Rise of the Warrior Cop (46 page)

Unsurprisingly, the commission found that while SWAT teams were generally justified, defended, and regarded as responders to emergency situations like hostage crises and terror attacks, they were most commonly being used to serve drug warrants. Nevertheless, the panel’s final recommendations did little to address the number of SWAT teams, how they were being used, or police militarism in general. The panel’s chief complaint was that SWAT teams were undertrained and underfunded, suggesting that local, state, and federal government should be throwing
more
funding and resources at SWAT teams, not less. The other recommendations consisted largely of standardizing procedures, definitions, and guidelines and communicating better with the public. The commission didn’t address any of the more urgent problems that had plagued the state’s SWAT teams over the previous twenty years, such as SWAT teams launching raids based on uncorroborated tips from informants, asset forfeiture incentivizing the use of aggressive policing, or prosecutors and judges neglecting their duty to scrutinize the warrants authorizing these violent raids.

In the end, even if every SWAT team in the state had implemented the panel’s recommendations (and they were by no means obligated to), it’s unlikely that much would have changed. In fact, if the suggestions had been implemented in the 1990s, it seems unlikely that they would have prevented the death of Alberto Sepulveda, the reason for Lockyer’s panel in the first place.

Back in the early 1970s, nationwide outrage over a series of wrong-door drug raids had inspired furious politicians to hastily call congressional hearings; as a consequence, the law that had authorized those raids was repealed. Now, in 2000, an eleven-year-old boy had just been obliterated at close range with a shotgun as his parents and siblings lay on the ground beside him. And even that wasn’t enough to stop his
own town
from discontinuing the aggressive tactics that
caused his death. The mistakes, the terrorizing of innocents, and the unnecessary fatalities would continue.
⁸

T
HE
G
EORGE
W. B
USH ADMINISTRATION QUICKLY MADE IT
clear that the drug war would once again be fought as a culture war. Bush appointed only one drug czar in his two terms. John Walters was a longtime aide to William Bennett who, like Bennett, took a hard-line, zero-tolerance approach to drugs. But when the 9/11 attacks happened eight months after Bush was inaugurated, they presented a new opportunity. Instead of exploiting the fear of crime or tapping into what remained of anti-counterculture sentiment, they could now exploit the fear of terrorist attacks. They would use the 9/11 attacks for drug war propaganda.

And so, starting in the February following the attacks, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) started the “I helped . . . ” campaign, which consisted of commercial and print ads claiming that casual drug users in the United States were supporting the very sorts of terrorists that had attacked America. The television commercials featured a series of young people portrayed as casual drug users. One by one, the young actors rattled off the varieties of atrocity allegedly funded by recreational drug use. “I helped kill a policeman,” one said. “I helped murder families,” said another. “I helped kidnap people’s dads,” said still another. The ads aired during the 2002 Super Bowl, just after a September 11–themed halftime show that featured a running scroll of the names of the 9/11 victims, accompanied by a performance by the band U2.

The campaign was not only shamefully exploitative, it was simply false. The claim that casual drug users supported terrorism was dubious at best. To the extent that black market drug purchases in the United States did support terror groups, it was the “black market” part that made it possible. Nearly all of the terror attacks listed on the DEA’s website at the time had been attacks by drug-smuggling groups related to the drug trade, and nearly all had taken place in Latin America and Mexico. The only widely used drug in the United
States with any tangible connection to terrorism of the 9/11 variety was heroin, and even that link was tenuous. By the federal government’s own estimates, 82 percent of US heroin came from Mexico and South America. A small percentage was domestically grown, and much of the rest came from a slew of countries in Asia, only a few of which were host to active anti-American terrorist groups. There was just no evidence that Al Qaeda operatives were selling pot to Americans to fund their schemes to slam airplanes into buildings. But that was the line the government was pushing. The DEA would later put on a touring museum exhibit with the same themes. It included pieces of rubble from the World Trade Center.

If anything, there was a stronger argument that the country’s
antidrug
efforts were sponsoring terrorism. In May 2001—just four months before September 11—the US State Department announced a $43 million aid gift to Afghanistan, which at the time was ruled by the Taliban. The grant was intended to be used to compensate Afghan farmers who had been hurt by a Taliban edict (encouraged by the United States) banning the cultivation of opium poppies. Of course, the edict didn’t really stop the heroin from flowing out of Afghanistan. It simply enabled the Taliban to consolidate heroin production so that more of the revenue went directly to the regime. The United States had also given aid to support a drug war in Thailand that included government “death squads” that human rights groups accused of carrying out as many as four thousand extrajudicial executions of suspected drug offenders. US aid had also gone to right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia that were accused of mass human rights abuses.

From a broader view, the ads weren’t all that different from prior attempts to associate drugs and intoxicants with whatever bogeyman the country happened to be facing at the time. But by tying even casual drug users to terrorism so soon after one of the most horrific attacks on US soil in the country’s history—particularly an attack that took the lives of so many police officers—the federal government afforded drug cops yet more moral license to treat suspected drug offenders as enemy combatants not as citizens with rights.
⁹

Bush also continued Clinton’s assault on medical marijuana. In the 2000 campaign, Bush had promised a federalist approach to the issue—he had said he would leave it to the states to decide. That promise didn’t last long. It quickly became clear that, like Clinton before him, Bush would give no quarter to sick people using pot in states that had legalized it for treatment. The aggressive raids that began during the Clinton administration increased, in both number and intensity.
¹⁰

The result was the perverse spectacle of armed federal cops taking down medical facilities and their patients. On September 5, 2002, for example, federal agents raided the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz, California. Suzanne Pfeil, a post-polio patient who couldn’t walk without leg braces and crutches, told columnist Mitch Albom that she awoke to find federal agents pointing assault rifles at her head. They yelled at her to get up. She said she couldn’t. They yelled at her some more. She explained, again, that she was crippled. They finally handcuffed Pfeil to her bed, then moved on to other patients. Because she was allergic to many classes of drugs, Pfeil smoked marijuana to alleviate muscle and nerve pain brought on by her condition.
¹¹

On the same day, federal agents also raided the home of the facility’s owners, Valerie and Michael Coral. A DEA SWAT team decked out in flak jackets and M-16s stormed the house, shoved Valerie Coral to the ground, and put a gun to her head. She was cuffed, arrested, and taken to a federal detention center, still wearing her pajamas. When asked if such heavy-handed tactics were necessary given that Valerie Coral was hardly a dangerous drug kingpin, DEA spokesman Will Glaspy replied, “We target drug traffickers. There is no such term as ‘medical marijuana,’ except as created by the marijuana lobby.”
¹²
A week later, agents raided the Genesis 1:29 medical cannabis dispensary and the grower that supplied it. California attorney general Bill Lockyer was angry, protesting, “A medical marijuana provider such as the Santa Cruz collective represents little danger to the public and is certainly not a concern which would warrant diverting scarce federal resources.”
¹³

The heavy-handed federal enforcement on medical providers wasn’t limited to marijuana. As fears about prescription opioid painkillers started to take root in the media in the early 2000s, the DEA began targeting doctors, and it has been doing so ever since. These are professionals with medical degrees, practices, offices, and patients, singled out for allegedly overprescribing a certain class of drugs. There’s still a debate over whether overprescribing these drugs—as defined by drug cops, not other doctors—should even be a crime, and whether some of the doctors were even overprescribing in the first place.
¹⁴
Those questions aside, it’s hard to fathom why it would be necessary to send SWAT teams to storm their homes and offices, subjecting their families and patients to the violence and volatility of a typical raid.
¹⁵

The federal government wasn’t even pretending anymore. Alleged “states’ rights” supporters like Asa Hutchison, the head of DEA appointed by Bush in 2001, and Attorney General John Ashcroft were making an example of these doctors, these dispensaries, and the people who owned, supplied, and patronized them. The guns and commando tactics were completely unnecessary. No reasonable person believed that Suzanne Pfeil or Valerie Coral was going to take out a couple of DEA agents in a suicidal blaze of glory. Most of the dispensaries were operating openly, within state law. Bush, Walters, Hutchison, Ashcroft, and the rest of the administration’s drug policy team were using state-sanctioned violence to make a political point.

“W
E’RE GOING TO HAVE OUR OWN TANK,” KEENE
, N.H., Mayor Kendall Lane whispered to Councilman Mitch Greenwald during a December 2011 city council meeting.

It wasn’t quite a tank. But the quaint town of 23,000—home to just two murders since 1999—had just accepted a $285,933 grant from the Department of Homeland Security to purchase a Bearcat, an eight-ton armored personnel vehicle made by Lenco Industries, Inc. Since the September 11 attacks, Homeland Security has been
handing out anti-terrorism grants like parade candy, giving cities and towns across the country funds to buy military-grade armored vehicles, guns, armor, aircraft, and other equipment. Companies like Lenco have thrived, creating yet another class of government hardware contractors, and a new interest group to lobby Washington to ensure the process of police militarization continues.

These DHS grants have dwarfed the 1033 program. At the end of 2011, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) found that Homeland Security had given out at least $34 billion in anti-terror grants since its inception, many of which went to such unlikely terrorism targets as Fargo, N.D.; Fon du Lac, Wisc.; and Canyon County, Idaho. Defense contractors that had previously served the Pentagon exclusively, CIR reported, have since shifted their focus to police departments, hoping to tap a new homeland security market bounty expected to be worth $19 billion annually by 2014. Police agencies have a whole new source of funding for their war gear. Just as they’d done with the 1033 program, they’d initially argue that the equipment was necessary “just in case” of the rare school shooting or Al Qaeda attack in Fon du Lac. But once they get the gear, they use it for drug raids.

But in Keene, there was some resistance to the Bearcat. It began with Mike Clark, a 27-year-old handyman. Clark, who’d had a couple encounters with Keene police that he described as “negative,” read about the Homeland Security grant in the newspaper. “The police are already pretty brutal,” Clark told me in February 2012. “The last thing they need is this big piece of military equipment to make them think they’re soldiers.”