Rise of the Warrior Cop (47 page)

On Feb. 9, 2012, more than 100 people packed a meeting of a city council committee, nearly all to oppose equipping the Keene Police Department and its 45 sworn officers with a Bearcat. One speaker quoted in the
Keene Sentinel
was Roberta Mastrogiovanni, owner of a newsstand downtown. “It promotes violence,” Mastrogiovanni said. “We should promote more human interaction rather than militarize. I refuse to use money for something this unnecessary when so many people in our community are in need.”

Lenco spokesman Jim Massery dismissed critics who asked why a town with almost no crime would need a $300,000 armored truck. “I don’t think there’s any place in the country where you can say, ‘That isn’t a likely terrorist target,’” Massery told me. “How would you know? We don’t know what the terrorists are thinking . . . Our trucks save lives. They save police lives. And I can’t help but think that the people who are trying to stop this just don’t think police officers’ lives are worth saving.”

It’s a line of argument defenders of militarization use often. Oppose the arming of cops as if they were soldiers, and you must be secretly want cops to be killed on the job. But the video Lenco was using to market the vehicle to police departments didn’t exactly emphasize negotiation. The camera viewpoint in the video was similar to that of a shooter video game. The soundtrack was AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” Cops dressed in camouflage toted assault weapons, piled in and out of the Bearcat, and took aim at targets from around and behind the vehicle. They then attached a battering ram to the front of the vehicle, which they then used to punch a hole in the front door of a house, into which they injected canisters of tear gas.

Lenco wasn’t stupid. The company had chosen the images and music used in the video because they felt it would appeal to those police departments in the market for a Bearcat.

Dorrie O’Meara, a 13-year resident of the town told me, “Keene is a beautiful place. It’s gorgeous, and it’s safe, and we love it here. We just don’t want to live in the kind of place where there’s an armored personnel carrier parked outside of City Hall . . . It’s just not who we are.”

According to CIR’s research, DHS gave out $2 billion in grants in 2011, about four times the value of equipment given out through the 1033 program. As with the Byrne and COPS grants, the DHS grant program also got a big boost in President Obama’s 2009 economic recovery package. The CIR investigation also found that DHS makes little effort to track how the grants are spent once they’re sent, nor does it track how the equipment is used once it has been purchased. The agency also doesn’t seem to care if the
recipients of the grants are places that face any tangible threat of terrorism. Hence, a city like Fargo, North Dakota has been able to get its hands on $8 million in grants, which the police department has used to buy assault rifles, kevlar helmets, and an armored truck with a rotating turret.

Fargo Police Lt. Ross Renner attempted to defend the city’s armament. “It’s foolish to not be cognizant of the threats out there,” he said, “whether it’s New York, Los Angeles, or Fargo.” But until the day when the next Muhammad Atta casts rage-filled eyes on North Dakota, the department hasn’t made much use of its gun-fitted armored truck. CIR reported that it’s mostly used for show, including at the annual city picnic, where police parked it near the children’s bouncy castle.

Elsewhere, CIR found that “In Augusta, Maine, with fewer than 20,000 people and where an officer hasn’t died from gunfire in the line of duty in more than 125 years, police bought eight $1,500 tactical vests. Police in Des Moines, Iowa, bought two $180,000 bomb-disarming robots, while an Arizona sheriff is now the proud owner of a surplus Army tank.” And in Montgomery County, Texas, “the sheriff’s department owns a $300,000 pilotless surveillance drone, like those used to hunt down al Qaeda terrorists in the remote tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.” A couple months before the CIR report, the sheriff in Montgomery County had broached the possibility of arming his drone with rubber bullets, or possibly teargas. “No matter what we do in law enforcement, somebody’s going to question it, but we’re going to do the right thing, and I can assure you of that,” he said. Five months later, the department made headlines when its DHS-funded drone accidentally crashed into its DHS-funded Bearcat.

Lenco’s Massery told me he was certain that the Keene protesters’ efforts would ultimately be in vain. “We have Bearcats in 90 percent of the 100 or so largest cities in America,” Massery said. “This is going to happen. It has already happened. To resist now would be like saying police officers should scrap the Glock and go back to the revolver. It’s a fantasy.”

Massery was right. In November 2012, Lenco accepted its check from DHS, and delivered a shiny new Bearcat to the town of Keene.
¹⁶

O
N
N
OVEMBER
2, 2002,
A LARGE GROUP OF POLICE OFFICERS
in tactical gear descended on a rave party in Racine, Wisconsin. The cops kicked in doors, dragged young people from bathroom stalls, threw others to the floor, and held dozens more at gunpoint. The police issued more than 450 citations of $968 each to partygoers merely for attending an event where some attendees were breaking the state’s drug laws. Only three people were arrested on actual drug charges. With help from the ACLU, the city of Racine eventually dismissed the charges against all attendees who hadn’t yet pleaded guilty.
¹⁷

The trendy new drug throwing the media and politicians into hysterics was Ecstasy. Raves were the new, weird, and different dance parties where teenagers were allegedly taking this crazy sex drug. Cue the moral panic, political grandstanding, and ensuing aggressive crackdown. Prior to the raid in Racine, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware seemed particularly obsessed with rave parties. Politicians seemed to think that any party with techno music, pulsing lights, and neon inevitably degenerated into underage kids getting high on Ecstasy and engaging in mass orgies. In the summer of 2002, Biden was pushing his RAVE Act, an absurdly broad law that would have made venue and club owners liable for running a drug operation if they merely sold the “paraphernalia” common to parties where people took Ecstasy—accessories like bottled water and glow sticks. After attempting to sneak the bill through Congress with various parliamentary maneuvers, Biden was finally able to get a slightly modified version folded into the bill that created the Amber Alert for missing children. Once again a politician had demagogued worries over a mostly harmless drug into a climate of fear. And once again that fear led to aggressive, wholly disproportionate crackdowns across the country.
¹⁸

A few years later one of rave raids was captured on video. In August 2005, more than 90 police officers from several state and local SWAT teams raided 1,500 people at a peaceful, outdoor dance party
in Spanish Fork Canyon, Utah. The police were armed with assault weapons, full SWAT attire, police dogs, and tear gas. Many in attendance say that police beat, abused, and swore at partygoers. Police denied the allegations, though amateur video/audio clearly showed the police barking out orders punctuated with profanity. In truth, the party appeared to have been pretty well run. Private security guards had been stationed outside the event, and confiscated any illegal drugs they found on attendees. The raiding SWAT cops then arrested the private security guards for the drugs they had confiscated, and charged them with possession.
¹⁹

The other new concept at work in Racine and Spanish Fork was the willingness to subject large groups of people to commando tactics in hopes of catching even a few offenders. By the late 2000s, SWAT teams were increasingly called out to raid entire bars and nightclubs for drug activity. A search warrant for a bar’s owner or a description of the place as a drug market could allow police to go in and give the SWAT treatment to everyone inside. And it wasn’t just bars and nightclubs that were treated this way. In November 2003, police in Goose Creek, South Carolina, raided an entire high school, conducting a blanket commando-style raid on Stratford High School. Students were ordered at gunpoint to lie face-down on the floor while police searched their lockers and persons for drugs. Some were handcuffed, while K-9 units deployed dogs to search their lockers, backpacks, and bodies. Oddly, media reports indicated that the school had a stellar academic reputation.
²⁰

Le’Quan Simpson, a fourteen-year-old, was forced to kneel at gunpoint. His father had once served on a SWAT team. “They hit that school like it was a crack house,” he said. “Like they knew that there were crack dealers in there armed with guns.” The raid was based on a tip from the school’s principal that a single student might have been selling pot. The raid turned up no illicit drugs, and the police made no arrests.
²¹

Still, though these raids of schools and parties were somewhat new, drug cops had been conducting massive drug sweeps of entire neighborhoods for years, subjecting innocent people to violent tactics
simply because of where they happened to live. There were more of those police actions too. In February 2002, for example, one hundred Durham police officers, two National Guard helicopters, and ten North Carolina Bureau of Investigation agents seized an entire neighborhood on Cheek Road, then engaged in a series of forced-entry drug raids. They called the whole episode Operation TAPS, short for The Aggressive Police Strategy. The police arrested thirty-five people and confiscated an “undisclosed” amount of drugs, plus two pistols. Superior Court judge Orlando Hudson later threw out all the arrests and evidence, ruling that the entire operation was unconstitutional and “partially illegal” and that some of the officers’ behavior amounted to “criminal conduct.”
²²

One particularly aggressive action peppered with war rhetoric occurred in April 2006, when police in Buffalo, New York, staged a series of drug raids throughout the city under the moniker Operation Shock and Awe. They borrowed the phrase from the US military, which had used it to describe its strategy in the early days of the Iraq War. Shock and Awe in Buffalo meant thirty-eight SWAT raids over three days. The cops even invited along a couple of reporters from the
Buffalo News
to cover the invasion.

A month later, the
Buffalo News
ran a follow-up report. The original six pounds of marijuana police claimed to have found was actually four pounds, thirteen ounces. Three and a half pounds of that came by way of an unrelated traffic stop on the same day that had nothing to do with the raids. They found all of five guns. Not surprisingly, the revised haul wasn’t enough contraband to keep the seventy-eight people in jail. Sixteen were immediately released with no criminal charges. Another thirty-two were out of jail within twenty-four hours due to insufficient evidence.

City leaders were furious, not because city police had just terrorized innocent people with fruitless SWAT raids, but because so many petty offenders were let off. City officials demanded tougher drug laws, and discussed the possibility of sending drug cops and SWAT teams out with housing code inspectors to clean up suspected crack houses without those pesky Fourth Amendment warrant requirements.

Buffalo’s chief of detectives, Dennis Richards, told the newspaper that Operation Shock and Awe was “just the beginning.” “There will certainly be more raids in the future,” he said. “You can count on that. . . . We’re looking at small-scale, large-scale, street-level. . . . We’re looking at top to bottom.”
²³

I
N THE
2000s,
THE
US S
UPREME
C
OURT SOMEHOW MANAGED
to inflict more damage on the already crippled Castle Doctrine. It began with
United States v. Banks
.
²⁴
In 1998 a raid team in North Las Vegas knocked and announced themselves while serving a drug warrant. The suspect was in the shower at the time, and claimed he didn’t hear them. They waited an estimated fifteen to twenty seconds, then forced their way inside. The search turned up illicit drugs and illegal weapons.