Rise of the Warrior Cop (31 page)

Despite consistent data showing that drug use and addiction were abating, Bennett’s
Drug Strategy
report of 1989 declared drugs to be a “deepening crisis” that presented “the gravest threat to our national well-being.” Bennett’s appointment and subsequent hard line instigated a new round of drug war hysteria from other public officials. Sen. Phil Gram, Republican of Texas, and Republican Georgia representative Newt Gingrich introduced a bill to convert unused army centers into mass detention centers for drug offenders. Republican representative Richard Ray of Georgia proposed that drug offenders be exiled to Midway and Wake Islands. With no distractions, Ray argued, it would be easier for them to rehabilitate. Ray’s proposal even passed the House Armed Services Committee. He said that when he proposed the idea to a conference of sheriffs and police chiefs, he received a standing ovation. FBI director William Sessions declared that the country would need to “strike a new balance between order and individual liberties.” Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. William Crowe went further, stating that with the new antidrug offensive, “you’re probably going to have to infringe on some human rights.” In testimony before Congress, Darryl Gates proclaimed that casual drug use was “treason,” then recommended that users be “taken out and shot.” It was an especially odd comment given that Gates’s own son had a history of problems with drug abuse.
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On several occasions in the 1980s, the House and Senate also flirted with extending the death penalty to convicted drug dealers.

In terms of actual policy, Bush and Bennett proposed huge increases in funding to build new prisons. Their plan proposed three
times more funding for law enforcement than for treatment, and shifted much of the enforcement emphasis from smugglers and dealers to casual users. The plan nudged states to raise penalties on users, to seize their cars, and to send them to military-like “boot camps” for rehabilitation, regardless of whether or not they were actually addicted.

As part of the 1988 crime bill, Congress also created a new set of federal grants called “Byrne grants” through the Justice Department’s Justice Assistants Grants (JAG) program.
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Over the next twenty-five years, Byrne grants would send billions of federal dollars to police departments across the country to fight crime in what amounted to a larger, better-funded, more ingeniously planned, and thus more successful attempt at what Nixon tried to do with the LEAA.

The Byrne grant program gave the White House another way to impose its crime policy on local law enforcement. As local police departments were infused with federal cash, members of Congress got press release fodder for bringing federal money back to the police departments in their districts. No one gave much thought to the potential unintended consequences of such a program because there was no reason to—for everyone who mattered, the program was a winner. The program’s losers would become apparent in the 1990s.

The careless mixing of cops and soldiers continued too. In 1989 President Bush created yet more regional “joint task forces” to further coordinate between the military and law enforcement agencies across the country—but again, only for drug policing. One of the few voices of sanity in the Reagan years was Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who spoke out against his own boss’s attempt to enlist the military in drug policing. Bush’s secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, had no such reservations. He’d write in a DoD publication a few years later, “The detection and countering of the production, trafficking, and use of illegal drugs is a high priority national security mission at the Department of Defense.”
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Democrats in Congress savaged Bennett and Bush’s drug plan—
for not going far enough
. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Joe
Biden told the Associated Press that, “quite frankly,” the Bush-Bennett plan “is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand.”
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Representative Larry Smith of Florida lamented the lack of more funding to hire more drug warriors. “This is a war that is being fought without very many troops,” he said.
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The most pointed criticism came from Representative Charlie Rangel of New York. A March 1989 profile of Rangel in
Ebony
magazine ran under the headline, “Charles Rangel: The Front-Line General in the War on Drugs.” Rangel told the magazine: “All these people are talking about protecting the world against communism and the Soviets. . . . How dare they let this happen to our children and not scream with indignation!” It isn’t clear just whom Rangel was criticizing. Just about everyone running for office had been screaming with indignation for ten years. Yet Rangel called the federal drug war “lackadaisical” and “indifferent” and said that it suffered from “a lack of commitment.” He damned methadone treatment as “a crime” and snapped that anyone who even mentioned legalization was committing “moral suicide.”
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By the late 1980s, the policies, rhetoric, and mind-set of the Reagan-Bush all-out antidrug blitzkrieg had fully set in at police departments across the country. Nearly every city with a population of 100,000 or more either had a SWAT team or was well on its way to getting one. The tactics that ten years earlier had been reserved for the rare, violent hostage-taking or bank robbery were by now employed daily by large police departments from coast to coast. “I wonder where the United States is heading,” Federal District Court judge Richard Matsch, a Nixon appointee, told
USA Today
in 1989. “My concern is that the real victim in the war on drugs might be the United States Constitution.” Another federal judge, Reagan appointee John Conway, worried that “police practices of this nature raise the grim specter of a totalitarian state.”
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The free market economist Milton Friedman, who had worked in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, was so concerned that he wrote an open letter to Bennett in the
Wall Street Journal:

This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. A country in which shooting down unidentified planes “on suspicion” can be seriously considered as a drug-war tactic is not the kind of United States that either you or I want to hand on to future generations.
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The public appeared to side with Bennett. In a September 1989 poll conducted by the
Washington Post
and ABC News, 62 percent of the country said that they would “be willing to give up a few of the freedoms we have in this country if it meant we could greatly reduce the amount of illegal drug use.” Another 52 percent agreed that police should be allowed “to search without a court order the houses of people suspected of selling drugs, even if houses of people like you are sometimes searched by mistake.”
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In Boston, police cracked down with “Terry” searches—the “stop-and-frisk” searches that were borne of
Terry v. Ohio
—of any suspected drug offenders “who cause fear in the community,” a broad enough justification to let them search anyone at will. Suffolk Superior Court judge Cortland Mathers described the new policy as, “in effect, a proclamation of martial law in Roxbury for a narrow class of people, young blacks.” A
Boston Globe
article in September 1989 described how what was essentially an occupation of some neighborhoods was degrading an entire generation’s opinion of police. One woman who worked with preteens at a city community center told the paper that the children “have a negative sense of a police officer. They see the television version of a police officer, who is knocking down doors for the bad guys, then they see their friends, innocent people, getting stopped and searched. They see innocent people getting harmed by police for no reason. When I talk to 9- and 10-year-olds, they think all police are bad.” A thirteen-year-old girl at the center told the
Globe
reporter, “Some officers let guns and badges
go to their heads. They want respect, but if they don’t give respect, they don’t get respect. Like when they jumped to the conclusion to shoot that 30-year-old man.” (She was referring to an incident in which a Boston police officer shot Rolando Carr during a stop-and-frisk. Carr was unarmed.) An eight-year-old added, “Sometimes, they should look more into the situation before they do anything.”
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William Bennett supported what was going on in Boston and in a number of other cities that had passed “anti-loitering” laws, which had the same effect—to give police the power to essentially declare martial law in many neighborhoods. Such law enforcement saturations of mostly minority neighborhoods were merely due to “the overriding spirit and energy of our front-line enforcement officers,” Bennett said. “We should be extremely reluctant to restrict [them] within formal and arbitrary lines.”

Meanwhile, the pile of collateral damage was growing. In Riverside, California, police staged fourteen simultaneous raids over a two-and-a-half-block area. The raid turned up very little contraband. In one of the raids, fifty-year-old Richard Sears and his wife Sandra woke up to flash-bang grenades and armed men in their bedroom. Unaware that the men were police, Sears resisted and was repeatedly struck in the face with the butt of a rifle. When Sandra Sears attempted to escape the detonating grenades, she was pulled back into the room and thrown to the floor. Sears was arrested and charged with interfering with a police officer and resisting arrest. The charges were later dropped, and the sheriff’s department admitted that the Searses had done nothing wrong.
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In March 1989, police in Gardena, California, raided the home of Lorine Harris on suspicion of drug activity. By the occupants’ account of the raid, Officer Davie Mathieson mistook the sound of a flash-bang grenade for hostile gunfire and shot Harris’s twenty-year-old son, Dexter Herbert, in the back, killing him. According to Mathieson’s account of the raid, another man, Mack Charles Moore, had run out of a bedroom holding a shotgun. Officer Mathieson attempted to shoot Moore, but shot and killed Herbert instead. By both accounts, Herbert was unarmed. Prosecutors twice
attempted to try Moore for Herbert’s death, arguing that his wielding of the shotgun provoked Mathieson to shoot Herbert. The first attempt ended in a mistrial, the second in an acquittal.
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Though law enforcement officials would often defend the paramilitary tactics as critical to preserving officer safety, cops were dying in these raids too.

Boston detective Sherman Griffiths died after he was shot through the door while preparing to raid a suspected drug house. In May 1988, the
Washington Post
ran an article under the headline “Show of Force.”
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The piece profiled the new, particularly aggressive antidrug police units at the Prince George’s County, Maryland, police department. The article noted that the department was conducting more raids, more “jump outs” on suspected drug dealers, and making many, many more arrests than it had in the past. Three months later, one of those teams conducted a drug raid on an apartment in the town of Riverdale. Cpl. Patrick Murphy, thirty-five years old, crouched in front of the door to position a hydraulic ram designed to blow the door open. As he did, someone inside opened the door. Two of Murphy’s colleagues responded by opening fire. One suspect was shot in the face. Murphy was struck in the back of the head. He later died at the hospital. The police first claimed that someone inside the house fired at them. But it was later revealed that the only gun in the house hadn’t been fired that night. Murphy himself had shot an unarmed, fleeing suspect during a drug raid in 1982.
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Officer Keith Neumann, twenty-four years old, was also killed by a fellow police officer during a predawn drug raid on August 4, 1989, in Irvington, New York. The raid turned up an eighth of an ounce of cocaine and no weapons. Neumann had been married just three weeks before his death.
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And in February 1989, black-clad police wearing face masks broke into the Titusville, Florida, home of fifty-eight-year-old Charles DiGristine, his wife, and their four children. They staged the no-knock raid after an informant told police someone was dealing drugs from the house and was protecting the drug supply with
armed guards. DiGristine first heard an explosion (the flash-bang grenade), then his wife’s scream. He ran to his bedroom to get his handgun. Officer Stephen House entered DiGristine’s bedroom with his gun drawn. The two exchanged gunfire. House was struck and killed. The police found no large supply of drugs, only less than a gram of marijuana that belonged to DiGristine’s sixteen-year-old son. DiGristine was arrested and initially charged with murder, which could have brought a death sentence. A grand jury lowered the charge to second-degree murder, which still could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life. But the following August, a Titusville jury acquitted him on all charges. DiGristine later filed suit against the city. During discovery, his attorney found prior incidents of botched raids and excessive force, including one incident where, as police approached a house, the homeowner opened the door and invited them inside. They tossed flash-bang grenades through the doorway anyway. Titusville city manager Randy Reid called the lawsuit part of an “overall plan of greed and publicity.”
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