Rise of the Warrior Cop (25 page)
Read Rise of the Warrior Cop Online
Authors: Radley Balko
Big-city SWAT teams were getting training in paramilitary tactics and weapons, but that training was balanced by an emphasis on negotiation and deescalation and the use of violence only as the last possible option. In the smaller agencies around the country, not only did the SWAT team not get that sort of training, but the teams were staffed by part-timers, usually cops whose full-time jobs were more conventional police work. The risk was that the entire police department could succumb to a culture of militarism. In some quarters, it was already happening. Within a decade, the SWAT proliferation would accelerate. The emphasis on deescalation would all but disappear. Soon, just about every decent-sized city police department was armed with a hammer. And the drug war would ensure there were always plenty of nails around for pounding.
TO
INFILTRATE THE
S
AN JOSE
, C
ALIFORNIA
,
CHAPTER OF
Hell’s Angels, Russ Jones stopped cutting his hair, grew a beard, sported chains and denim, and rode a Harley. He had developed a particular knack for building methamphetamine cases against motorcycle gangs. His undercover getup was so good, in fact, that he’d twice been pulled over and searched, once by the state police and once by one of his colleagues at the San Jose Police Department.
The state cop even roughed him up a little. He never did figure out that Jones was a fellow cop. When Jones had accumulated enough evidence to wind down his 1973 investigation of the Hell’s Angels, he cut his hair, trimmed his beard, and then met with a deputy district attorney to sort out what charges to bring against whom.
After several days of planning, Jones held a 4:00 AM briefing the morning of the raids with members of his narcotics team, as well as a few men from the ATF and the FBI. Jones had also specifically asked a lieutenant in the department to send along some uniformed officers to help with the warrants. “We had always sent uniformed officers when we served search warrants, so the suspects clearly and unquestionably knew we were police,” Jones says.
When the San Jose backup detail walked in, Jones was startled. “There were all these guys in SWAT gear. Dark overalls, watch caps, all of that. Daryl Gates’s SWAT team idea had started to spread across the state, but that was my first interaction with ours, which they called MERGE. They looked like they were about to storm a hostage situation.”
Jones approached the lieutenant. “What is this?”
The lieutenant replied, “Our new uniform.”
Jones told the lieutenant to have the MERGE team change into regular uniforms, or he’d just pull some beat cops off the street when he neared the Hell’s Angels hangout. The tactical getups were inappropriate.
“He was angry as hell,” Jones says. Jones had planned to serve the search warrants as he always had—by walking up to the door, knocking, announcing who he was and why he was there, then waiting for someone to answer.
“I’ve investigated some tough people. A lot of drug dealers, a lot of gangsters. I never had a case where knocking, announcing, and waiting for someone to come to the door created a problem,” Jones says. Now retired, Jones’s two decades of experience as a drug cop have since turned him into a vocal critic of police militarization and the drug war in general.
“I was already concerned with this militarizing of cops in San Jose. I don’t recall ever using a ‘no-knock’ warrant in my career,” Jones says. “But when I got to DEA, I noticed a slow progression in that direction. Guys would say, ‘Oh, I heard a toilet flush,’ or, ‘I heard someone running in the house,’ which they’d use as an excuse to break in after knocking instead of waiting for someone to answer. Eventually, the pause between the time they’d knock and the time they’d break down the door was so short that they weren’t giving anyone time to get to the door to let them in—even if the suspect wanted to. And most of them did. I guess after I left the task force, they got to the point where they’d sometimes just not bother knocking at all.”
The MERGE lieutenant eventually backed down and told his team to change into regular police uniforms. They served the Hell’s Angels warrants by knocking, announcing themselves, and then waiting to be let in. They didn’t break down a single door. The suspects went peacefully. And the search turned up plenty more evidence of a methamphetamine operation.
Later, Jones’s supervisor tracked him down back at the office. The MERGE lieutenant had complained. Jones explained his position. His boss seemed to agree, but added, “You won the argument this morning, but you’re going to lose the battle. These guys got new toys. They want to use them.”
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B
Y THE SECOND HALF OF THE
1970
S, THE LAW-AND-ORDER
hard-liners had temporarily been stalled. President Jimmy Carter took a much less aggressive approach to the drug war than Nixon had. The country took a break from seven years of continual drug war and police power escalation, at least at the federal level.
But Sam Ervin’s defeat of the no-knock raid was in many ways merely symbolic. It was never clear that federal agents actually needed the law to conduct such raids in the first place. Indeed, by the early 1980s they were using the tactic again, without any new federal law
to officially reauthorize the practice. But Ervin’s moral leadership on the issue was important in halting the spread of a dangerous tactic, even if only temporarily. In his autobiography, Ervin writes, “I was convinced that we must not sacrifice the proud boast of our law that every man’s home is his castle on the altar of fear.”
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The lull in the fighting didn’t last long. Before Carter left the White House, he’d face allegations that pot-smoking was common among his staff and that two senior-level aides were cocaine users—and that one of them was his drug czar. The Reagan administration would soon come in to staff the drug policy positions with hardened culture warriors.
Ervin’s wins were important, but ultimately ephemeral. The drug war and police militarization trends were about to merge. By the time Sam Ervin died in April 1985, the California National Guard was sending helicopters to drop camouflage-clad troops into the backyards of suspected pot growers in Humboldt County; the Justice Department was wiretapping defense attorneys; and Daryl Gates was using a battering ram affixed to a military-issue armored personnel carrier to smash his way into the living rooms of suspected drug offenders.
The Numbers
Value of the property that Nixon claimed in 1972 was stolen each year by heroin addicts: $2 billion
. . . claimed by Minnesota senator George McGovern: $4.4 billion
. . . claimed by Nixon administration drug treatment expert Robert DuPont: $6.3 billion
. . . claimed by Illinois senator Charles Percy: $10 billion–$15 billion
. . . claimed by a White House briefing book on drug abuse distributed to the press: $18 billion
all
reported stolen property in the United States in 1972: $1.2 billion