Rise of the Warrior Cop (51 page)

There are other problems with the use of flash-bang grenades beyond their potential to inflict injuries and start fires. By design, the devices are intended to confuse, stun, and bewilder everyone in the room where they’re detonated. That may make sense if you’re apprehending a suspect who poses an immediate threat to other people—again, bank robbers, hostage takers, active shooters, and so on. But in raids for nonviolent offenses, sowing confusion only
increases
the potential for violence. On numerous occasions, police have detonated a flash-bang grenade in the course of a raid, then claimed that a suspect who subsequently grabbed a gun or a knife or who physically attacked one of the officers should have known that it was the police raiding the home. But you can’t first claim that the use of flash-bang grenades to stun and confuse people is critically important, then claim that seconds after the device goes off, those same people (many of whom have also just woken up) should be cognizant, collected, and alert enough to make sense of
the chaos around them. Well, you can’t
logically
make both claims. In practice, police make both claims all the time. Courts and public officials rarely question the contradiction.

The fact that flash-bang grenades are usually detonated before, during, or just after the police break down a door creates yet more problems. Sometimes they’re tossed through a window before the door comes down, or detonated shortly after police make an announcement but before they force entry. “The whole psychological philosophy behind them is contradictory,” says Joseph McNamara, the former police chief of Kansas City and San Jose. “Knock-and-announce is to give the person inside time to voluntarily surrender. When you’re waiting just fifteen seconds, setting off flash grenades, then using a battering ram, you’re
diverting
attention from the front door. You’re scaring people into running in the other direction.”
⁵⁹
It also decreases the likelihood that the occupants inside will recognize the armed intruders as police officers. In 2006 a Florida state appeals court found that a SWAT team had violated a man’s Fourth Amendment rights because although they waited fifteen seconds after announcing before forcing entry, the officers began counting only after detonating a flash-bang grenade and included in their count the time they spent bashing the door with a battering ram.
⁶⁰

But only a few other courts have either questioned the use of flash-bang grenades or put restrictions on their use, and even then only in limited circumstances.
⁶¹
Generally speaking, the courts give police an enormous amount of leeway in deciding how to serve a search warrant. Even in the rare case when a court has found that the use of the grenades was unreasonable, and therefore a violation of a plaintiff’s constitutional rights, the same court inevitably finds that the police officers are protected by qualified immunity, which means that the person injured by the grenade won’t even get his case in front of a jury. In 2004, for example, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that “blindly” tossing a flash-bang grenade into a house or room with no certainty as to who and how many people might have been inside was unreasonable. But because it wasn’t so unreasonable as to be established law or
obvious to a layperson, the officers in that case still couldn’t be held liable.
⁶²

The flash-bang grenade issue has never been of much interest to politicians either. During congressional hearings on the Branch Davidian raid, Democratic representative Charles Schumer of New York asked Dick DeGuerin, an attorney for David Koresh, if the Branch Davidians had stockpiled grenades. DeGuerin responded that the only grenades he had seen were thrown by ATF agents. Schumer derisively dismissed the idea that flash-bang grenades were harmful. “Mr. DeGuerin said flashbangers can kill, injure, maim,” Schumer said. “Anyone who knows anything about these things knows they can’t.” Schumer went on to win a US Senate seat in 1998. Which means that when New York City resident Alberta Spruill died from the effects of a flash-bang grenade in 2003, she was one of Schumer’s constituents.

S
AL
C
ULOSI IS DEAD BECAUSE HE BET ON A FOOTBALL GAME
—but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.
⁶³

Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to
charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team.

On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi’s heart.

Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?”

In March 2006, just two months after its ridiculous gambling investigation resulted in the death of an unarmed man, the Fairfax County Police Department issued a press release warning residents not to participate in office betting pools tied to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The title: “Illegal Gambling Not Worth the Risk.” Given the proximity to Culosi’s death, residents could be forgiven for thinking the police department believed wagering on sports was a crime punishable by execution.

In January 2011, the Culosi family accepted a $2 million settlement offer from Fairfax County. That same year, Virginia’s government spent $20 million promoting the state lottery.

The raid on Sal Culosi was merely another red flag indicating yet more SWAT team mission creep in America. It wasn’t even the first time a Virginia SWAT team had killed someone during a gambling raid. In 1998 a SWAT team in Virginia Beach shot and killed security guard Edward C. Reed during a 3:00 AM raid on a private club suspected of facilitating gambling. Police said they approached the tinted car where Reed was working security, knocked, and identified themselves, then shot Reed when he refused to drop his handgun. Reed’s family insisted the police story was unlikely. Reed had no criminal record. Why would he knowingly point his gun at a heavily armed police team? More likely, they said, Reed mistakenly believed the raiding officers were there to do harm, particularly given that the club had been robbed not long before the raid. Statements by the
police themselves seem to back that account. According to officers at the scene, Reed’s last words were, “Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book.”
⁶⁴

As the Texas Hold ’Em craze picked up momentum in the mid-2000s, fans of the game started hosting tournaments at private clubs, bars, and residences. Police in many parts of the country responded with SWAT raids. In 2011, for example, police in Baltimore County, Maryland, sent a tactical unit to raid a $65 buy-in poker game at the Lynch Point Social Club.
⁶⁵
From 2006 to 2008, SWAT teams in South Carolina staged a number of raids to break up poker games in the suburbs of Charleston. Some were well organized and high-stakes, but others were friendly games with a $20 buy-in. “The typical police raid of these games . . . is to literally burst into a home in SWAT gear with guns drawn and treat poker players like a bunch of high-level drug dealers,” an attorney representing poker players told a local newspaper. “Using the taxpayers’ resources for such useless Gestapo-like tactics is more of a crime than is playing of the game.”
⁶⁶

In 2007 a Dallas SWAT team actually raided a Veterans of Foreign Wars outpost for hosting charity poker games. Players said the tactics were terrifying. One woman urinated on herself.
⁶⁷
When police raided a San Mateo, California, poker game in 2008, card players described cops storming the place “in full riot gear” and “with guns drawn.” The games had buy-ins ranging from $25 to $55. Under California law, the games were legal so long as no one took a “rake,” or a cut of the stakes. No one had, but police claimed the $5 the hosts charged players to buy refreshments qualified as a rake. In March 2007, a small army of local cops, ATF agents, National Guard troops, and a helicopter raided a poker game in Cary, North Carolina. They issued forty-one citations, all of them misdemeanors. A columnist at the
Fayetteville Observer
remarked, “They were there to play cards, not to foment rebellion. . . . [I] wonder . . . what other minutiae, personal vices and petty crimes are occupying [the National Guard’s] time, and where they’re occupying it. . . . Until we get this sorted out, better not jaywalk. There could be a military helicopter overhead.”
⁶⁸

Police have justified this sort of heavy-handedness by claiming that people who run illegal gambling operations tend to be armed, a blanket characterization that absurdly lumps neighborhood Hold ’Em tournaments with Uncle Junior Soprano’s weekly poker game. And in any case, if police know that people inside an establishment are likely to be armed, it makes even less sense to come in with guns blazing. Police have also defended the paramilitary tactics by noting that poker games are usually flush with cash and thus tend to get robbed. That too is an absurd argument, unless the police are afraid they’re going to raid a game at precisely the same moment it’s getting robbed. Under either scenario, the police are acknowledging that the people playing poker when these raids go down have good reason to think that the men storming the place with guns may be criminals, not cops.

Indeed, that’s exactly what happened to seventy-two-year-old Aaron Awtry in 2010. Awtry was hosting a poker tournament in his Greenville, South Carolina, home when police began breaking down the door with a battering ram. Awtry had begun carrying a gun after being robbed. Thinking he was about to be robbed again, he fired through the door, wounding Deputy Matthew May in both arms. The other officers opened fire into the building. Miraculously, only Awtry was hit. As he fell back into a hallway, other players reporting him asking, “Why didn’t you tell me it was the cops?” The raid team claimed they knocked and announced several times before putting ram to door, but other players said they heard no knock or announcement. When Awtry recovered, he was charged with attempted murder. As part of an agreement, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. Police had broken up Awtry’s games in the past. But on those occasions, they had knocked and waited, he had let them in peacefully, and he’d been given a $100 fine.
⁶⁹

The poker raids have gotten bad enough that the Poker Players Alliance, an interest group that lobbies to make the game legal, has established a network of attorneys around the country to help players who have been raided and arrested.

But the mission creep hasn’t stopped at poker games. By the end of the 2000s, police departments were sending SWAT teams
to enforce
regulatory law
. In August 2010, for example, a team of heavily armed Orange County, Florida, sheriff’s deputies raided several black- and Hispanic-owned barbershops in the Orlando area. More raids followed in September and October. The
Orlando Sentinel
reported that police held barbers and customers at gunpoint and put some in handcuffs, while they turned the shops inside out. The police raided a total of nine shops and arrested thirty-seven people.

By all appearances, these raids were drug sweeps. Shop owners told the
Sentinel
that police asked them where they were hiding illegal drugs and weapons. But in the end, thirty-four of the thirty-seven arrests were for “barbering without a license,” a misdemeanor for which only three people have ever served jail time in Florida.

The most disturbing aspect of the Orlando raids was that police didn’t even attempt to obtain a legal search warrant. They didn’t need to, because they conducted the raids in conjunction with the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. Despite the guns and handcuffs, under Florida law these were licensure inspections, not criminal searches, so no warrants were necessary.
⁷⁰