KILL ZONE

Early on the morning of May 14, 2003, officers broke down the door to
68-year-old Timothy Brockman's apartment, tossed in a stun grenade, blitzed
the residence with guns, gas masks and shields and rousted the old man from
bed. Surprisingly, no weapons or drugs were found in the possession of the
former Marine and retired factory worker. But perhaps it wasn't too
surprising, considering the quality of the investigation.

As the New York Times reported, there was one informant who identified the
wrong apartment building, another informant who didn't really exist,
confusion about the apartment address on top of the misidentified building,
little or no double-checking of evidence, and no checking at all of various
key assumptions. Still, armed with much more determination than
preparation, the officers rushed in like the Delta Force of dope.

"They threw some kind bomb in here," Brockman said after the raid. The
flashbang grenade - designed to distract and immobilize residents - set
fire to his carpet, and the concussive ruckus so terrified his neighbors
that they split the building with their kids still decked in pajamas,
fearing for their lives, thinking a terrorist had attacked their building.

Sadly, the war on drugs makes that assumption increasingly understandable.

On Nov. 20, 2002, for instance, three cousins - Salvador Huerta, Marcos
Huerta and Vicente Huerta, all young men who worked at a San Antonio
restaurant - were sitting around their apartment after work watching TV.
Around 8 p.m. a dozen SWAT officers invaded the home, firing tear gas,
allegedly shouting profanities and violently beating two of the men.

"We were kicked and punched at least 20 times," said Salvador, who suffered
a broken front tooth and a swollen face. Marcos' face was cut and his head
bruised. Vicente, the lucky one, didn't stick around for his. He lit off
instead of taking the boot. After a vain search for drugs and guns, the
police realized they were at the wrong apartment. According to the San
Antonio Express-News, "police apologized several times and went five
apartments down and arrested two people. ..."

In a more publicized case, while getting ready for her government job in
downtown New York City the morning of May 16, 2003, Alberta Spruill walked
into the main room of her Harlem apartment as a dozen officers from the
city police's Emergency Service Unit and regular patrol converged on her
home. Told by a confidential informant they'd find a cache of guns and
drugs, guarded by dogs, the ESU team battered open the front door and
chucked a stun grenade into the room Spruill had just entered. The device
exploded with a concussive, deafening bang above a glass-top table,
instantly shattering it amid a blinding white flash. Then, with whip-sting
speed, six tactical officers rushed the dwelling and handcuffed a coughing
and screaming Spruill.

As operations go, up to this point the raid went flawlessly. But police
were soon puzzled to find neither guns nor drugs in the home of the
57-year-old, churchgoing grandmother. The snarling guard dogs had
apparently taken a powder as well. As it turned out, the informant had been
less than accurate. The cops had the wrong apartment. But that didn't stop
Spruill from dying of a heart attack within hours of the raid - literally
scared to death.

When the sheriff's office of Preble County, Ohio, got word from an
informant that residents of a rural farmhouse were peddling pot, it
conducted a quick investigation and then sent its ESU team on a
late-evening, no-knock raid. Because police thought there might be more
than a dozen men at the farmhouse, they deployed a heavily armed team of
15. The result, besides what the Dayton Daily News referred to as "a small
amount of marijuana, pipes and a bong, papers used in rolling the drug, and
weapons," was a dead suspect, Clayton J. Helriggle, who police shot as he
came down the stairs with a 9mm handgun.

Helriggle's mother admits it was regular practice for her son and the men
at the house to smoke pot in the evening after work. But such a raid was
hardly necessary. No evidence indicated a major commercial operation. Only
a minute amount of marijuana was found, and in Ohio possessing less than
3.5 ounces is only an infraction - worth a $100 fine, not a lead deposit.

As for possession of weapons, it was a farmhouse. What farmhouse doesn't
have a few rifles and other firearms? Given that fact alone, Helriggle's
death is likely the police's fault more than anything. When the police raid
a house at twilight, it's perfectly predictable that a suspect would pick
up a gun and come down the stairs to face the intruders. Responsible
homeowners and renters should be expected to defend their families and
homes from invaders.

When John Adams was killed in a bollixed raid in Lebanon, Tenn., it was
precisely his attempted defense of his wife and home that got him killed.

After hearing knocking at the door, John's wife, Loraine, went to answer.
There was no reply when she asked for identification. Instead, the door was
kicked in and five officers stormed the house, immediately cuffing her.
John wasn't so fortunate. "I thought it was a home invasion," said Loraine.
"I said 'Baby, get your gun!'" He did, and as cops rounded the corner into
the room where he sat, they drilled John three times. He died later that night.

No drugs were found. The police got the wrong house - a pathetic mistake
because it was one of only two dwellings on the block.

Just as bad and problematic as forcing such dangerous confrontations in the
first place (especially when police are less than thorough in their
investigations) is the fact that no-knocks often put people at incredible
levels of risk for even meager drug busts.

In January 2003, for instance, police in Spokane, Wash., decided to raid a
home based on the sale of a single $20 rock of cocaine, endangering not
only the officers but also the three boys and a woman who lived there.
Worse, they found no drugs. Getting the bust was so important that it was
worth creating a life-threatening situation in which police stormed a home
not even knowing that they'd find drugs inside. Picture it this way:
Playing poker, a man slides a $20 crack rock into the pot; sitting across
the table, the police see the bet and raise him a family.

Jesus and Wendy Olveda of Dalton, Wis., found themselves on the floor after
black-clad police burst through the door - their 3-year-old girl left to
watch in horror as her parents were cuffed on the ground. Wendy, five
months pregnant, tried to inform the officers that they were in the wrong
house, but no one listened. When she told officers she was pregnant, "they
responded by pushing her head down on the ground in front of her daughter,"
according to the Beaver Dam Daily Citizen. Jesus also tried to tell them
they had the wrong house: "When I lifted my head to say they got the wrong
address, one of them put a knee on my head and ground it into the floor."
They should have listened.

Officers found no drugs because the next-door neighbor was the actual
target. Ironically, Wendy, a fifth-grade teacher, is a founding member of
the local drug-prevention program. "This is a very traumatic experience for
my whole family," she later said. "I don't know how I'm going to be able to
sleep. How can such a thing happen to an innocent family?" It's a question
many are asking.

"Is it worth putting an entire family at risk for what is sometimes a small
amount of drugs, or small-time dealers?" asks Peter Kraska, criminal
justice professor at Eastern Kentucky University. While his answer is
clearly "no," drug warriors seem to think the answer is "yes." According to
Kraska's figures, between 1980 and 2000, deployment of tactical police
increased more than 900 percent. Once a rarity, calling out SWAT for drug
warrants has increased to the point that today it is routine, often no
matter how small the reward.

As I point out in my new book "Bad Trip: How the War Against Drugs is
Destroying America," part of the problem is that the drug war has
encouraged a change in the mindset of what constitutes good policing.
Thorough investigation used to be paramount. No longer. In the new
militarized style of policing, confrontation has replaced investigation.
And the sudden door-kicking display of brute force is increasingly routine.

The big-gun approach was pioneered by Daryl Gates in the 1960s, who later
became the celebrated Los Angeles chief of police (a position he held when
he told a Senate committee that casual drug users should be rounded up and
shot because "we're in a war," and even occasional use "is treason").
Within a few years, SWAT caught on across the country. Today, known
variously as Emergency Services, Special Response, Tactical Operations, and
Violent Crime Suppression Units, there are more than 30,000 such units
operating in jurisdictions across the nation.

We can blame the twin catastrophes of the Johnson and Nixon administrations
for the spread of SWAT teams. Johnson's big-government schemes provided the
funding for national SWAT outfitting, which Nixon then expanded along with
the first federal provisions for no-knock drug raids, marrying for the
first time highly militarized police teams and the legal weapon needed to
kick down doors and swarm private homes.

No-knock was quite a departure from standard warrant service. For a search
to be constitutionally kosher, it must abide by certain strictures. One of
those is the knock-and-notice principle. As it is currently codified in
U.S. law, "The officer may break open any outer or inner door or window of
a house, or any part of a house, or anything therein, to execute a search
warrant, if, after notice of his authority and purpose, he is refused
admittance ..." (emphasis added). In other words, police shouldn't just
blurt "Police!" and then go Dirty Harry on the door with a boot or
battering ram. No-knock authority gets around that annoyance.

One more thing was needed to bring us to the tragic situation we find
ourselves in today - the blurring line between military and law enforcement.

Today, SWAT officers dress more like soldiers than police. They come decked
in ballistic helmets, in all-black fatigues or cammies, sometimes
schlepping ballistic shields.

Police are also armed more like soldiers, using surplus military equipment
and sporting military or military-like weaponry, including Colt-made M-16s
and AR-15s, Ruger Mini 14s, Steyr AUGs, Ingram MAC 10s, and, most popular,
Heckler and Koch MP-5s. Says tactical policing expert Capt. Robert L. Snow,
these automatic-fire assault rifles and submachine guns "are favored
because they are compact, reliable, and very accurate. SWAT teams also like
them because they can be set to fire a single shot, set to fire two or
three shot bursts, or set on automatic fire."

Much of this equipment comes from the U.S. government. The flow started in
1981 with the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials Act,
which "encouraged the military to (a) make available equipment, military
bases, and research facilities to federal, state, and local police; (b)
train and advise civilian police on the use of the equipment; and (c)
assist law enforcement personnel in keeping drugs from entering the
country," writes Diane Cecelia Weber in a Cato Institute briefing paper,
"Warrior Cops."

Previously, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 proscribed such transfers, but
in 1987 Congress again worked to make it easier for local police
departments to score military hardware with a more streamlined process. Six
years later, in 1993, Congress ordered the Department of Defense to get the
lead out on such transfers, ordering the sale of surplus equipment for
anti-narcotics purposes.

The results have been profound. "Between 1995 and 1997 the Department of
Defense gave police departments 1.2 million pieces of military hardware,
including 73 grenade launchers and 112 armored personnel carriers. The Los
Angeles Police Department has acquired 600 Army surplus M-16s," writes
Weber. Given that SWAT was born in the City of Angels, maybe that last bit
isn't too surprising, but the militarism trend is national. "Even
small-town police departments are getting into the act. The seven-officer
department in Jasper, Florida, is now equipped with fully automatic M-16s."

The H&K MP-5 machine pistol, notes David B. Kopel of the Denver,
Colo.-based Independence Institute, is usually purchased by police rather
than donated. "These weapons are sold almost exclusively to the military
and police. The advertising to civilian law enforcement conveys the message
that by owning the weapon, the civilian officer will be the equivalent of a
member of an elite military strike force, such as the Navy SEALs."

One example of H&K ad copy Kopel provides: "From the Gulf War to the Drug War."

"When a weapon's advertising and styling deliberately blur the line between
warfare and law enforcement, it is not unreasonable to expect that some
officers - especially when under stress - will start behaving as if they
were in the military," says Kopel.

The problem goes back to the metaphor itself. War and policing are vastly
different. In common parlance the military's job is to kill people and
break things. As Reagan administration Assistant Secretary of Defense
Lawrence Korb puts it, soldiers are supposed to "vaporize, not
'Mirandize.'" On the other hand, police are trained to solve problems with
scrupulous attention to suspects' civil rights and with a multitude of
solutions, lethal violence being the last rung on the escalating ladder of
force. No-knock raids race up the ladder, going straight to the threat of
lethal force.

Some police chiefs recognize the contradiction in roles and the danger of
mixing them. "I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted," said Nick
Pastore, former police chief in New Haven, Conn. Pastore said he "turned it
all down because it feeds a mindset that you're not a police officer
serving a community, you're a soldier at war."

It's a terrible shame, really. People still have a lot of faith in the
police and want to feel as if they can trust them.

"The police - they're all right with me," said the good-natured Timothy
Brockman after the bungled raid on his apartment. Occasionally suffering
from seizures, the elderly man is grateful when officers are out and about
and can help him up when he falls afflicted in the street. "You have people
who say, 'The police are dirty, this and that.' I can't find any fault with
them that I know of. They got a job to do. But I don't know why they came
and broke into my house," he said, betraying at least a slight fracturing
of his faith.

"I don't see any right in that. If they have me under surveillance, they
would watch me and see who's coming in and out. Not to come in like storm
troopers."