Radley Balko

Welcome To The Police Industrial Complex

2013-06-19T08:55:53-04:00

Want to make money on the drug war? Start a company that builds military equipment, then sell that gear to local police departments. Thanks to the generation-long trend toward more militarized police forces, there's now massive and growing market for private companies to outfit your neighborhood cops with gear that's more appropriate for a battlefield.

Some of this is decades-old news. For over 25 years, the Pentagon has been supplying surplus military equipment to police agencies across the country, largely in the name of fighting the drug war. In fact, in as early as 1968 Congress passed a law authorizing the military to share gear with domestic police agencies. But it was in 1987 that Washington really formalized the practice, with a law instructing the Secretary of Defense and the U.S. Attorney General to notify local law enforcement agencies each year about what surplus gear was available. The law established an office in the Pentagon specifically to facilitate such transfers, and Congress even set up an 800 number that sheriffs and police chiefs could call to inquire about the stuff they could get. The bill also instructed the General Services Administration to produce a catalog from which police agencies could make their Christmas lists.

Ten years later, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Security Act of 1997, a portion of which created what is now known as the 1033 Program. In that bill, Congress created the Law Enforcement Support Program, an agency headquartered in Ft. Belvoir, Virginia whose sole task is to make it easier for Pentagon supplies to find their way to local police stations. In just its first three years, the office handled 3.4 million orders for Pentagon gear from 11,000 police agencies in all 50 states. By 2005, over 17,000 police agencies were serviced by the office. National Journal reported in 2000 that between 1997 and 1999, the office doled out $727 million worth of equipment, including 253 aircraft , 7,856 M-16 rifles, and 181 grenade launchers. In the October 2011 edition of the program's monthly newsletter (Motto: "From Warfighter to Crimefighter"), the office celebrated that it had given away a record $500 million in military gear in fiscal year 2011.

The increasing role of the National Guard in the drug war also benefits military contractors. The National Guard straddles the gap between a police force and a military force. Over the years, Congress, state legislatures, and state governors have increasingly asked the Guard to take on the role of a domestic anti-drug agency, but to approach the job as the military might. of course supply the guard with everything from uniforms to weapons to aircraft. The National Guard was first recruited into the drug war in the mid-1980s with the Campaign Against Marijuana Production program. But it was during the lat 1980s and early 1990s that the Guard's role really began to expand. In 1989 Congress first gave the Guard funding for $40 for drug interdiction efforts -- $40 million. The next year, funding jumped to $70 million. Two years later it was up to $237 million.

By 1989, fully-armed Guard troops were stationed in front of suspected drug houses in a series of drug raids in Portland. In Kentucky, local residents grew so enraged at Guard sweeps in low-flying helicopters, they blew up a Kentucky police radio tower. In Oklahoma, Guard troops dressed in battle garb rappelled down from helicopters and fanned out into rural areas in search of pot plants to uproot. Guard troops would later tell USA Today Some would later tell media outlets they were told to exaggerate their haul in order to boost federal funding for future efforts.

In September 1990, the San Diego Union-Tribune sent a reporter to cover “the nation's first counternarcotics school, organized to teach military and law enforcement how to fight the war on drugs together.” The curriculum stressed “the need for law enforcement agencies to wage the war with searches, seizures and arrests, while the military performs surveillance, intelligence and undercover roles.”

By the 1990s, National Guard units were flying anti-drug surveillance helicopters and boarding up crack houses in Washington, D.C.; flying surveillance helicopters and cruising the streets with infrared gear to spot drug houses in Brooklyn; sealing crack houses in Philadelphia; sent to support drug raids in Baltimore; and helping serve 94 drug warrants during a massive, city-wide raid in Pittsburgh. Members of the Pennsylvania Guard assisted in raids of two factories that produced small glass vials. There were no drugs in the vials. But both states had made the vials illegal because they were often used by drug dealers to package crack cocaine. The staff of Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) discovered that the Texas National Guard had received $3 million in federal funding to dress troops up like cacti and position them along the border to hunt for drug smugglers. And in the summer of 1990, an Army helicopter circled overhead as Massachusetts National Guard troops, some of them undercover, assisted police in identifying potential drug offenders at a Grateful Dead show.

According to journalist James Bovard, in 1992 alone National Guard troops across the country assisted in just under 20,000 arrests, searched 120,000 automobiles, entered 1,200 private buildings without a search warrant, and stepped onto private property to search for drugs (also without a warrant) 6,500 times. Col. Richard Browning III, head of the organization's drug-interdiction effort, declared that year, “The rapid growth of the drug scourge has shown that military force must be used to change the attitudes and activities of Americans who are dealing and using drugs. The National Guard is America's legally feasible attitude-change agent.”

The next major wave of militarization came after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In the decade since, DHS has handed out billions in homeland security grants with a program far larger and better funded than even the Pentagon giveaways. According to the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), DHS gave out $2 billion in such grants in 2011 alone, about four times the value of gear the 1033 program gave out in its own record year. The money goes for hardware such as armored personnel carriers, high-power weapons, aircraft, and other military-grade gear.

Though these are considered anti-terror or homeland security grants, because the overwhelming majority of cities, counties, and towns that get them will never be subject to a terrorist attack, the equipment bought with them inevitably gets used in the drug war -- namely, to perform raids on people suspected of nonviolent consensual drug crimes. (The federal government laid the groundwork for conflating the two issues in 2002 when it ran an ad campaign explicitly arguing that terrorism and the drug war were inextricably linked.)

But most the most troubling thing about the DHS grant program is that it has given birth to the police-industrial complex. As the CIR reported in 2011, military contractors now market directly to police agencies with messages that encourage the mindset that the military and the police are fighting the same battle. And it's lucrative. The spokesman for Lenco, which makes armored personnel vehicles, told me last year that thanks to DHS, the company has sold at least one of its "Bearcats" to 90 of the 100 largest cities in America. The CIR reports that, "The homeland security market for state and local agencies is projected to reach $19.2 billion by 2014, up from an estimated $15.8 billion in fiscal 2009, according to the Homeland Security Research Corp."

That not only means that there's fortune to be made arming domestic police departments for battle, there's also plenty of money left over to set up lobbying offices in D.C., hire former politicians and their staffs, and generally lobby Congress, the Pentagon, and the White House to ensure that these programs not only stay around, but that they grow in size and influence going forward.

So if you want to make money off the war on drugs, consider starting a company that makes military gear for police departments. There's a small mountain of government money for the taking. And unlike contracting with the Pentagon, you won't even need a security clearance.

(Portions of this post were borrowed from my forthcoming book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces, coming on July 9th from PublicAffairs.)

This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post to mark the theatrical and on-demand release of "How To Make Money Selling Drugs," a new documentary by Matthew Cooke that examines the drug trade from a variety of angles. For more info on the film, click here.

Added Heat In Mississippi's Long-Simmering Forensics Scandal

2013-06-17T11:54:46-04:00

In January, I wrote a long feature on the Belzoni, Mississippi murder of Kathy Mabry, and how the 15-year-old crime casts light on the 20-year forensics scandal involving Dr. Steven Hayne and the dentist Michael West. In a new article published in the Mississippi Law Journal, several attorneys at the Mississippi Innocence Project and the Mississippi School of Law offer a detailed, heavily-footnoted chronology of the entire saga. From the introduction:

Over the last four decades, Mississippi has persisted in condoning systemic medico-legal and forensic malfeasance, and, more specifically, refused to adapt and properly accommodate contemporary forensic science in its courtrooms. The fact of the matter is that Mississippi has never, until very recently, made a good-faith effort to bring its medico-legal death investigation system into line to prohibit the failures of justice that have been its hallmark.

Even though the Mississippi Legislature abolished coroner's juries in the 1980s and created the State Medical Examiner's office to provide meaningful oversight of Mississippi's death investigation system, no demonstrative improvements occurred. In fact, it was just the opposite: During the early 1990s, the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, the administrative agency responsible for appointing a State Medical Examiner, failed to appoint a person to the position. Among the public health consequences was a medico-legal spoils system that valued pseudoscience and expedient criminal convictions over scientific validity and defendants' basic civil rights.

As a direct and entirely natural correlation, Mississippi produced a significant number--and shocking types--of wrongful convictions and perpetrated some of the most notorious forensic fraud in American legal history . . .

The pervasive impact of Mississippi's broken medico-legal system should come as no surprise. The logical consequence of a system that encourages forensic fraud is forensic fraud; and the logical consequence of forensic fraud is wrongful convictions. Empirical evidence from every jurisdiction in the United States, including Mississippi, bears this out. In a recent national study of wrongful convictions that featured forensic testimony, sixty percent of the forensic witnesses provided inaccurate information.

This Article documents for the first time the complete, tragic history of Mississippi's medico-legal system from the mid-1970s, when initial efforts were made to improve the local, coroner-based system, to the present day. Its primary purpose is to provide a comprehensive narrative through which the state might honestly come to terms on a morally acceptable basis with the attendant failures of justice that occurred as a result of the path it chose. In that way this Article also offers up the Mississippi medico-legal system as a cautionary tale, a study in what not to do. Although all of the cases, agencies, and people discussed in this Article are from Mississippi, the lessons learned from Mississippi medico-legal system's breakdown are universal.

Indeed. Just last week, a state crime lab in Colorado came under fire, with allegations of mismanagement, bias, and cover-up. It's just the latest in a long, sad line of such stories.

But back to Mississippi. Tucker Carrington (director of the Mississippi Innocence Project) and other concerned attorneys, public officials, and even some law enforcement have been calling for an independent investigation of Hayne for years, now. It looks as if they may be finally getting some traction in the state legislature. From Jackson's Clarion-Ledger:

State Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, chairman of the Judiciary B Committee, agrees with Carrington that something needs to be done. "Our experience with Dr. Hayne is extremely troubling, and there needs to be a look at anything he is involved in," he said. "We need to look at that."

There are some other signs of growing momentum. The Mississippi Supreme Court has always been deferential to Hayne, and for the most part has curtly dismissed appeals and post-conviction petitions that have challenged his credentials and credibility. But in April, the court not only tossed Hayne's testimony in a murder case, but did so in some unusually harsh language. The New York Times also took a look at the controversy around Hayne in an article published last January. Unfortunately, the biggest roadblock to a thorough review and investigation has come from the one state official with the most power to order one -- Attorney General Jim Hood.

The state desperately needs this investigation -- to find out who may be wrongly in prison (or still awaiting execution) because of Hayne's testimony, to learn what dangerous criminals may still be free because of those wrongful convictions, and to assess the scope and breadth of the damage Hayne's reign in Mississippi has done to the state's criminal and civil justice systems. I've been following and reporting on this story for seven years now. I can say this with confidence: If there's competent review by an impartial team of investigators, we're going to see a truly terrifying report.

The Marketing Of Police Militarism

2013-06-12T13:04:36-04:00

Lenco, Inc., makes the Bearcat, an armored personnel carrier that's popping up in cities, towns, and counties across the country. Last year, Jim Massery, a spokesman for the company, told me they now have Bearcats in 90 of the 100 largest cities in America. They also have them in lots of smaller, even tiny towns like Keene, New Hampshire. These cities and towns are buying the vehicles with anti-terror grants from the Department of Homeland Security, at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars each.

Critics (like me) say arming every small-town police department in the country with gear more suited for a battlefield is fostering a militarized, aggressive mindset in America's police forces. Moreover, because most small towns will never see a school shooting or terrorist attack, once the gear is in place it inevitably gets used for more mundane police tasks -- mostly drug raids. But because this stuff is "free" -- the federal government foots the bill -- there's usually no local discussion or debate about whether it's appropriate for domestic policing. (There was such a debate in Keene. Residents protested, but the town went ahead with the Bearcat, anyway.)

At the time I wrote my article on Keene, Lenco was using an interesting video to market the Bearcat. Shot from a first-person-shooter point of view, the video included images of cops dressed in camouflage, shooting high-powered weapons, eventually using a battering ram affixed to the Bearcat to punch a hole in a building, through which the vehicle then injected teargas. All of this was set to AC/DC's "Thunderstruck."

After the video received some criticism, Lenco sent a take-down notice to Google, and it was removed from YouTube. I'm republishing it here, because I think there are political and policy reasons to let the public see how these companies are marketing themselves to police agencies. They wouldn't use these images if they weren't effective at winning business. And that this sort of highly-militarized imagery is effective at attracting the interest of police agencies -- why that is, and what it means -- are issues worth discussing.

I bring this up again because Lenco recently released a new video, this time for public consumption. This time, the company is promoting its brand by appropriating images from the manhunt and crackdown in Boston after the April marathon bombing. I'll let you decide if this is creepy propaganda or merely a government contractor celebrating the heroism of police in the wake of a tragedy.

What I find most interesting here is the difference in tone and tenor between the way Lenco markets its products to police -- camouflage, guns firing, ass-kicking, Thunderstruck -- and the face it presents to the public: still images of heroic cops protecting and serving, set to classical piano. The first video is aggressive and confrontational. The second video aspires for inspiring. The contrast is telling.

HuffPost senior writer Radley Balko is author of the forthcoming book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. It's due out in July, but you can pre-order it here.

Lunch Links: FBI Dials Up Use Of Controversial PATRIOT Act Provision, David Brooks As Stalin, Don't Say Gay In Russia

2013-06-12T12:22:54-04:00

-- Another day, another revelation about the massive breadth and scope of the feds' spying apparatus.

-- "David Brooks: The Last Stalinist." And more from Amy Davidson at the New Yorker, who writes, "Brooks....seems to have a greater horror of impoliteness than of injustice." Spot-on.

-- This is an intense photo. So much going on.

-- Al Weiwei says the U.S. surveillance is reminiscent of China's. And he would know.

-- Russia's Duma passes its own version of "don't say gay." Unanimously.

That's Not What I Meant!

2013-06-11T09:57:23-04:00

Over at the New York Times, Adam Liptak interviews the Innocence Project's Peter Neufeld, who is none too pleased at the way Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy cited his book in the majority opinion for the recent DNA collection case, Maryland v. King. In a 5-4 decision, the Court upheld a Maryland law requiring police to take a DNA sample of everyone arrested for a serious crime, regardless of whether they're eventually charged or convicted.*

Kennedy writes that the practice of collecting DNA from everyone arrested for a serious crime could match DNA collected from crimes for which the wrong person has been convicted. "In the interests of justice," Kennedy writes, "the identification of an arrestee as the perpetrator of some heinous crime may have the salutary effect of freeing a person wrongfully imprisoned for the same offense." He then quotes from a book written by Neufeld and Jim Dwyer to support his contention.

From Liptak:

I asked Peter J. Neufeld, one of its authors, how he felt about the honor.

"Not great," he said.

Part of the problem was what he called an irony.

In 2009, Justice Kennedy joined the majority opinion in a 5-to-4 decision that said prisoners had no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence. Mr. Neufeld, who founded the Innocence Project with Barry Scheck, represented the prisoner on the losing end of that case, District Attorney's Office v. Osborne.

But last week, Mr. Neufeld said, Justice Kennedy concluded that "it's O.K. for the state to take DNA, without a warrant, from mere arrestees, who may ultimately have their charges dismissed."

So Kennedy is happy to invoke the cause of the wrongfully convicted when empowering the police to collect DNA from everyone they arrest. But at the same time, he has ruled that the wrongly convicted have no right to DNA testing, even it could conclusively establish their innocence. Sorta' sounds like a justice who is expropriating sympathy for the wrongly convicted to give more power to police.

Kennedy also misquoted Neufeld. In a quote from the book, Kennedy writes that Neufeld and co-author Jim Dwyer encourage "prompt testing" of DNA to prevent wrongful convictions. But Kennedy implies that the authors were advocating for prompt testing of all arrestees. They weren't. They were advocating for prompt testing of evidence collected from the crime scene. In their book, Neufeld and Dwyer take take six sentences to explain this. In his quote, Kennedy hides those six sentences behind an ellipsis.

Liptak points out that Kennedy's quote from the book also includes a second interesting ellipsis. After misstating what the authors meant by "prompt DNA testing," Kennedy then notes that they state such testing could "prevent the grotesque detention of ... innocent people." The original quote included the words thousands of in place of the ellipsis. Liptak writes, "Justice Kennedy apparently did not want to endorse the possibility that the criminal justice system had such widespread shortcomings." That seems like the only plausible explanation. I can't imagine that Kennedy was trying to squeeze under some sort of word count limit on Supreme Court opinions.

This isn't the first time an expert has been upset about the way their work was interpreted by the Court. I describe another example in my forthcoming book. In the 2006 case Hudson v. Michigan, the Court decided in a 6-3 vote that even when police conduct a clearly illegal no-knock raid, any illegal evidence they might seize afterward isn't subject to the Exclusionary Rule. So it can still be used against the defendant at trial.

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia took aim at the rule, which has long been a target of scorn among law-and-order conservatives. Scalia and the majority concluded that the rule was an inappropriate remedy for violations of the knock-and-announce rule. Instead, Scalia argued that there are other, more appropriate ways to hold police officers accountable when they violate the rule. He suggested, for example, that internal affairs departments investigations and internal discipline could be sufficient to deter cops from barging into homes without knocking and announcing themselves. If you're familiar with the phrase blue code of silence, you'll know why that's rather unlikely.

To support his thesis that are better methods to deter knock-and-announce violations, Scalia cited the work of criminologist Samuel Walker, who has done extensive research on police professionalism. In the book Scalia cited, Walker concluded that there has been enormous progress "in the education, training and supervision of police officers." Scalia argued that this progress was making the Exclusionary Rule obsolete. But Walker's thesis was that this progress had come about because of Supreme Court decisions applying the Exclusionary Rule, particularly during the Warren court. Police departments implemented better search procedures because with out them, their arrests would be continually thrown out by the courts. To cite his work to argue against the rule was to completely miss his point.

Like Neufeld, Walker wasn't happy to see his work misappropriated. Shortly after the Hudson decision came down, Walker wrote an op-ed in the L.A. Times headlined, "Thanks for nothing, Nino." (Nino is Scalia's nickname.) Walker wrote:

A FRIEND OF mine e-mailed me last week with some exciting news -- the Supreme Court had cited one of my criminal justice policy books in an important, late-term decision. My law professor friends tell me that being mentioned by the court is a huge deal. And my 93-year-old mother in Cleveland will certainly be impressed that her son has finally done something worthy of note.

Alas, as I surfed the Net for news about Hudson vs. Michigan, my excitement quickly turned to dismay, then horror. First, I learned that Justice Antonin Scalia cited me to support a terrible decision, holding that the exclusionary rule -- which for decades prevented evidence obtained illegally by police from being used at trial -- no longer applies when cops enter your home without knocking . . .

Scalia's opinion suggests that the results I highlighted have sufficiently removed the need for an exclusionary rule to act as a judicial-branch watchdog over the police. I have never said or even suggested such a thing. To the contrary, I have argued that the results reinforce the Supreme Court's continuing importance in defining constitutional protections for individual rights and requiring the appropriate remedies for violations, including the exclusion of evidence.

Imagine devoting your life to academic research, then learning that the Supreme Court has just cited your research to support an opinion that contradicts everything your research has found. And that opinion is now the law. It must be infuriating.

(*The Maryland law that the decision upheld is actually pretty narrow, as these laws go. If you're never charged or convicted, for example, you can ask that your DNA profile be removed from the state database. The problem is that the majority opinion was written broadly enough to include states far more onerous DNA collection laws.)

Morning Links: Schneier On Spying, Billy Joel Meets Police Militarization, And Dippin' Dots

2013-06-11T09:36:55-04:00

-- Security guru Bruce Schneier sounds off on government spying.

-- How the recent news might read if it were covered by the foreign press the way American reporters cover foreign countries.

-- We're tired of your lies, Dippin' Dots.

-- Police in Boulder, Colorado say an open patio door is just like inviting them into your home. I was unaware of this line of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.

-- When the Dianne Feinsteins of the world declare that violating our privacy is critical to protecting America, and that these policies are never abused, remember that while the Tsarnaevs were planning to bomb the Boston Marathon, the DHS fusion center in Boston was spying on anti-war protesters.

-- Your WTF video of the day:

Raid Of The Day: Witness To A Misdemeanor

2013-06-10T14:05:09-04:00

Today's raid comes courtesy of Vice.

It is an interview with an anonymous source, so factor that in when calibrating your outrage. But if true, this guy was raided not because of a murder, or a drug crime, or even a felony. He was raided because he may have possessed evidence of what appears to be a misdemeanor -- that was committed by someone else.

On Twitter, someone pointed out that regular folks can often mistake cops in riot gear for a SWAT raid. In other words, this may have just been an insanely heavy-handed police response, not a formal SWAT raid.

Still. We're talking about a misdemeanor, here. Not just that, but a consensual, nonviolent crime. It's also an activity that's legal in other contexts in other states. That is, pornography -- in which someone can pay someone to have sex with someone else, film it, and sell the footage -- is legal in many parts of the country. The suspect here was allegedly paying other people to have sex with him, filming it, and then selling the footage.

And it's worth repeating -- the guy they raided wasn't even the suspect. They've also apparently ruined his business, which included building website for a number of businesses that had nothing to do with pornography.

It's another data point supporting the theory that this sort of force is increasingly the first option police turn to, instead of the last.

Note: The "Raid of the Day" features accounts of police raids I've found, researched, and reported while writing my forthcoming book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. It's due out in July, but you can pre-order it here.

DOJ Report Finds Sexual Abuse At Juvenile Detention Facilities Is Down, But Still Prevalent

2013-06-06T12:09:05-04:00

A new report (PDF) from the Bureau of Justice Statistics paints an unsettling picture of juvenile detention centers in the U.S.

According to the survey of minors incarcerated at both privately and publicly run facilities, 9.5 percent of the jailed kids reported that they had been sexually victimized in the previous 12 months. A little less than 8 percent were victimized by staff, the others by fellow inmates. Interestingly, the rate of staff sexual misconduct is nearly twice as high at state facilities (8.2 percent) as those that are privately or locally operated (4.5 percent).

If there's some good news in the report, it's that the overall victimization rate at state run facilities is down, from 12.9 percent in 2008-2009, to 9.9 percent in 2012. The worst states are Georgia, Illinois, Ohio and South Carolina, which had victimization rates topping 15 percent. The best were Delaware, Massachusetts, New York and the District of Columbia, which had no reported incidents at all. The report indicates that about 3.5 percent of inmates reported sexual contact with staff members that involved the use of force of coercion. That's still way too many, but that number is down too, from 4.7 percent in 2008-2009.

Any sexual contact between staff and inmates at a youth corrections facility is troubling. But forcible contact is most alarming. So it's worth throwing some shame on the worst offenders. The BJS survey found eight facilities in which more than one in 10 incarcerated youth reported that they had been forcibly sexually assaulted by a staff member in the previous 12 months. Birchwood in South Carolina led the way, with an appalling rate of 21.7 percent. Ponder that. If the survey is accurate, one in five kids at this facility reported being sexually assaulted by a staff member. (Statistically speaking, at a 95 percent confidence level, the rate of victimization at Birchwood is somewhere between 14.2 and 31.8 percent.)

The other centers topping 10 percent are Circleville Juvenile Correctional Facility in Ohio (15.2 percent), Illinois Youth Center (14.0 percent), Augusta Youth Development Campus in Georgia (13.6 percent), Eastman Youth Development Campus in Georgia (13.1 percent), Scioto Juvenile Correctional Facility in Ohio (13.0 percent), Corsicana Residential Treatment Center in Texas (10.5 percent), and Sumter Youth Development Campus in Georgia (10.3 percent).

It's good that these numbers are falling. But there's still a lot more work to be done.

Raid Of The Day: Bruce Lavoie

2013-06-05T11:29:50-04:00

Note: The "Raid of the Day" features accounts of police raids I've found, researched, and reported while writing my forthcoming book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. It's due out in July, but you can pre-order it here.

At 4:30 am on August 3, 1989, officers with the Hudson, New Hampshire, police department met at the police station for a briefing. They'd be executing three simultaneous drug raids that morning in an apartment complex on Roosevelt Avenue. The raid on Bruce Lavoie, a 34-year-old machinist, would be done by Sgt. Stephen Burke, Officer Ronald Mello, and Albert Brackett, the town's chief of police. The chief was wearing a t-shirt with the word "Police" printed on the front and back. The other two officers were wearing black tactical uniforms.

A confidential informant claimed to have seen Lavoie sell a pound of marijuana to his upstairs neighbor, 25-year-old Kevin Hughes. Under New Hampshire law, in order to obtain a warrant for a no-knock raid, police must show specific information that the suspect either is violent or is likely to dispose of evidence. They had no such information on Bruce Lavoie. They stated in the warrant affidavit only that "individuals involved in drug dealing frequently carry firearms." Nashua District Court Judge Gauthier signed the warrant, anyway.

When the police broke in, Lavoie, 34, and his sons Jonathan, 8, and Steven, 6, were asleep in the master bedroom. Lavoie's other son Robert, 11, was asleep in his own bedroom. Bruce's wife Susan was sleeping in the living room. Chief Brackett announced his presence by smacking the Lavoie door three or four times with a battering ram, sending it flying open with the final blow. Susan Lavoie woke up with a start. She had recently been victim of two serious encounters with a neighbor, one in which he choked her, and another that ended with him beating on the family's door with a baseball bat. She feared he had come back for more.

In one hand, Sgt. Stephen Burke carried a Ruger 9 millimeter sem-automatic pistol, with a flashlight taped to his forearm. In the other hand he carried a 20-pound ballistic shield. Mello carried a shotgun with a flashlight strapped to its barrel. When the door came open, the two of them entered the house, both crouched behind Burke's shield. Seconds later, Burke fired his gun. The bullet sped through a hallway wall, into the room where young Robert Lavoie was sleeping, pierced a vacuum cleaner parked in the bedroom, then penetrated a second wall before stopping in a hallway on the other side. Burke would later say he didn't remember discharging his weapon.

Chief Brackett entered the house last. He hit the living room, where he put Susan Lavoie on the floor. According to police accounts, Burke then continued toward the master bedroom, where the door was partially open. As he neared the door, he said saw Lavoie, dressed only in his underwear, attempt to shut the door. Burke thrust his shield into the door, knocking Lavoie back into the bedroom. As Lavoie fell, Burke claimed the man grabbed at his gun gun, at which point he "felt pressure" on his left hand and "heard the gun discharge." Burke later said he didn't remember firing that shot, either.

The bullet struck Lavoie in the left side of his chest, then angled down into his abdominal cavity. He'd later die in surgery. His last words: "Why did you shoot me? What happened?"

Robert Lavoie, the 11-year-old, later told investigators that he woke to the pounding at the door, saw armed men enter the apartment, and heard a gunshot. He then saw them run into his father's bedroom and heard more shots. Jonathan, the eight-year-old, said he woke to gunshots, then looked and saw his wounded father lying on the mattress next to him.

Chief Brackett would later say he heard Burke scream "Let go of my gun!" just before the second gunshot. Mello claimed he heard Burke yell "He grabbed my gun!" after the second shot, just as he saw the two figures fall to the mattress.

In subsequent interviews, the paramedics who responded to the shooting said the police acted suspiciously. Hudson Fire Department Lt. Robert Bianchi and firefighter David Sassak said that when the call came in, they weren't told that they were responding to a shooting, but rather to an "unknown problem." If they had been told it was a shooting, they would have sent more personnel. When they arrived, Chief Brackett ran out to the ambulance and told them someone had been shot, but that it "wasn't one of ours." Brackett then told Bianchi that he wanted "only certain paramedics" to treat Lavoie. When Bianchi tried to call for the needed extra help, Brackett wouldn't allow it, and said instead that he and the other officers would give him whatever help he needed. Bianchi said that when he then asked for the officers to retrieve the stretcher from the ambulance while he treated Lavoie in the house, the officers wouldn't comply. He and Sassak had to leave Lavoie unattended to get the stretcher themselves.

There were other oddities in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Susan Lavoie said the police told her that her husband had only been shot in the arm, and was in good condition. It wasn't until she arrived at the hospital that she was told he was dead. When she and Lavoie's brother then asked to see the gunshot wound after he was pronounced dead, Chief Brackett wouldn't allow it. Crime lab reports would later show that none of Lavoie's fingerprints were on Burke's gun, nor was there any gunshot residue on Lavoie's hands.

The police did find a "small amount" of marijuana in Lavoie's house, as well as what they called "residue" of cocaine. Lavoie was unarmed when he was shot.

On the night of the raid, Susan Lavoie told police that one of the officers, dressed all in black, looked like Michael Keaton in the Batman movie. According to witnesses, at a public hearing on the raid the following month, several off-duty officers from Nashua showed up in Batman t-shirts to mock her.

Facing mounting public outrage over Lavoie's death, Chief Brackett commissioned a review of the raid and his department from the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Not surprisingly the resulting report -- written by former LAPD Officer Robert McCarthy -- was reluctant to criticize his fellow men in blue. In fact, of the 17-page report, less than one page addressed the Lavoie shooting, the reason the report was commissioned in the first place. According to the Nashua Telegraph, McCarthy praised the Hudson Police Department for its "high degree of professionalism" in "aggressively attack[ing] the drug problem." Despite the fact that neither Susan Lavoie nor her sons heard any police announcement, and that Susan Lavoie thought she was being attacked by a neighbor, McCarthy concluded that the police "wore easily identifiable uniforms," "loudly announced they were officers," and "gave clear commands." McCarthy then used an odd comparison to blame Bruce Lavoie for his own death: "The grabbing of the steering wheel of a speeding police car by a suspect could create the same result."

Of course, a suspect who commandeers a speeding squad car away from the police officer driving it knows full well what he's doing. Bruce Lavoie confronted Sgt. Burke during a 5 am no-knock raid on his home, after Burke had already fired a bullet inside of Lavoie's home. McCarthy's report also completely disregarded statements from Susan Lavoie and the Lavoie children. Even if the Hudson cops did announce themselves as loudly and clearly as they claimed, it's certainly conceivable that the sleeping family may not have heard them, may have been overcome by panic or fear, may have thought they were the unstable neighbor, or, given that Burke had already fired his gun in their home for no reason, simply didn't believe them when they said they were police. McCarthy's report showed a complete lack of empathy for the people -- even the innocent people -- subjected to one of these raids. McCarthy's report -- which again was commissioned in response to public anger of Bruce Lavoie's death during a drug raid -- went on to recommended that Hudson police officers get pay raises and better benefits.

McCarthy's report, and the general official response to Lavoie's death, also demonstrated one of many double standards that would begin to emerge in the handling of these botched drug raids. Chief Al Brackett asked for a no-knock raid because, he argued in his affidavit, drug dealers like Bruce Lavoie tend to be dangerous. Thus, they need to be taken by surprise. This is why they did a no-knock raid at 5 am. But post-raid, the officers and McCarthy argued that Lavoie should have known they were the police --even though they used tactics designed to make him unaware of their presence. Consequently, they argued, Bruce Lavoie was the only one to blame for his own death. But these two assertions can't exist side by side. One can't argue that violent, volatile tactics are necessary to preserve the element of surprise, then argue that the suspect shouldn't have been fully aware that it was the police who were invading his home. But that's exactly what they argued, and it's what police have argued in the years since when a no-knock raid ends in tragedy.

A subsequent report on the Lavoie raid from the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office reached the same conclusion, although that report did at least direct some strong criticism at Burke for the shot he mysteriously fired shortly after entering the house. It also concluded with a paragraph about how drug raids are "a tense and potentially dangerous activity." This paragraph was included to get at Burke's state of mind during the raid, and to excuse his actions as those any reasonable police officer would take under similar circumstances. Notably, it fails to mention that the police crated those tense and dangerous conditions when they decided how and when they'd serve the search warrant. While it went to great lengths to consider the mindset of Sgt. Burke in needlessly firing his gun shortly after entering the Lavoie house, it failed to consider the mindset Bruce Lavoie, a man with a full time job and no criminal record, asleep with his two young boys, who woke up to the sound of a gunshot, and then to the sights and sounds of armed men in his home. The report also failed to explain why Hudson police would decide to carry out a "tense and potentially dangerous" drug raid in a home in which three children were sleeping inside. There are only two possibilities: They either hadn't done enough investigating to know there were children inside, or they didn't care.

The following year, New Hampshire Superior Court Judge William Groff dismissed the evidence seized by police as well as a confession after another raid in Hudson, finding that the police had "flagrantly violated" the state's knock-and-announce requirement. That raid on 21-year-old Christopher Roystan occurred in April 1989, four months before the raid that ended Bruce Lavoie's life. The knock-and-announce rule wasn't just a formality, Groff implored in his ruling, but an important safeguard to "protect citizens' rights to privacy in their homes and prevent unnecessary violence which could result from unannounced entries." Groff found that, as in the Lavoie case, the search warrant affidavit contained no specific information suggesting Roystan could be violent. Instead police asked for -- and were given -- a no-knock warrant based only on boilerplate language about how, in the officer's experience, "drug dealers often keep weapons and ammunition in their homes."

Groff's ruling highlighted another trend that would play out alongside the increase in paramilitary drug raids over the next 20 years -- the increase in gun ownership in America. As Groff wrote, the "potential for serious injury or death to innocent persons when police resort to unannounced entry is also manifest. In New Hampshire, where many law-abiding citizens own guns, the potential for violent responses that might be aroused in a startled homeowner suddenly faced with armed unknown persons, endangers citizens and police alike."

The defense attorney in that case found that more than half the warrants executed by Hudson police over the previous two years were served with no-knock raids, many authorized by search warrants with the same boilerplate language.

Hudson police also videotaped the Roystan raid. Groff seemed alarmed by what he saw:

It is doubtful that the court would have appreciate the extreme violence attendant to the execution of the warrant by mere verbal description. The actions of the Hudson Police in this case, which is apparently representative of their general procedure in executing all search warrants for narcotics, underscores the importance of the enforcement of the knock and announce rule. The potential for unnecessary violence and injury to police and citizens by virtue of the indiscriminate use of such tactics is staggering.

The remarkable thing about that passage is that a state judge who regularly ruled on the reasonableness of searches (and presumably signed off on search warrants himself) apparently had no idea about the manner by which search warrants in his jurisdiction were being served. Judges are supposed to be the backstops for the Fourth Amendment. Here, even a judge who understood the amendment's value and importance was oblivious to what was happening after the warrants were signed.

In a bit of candor, Lt. Don Hamel, head of Nashua, New Hampshire's narcotics division, admitted that police departments in the state were changing the way they conduct raids in the wake of the Lavoie raid and Groff's ruling. "The tide is turning. The courts are looking into affidavits and search warrants much closer, and I think that's a good thing. It does rock us back on our heels a bit, but in the end it's making us better."

But other chiefs around New Hampshire reacted to Groff's ruling with a shrug. In the Nashua Telegraph, several dismissed the decision as an isolated case that probably wouldn't affect their own procedures. Unfortunately, they were right. Hamel was wrong. The raids would continue, in New Hampshire and elsewhere. And skeptical judges like Groff would soon become anachronisms.

In November 1990, the town of Hudson reached a $800,000 settlement with the Lavoie family. Part of it went to Susan Lavoie immediately, and part of it to the Lavoie boys when they turned 18. Susan Lavoie was also able to force some changes in department policy. The Hudson SWAT team was disbanded for two years. In a 1994 interview with the Nashua Telegraph, Richard Gendron said the department was doing more "consent searches" for drug warrants instead of nighttime raids, although the department still continued to do some raids with the help of SWAT teams from police departments nearby.

Stephen Burke resigned from the Nashua Police Department five months after the raid to take a position with another, undisclosed police agency. Chief Albert Brackett resigned a year later to take a job as a deputy with the Hillsborough County, Florida Sheriff's Department. He would be investigated in 1991 after a suspect died of massive internal bleeding while in his custody. Brackett had chased the man down, tackled him, cuffed him, then put a knee in his back for several minutes, ignoring the suspect's pleas that he couldn't breathe. He was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing in that case too. He was subsequently promoted to detective.

The Lavoie children had nightmares for years, and required intense pschological counseling. Robert Lavoie dropped out of school at 16. In 1998, at the age of 21, he was packing up his belongings to move out of the house where his father was killed when police pulled over the U-Haul truck he was driving. Police searched the truck and found LSD. He was charged with possession with intent to sell.

Susan Lavoie remarried, then was separated after filing several domestic violence complaints against her new husband. She also accumulated a criminal record of her own in the following years, including charges for writing bad checks, punching a police officer, and drunk driving. She eventually lost custody of her children.

Sources: "Son of Hudson Man Killed in 1989 Drug Raid Is Arrest," Manchester Union-Leader, December 5, 1998; "Deputy had role in earlier fatal raid," St. Petersburg Times, May 11, 1991; Andrew W. Serell, "The Death of Bruce Lavoie," Office of the New Hampshire Attorney General, August 25, 1989; Kris Frieswick, "Hudson Will Pay Widow $800,000," Manchester Union-Leader," November 17, 1990; Pat Grossmith, "Police Didn't Knock First," Manchester Union-Leader," July 31, 1990; Pat Grossmith, "Some Police Use No-Knock Search Warrants," Manchester Union-Leader, August 1, 1990; Cheryl Dulak, "Probe Backs Officers," Nashua Telegraph, November 7, 1989; Carolyn Magnusun, "One Year Later, Lavoies' Pain Lingers," Nashua Telegraph, August 1, 1990; Carolyn Magnuson, "Police Refused More Medics for Lavoie," Nashua Telegraph, August 30, 1989; Cheryl Dulak, "State A.G. Chided Over Lavoie Probe," Nashua Telegraph, November 28, 1989; Kevin Landrigan, "Lavoie Probe Sheds Light, Raises More Questions," Nashua Telegraph, August 29, 1989; Cheryl Dulak, "Troubled Times," "They're Good Kids; They Went Through Hell," and "Police Department Has a Different Look," all from the Nashua Telegraph, September 2, 1994.

Kickstarting Kate Tucker And The Sons Of Sweden

2013-06-01T09:06:08-04:00

One recurring theme I've encountered while exploring the music industry since moving to Nashville is just how expendable the giant record labels have become. As it turns out, pissing on your customers is a pretty awful business model. Artists are increasingly finding ways to fund their music that not only don't screw over their fans, but actually bring their fans into the production process, and that allow artists to keep more of what they make from their work to boot.

All of the artists who have done "Songs From My Couch" sessions -- Matthew Perryman Jones and Tom House -- have both had rewarding careers while bypassing the major labels. Jones' last album was funded entirely through a Kickstarter campaign. In a couple weeks I'll post videos from our most recent session with Griffin House, who funded his most recent album the same way.

I bring all of this up because another group of enormously talented Nashville artists are using Kickstarter to fund an album, along with a photo and video series, live performances, art gallery exhibits, and dance. Kate Tucker and the Sons of Sweden are committing to an admirably ambitious project.

We want to record a new album, THE SHAPE THE COLOR THE FEEL, and create a collaborative visual experience surrounding it. We believe that great music is inspired by great films and visual art, and great films and visual art are inspired by great music. It’s a beautiful cycle and we will explore it in this project by working with eight filmmakers to create music videos or short films for each of the songs on the album. We will release each film serially as the album rolls out along with an experimental documentary that retrospectively features the community that this collaborative venture will inevitably foster. And most of all we want to invite you to join us in the creative process.

In a time where a whole world of sound and experience can be compressed into a tiny digital file that we send to each other on our cell phones, we like the idea of attaching moving picture to this tiny little file and giving it some weight. So much goes into creating a song and a sound and an album and even more goes into making a film and all of that time, love, and attention is something we want to remember.

With that in mind, and a great love for collecting vinyl, we also want to give this album a physical presence. We’ll be releasing the album on limited edition 180 gram vinyl featuring art by Australian artist Jessie English. Jessie is creating a photo installation that will exist in the real world and will also inform the overall visual aesthetic of THE SHAPE THE COLOR THE FEEL. Jessie’s work has been shown in Sydney and NYC and we are excited to plan gallery openings surrounding the album release in Nashville, NYC, and Seattle, Washington.

I love this idea. As wonderful as it is that technology, social media, and new music formats are allowing artists to bring fans into the production process, and to write, record, produce, and distribute an album without signing their rights and independence away to Sony or Warner Brothers, the transition hasn't come without some costs. The big, beautiful album art of the 1970s and early 1980s is gone. You now get that 2 x 2 inch square that pops up on your iPhone. The lifespan of the music video as an art form was even shorter. Thriller and November Rain are excesses of the past. The substance of music itself has suffered, too. The MP3 culture has basically brought us back to the era of the single. There just isn't much room for a themed or concept album anymore. Studios also now engineer songs for portable devices, and a lot of sound is getting lost along the way. (There's more to the vinyl revival than just hipster culture. It really is a richer, fuller sound.)

I'm not lamenting the technology, here. The iPod revolution has done wonderful things for music. But in some ways, it has also shrunk music as an art form. There's a bit of irony at work here: As the democratization of technology has made us all increasingly multimedia savvy, music has grown increasingly one-dimensional.

Anyway, back to Kate Tucker. What I love about this project is that its aim is to blow it all back out. The idea here is to bring the visual and conceptual components back to music. You'll be able to download the songs for your MP3 player, but you can also get the fuller, less-loss recordings on vinyl. It's also a pretty bold to create and record a song, then hand it off to a photographer or filmmaker to interpret as they please -- and to let that interpretation be the way the song is presented to the public.

But the real beauty of the project is that just as it seeks to recapture some of what music has lost to technology, it's utilizing the same technology to make that happen. It'll be funded by crowd-sourcing. It will be promoted through social media. You'll be able to see the artwork online, and stream the videos on YouTube. It's really an effort to bring the best of the past and present together.

Of course, it'll never happen unless it gets enough funding. So you should go donate. I did.

Just so you know what you'll be supporting, here's a great song the band released a few years ago:

And here's a more recent acoustic Kate Tucker performance recorded here in Nashville:

Drug War Priorities

2013-05-29T11:20:54-04:00

This awful story has been making the rounds the last few days.

A woman was choked and raped following a 911 call to police in which the dispatcher told her to ask her attacker to "go away".

The incident, which occured late last August but was only widely reported last week, took place in Josephine County, Oregon, when a woman's ex-boyfriend tried to break into her home.

Instead of sending an officer to the scene, the police dispatcher advised, “I don’t have anybody to send out there. You know, obviously, if he comes inside the residence and assaults you, can you ask him to go away? Do you know if he’s intoxicated or anything?”

The man eventually forced entry to the house, wherein he proceeded to "brutally rape" the woman before fleeing. After the attack, police went in search for 29-year-old Michael Bellah, and arrested him.

The Sheriff's Department blamed the lack of resources due to recent public funding cuts. “There isn’t a day go by that we don’t have another victim,” said Josephine County Sheriff Gil Gilbertson. In Josephine County, 80 percent of sheriff’s deputies lost their jobs when the cuts were made. The few that remain cannot respond to emergency calls during the evening or on weekends . . .

After the government budget cuts, which occurred before the rape incident, Josephine County Sheriff Gil Gilbertson said in a press release that victims of domestic violence should "consider relocating to an area with adequate police services."

Heartbreaking. I don't know the fiscal situation in Josephine County, so I don't have an informed opinion on whether those cuts were necessary, or whether or not they really were severe enough to put its citizens at risk. But I did do a couple quick searches, and I found a few stories that make me question Sheriff Gilbertson's narrative.

-- From a November 15, 2012 article in the Mail Tribune: "A harvest season crackdown on Josephine County medical marijuana growers suspected of having significantly more of the drug than allowed under the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program led to the seizure of 930 pounds of bud and criminal charges for 26 people . . . "

-- Here's a February, 2013 story from KDRV TV: "Working with the Rogue Area Drugs Enforcement team in Grants Pass, the agencies tracked the drugs to a home on Panther Gulch Road near Williams. Police seized 161 pounds of marijuana, along with small amounts of heroin, cocaine, and mushrooms."

-- Here's a January 2013 story from KTVL: "Detectives in Josephine County took two drug dealers and their goods off the streets this week.The Rogue Area Drug Enforcement Team used a search warrant to go into a home in Wolf Creek, where they found 15 pounds of marijuana, four ounces of heroin and some methamphetamines."

Here's a November 2012 press release from the Oregon State Police:

Investigations conducted during the last 30 days by the interagency Rogue Area Drug Enforcement (RADE) team shows the team was inundated with a variety of cases, the majority involving marijuana. Due to the nature of the investigations and the cultural closeness of those involved in the unlawful manufacture and distribution of marijuana in Josephine County, RADE is now able to provide some information for these case investigations including the most recent investigation that led to three arrests Tuesday and the seizure of over 250 pounds of marijuana.

Oregon State Police (OSP) Sergeant Jim Johnson said RADE opened seventeen cases during this time for which 26 people were either arrested or have charges pending. Because a number of the cases are submitted to the Josephine County District Attorney's Office for potential charges toward additional suspects, not all of the mentioned cases list names of persons related to the investigations.

According to Johnson, the majority of the cases involved individuals associated with the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program (OMMP) and focused on growing or possessing significantly more marijuana than allowed under the program.

I also found this revealing quote from Sheriff Gilbertson in a Mail Tribune article about how Oregon's medical marijuana law was turning the plant into a cash crop in places like Josephine County.

"Medical marijuana is a joke," said Josephine County Sheriff Gil Gilbertson in an interview with the Mail Tribune. "The amount of people who have those cards is ludicrous. My understanding is that only about four percent of the cardholders have legitimate ailments.

"This is creating a nightmare for law enforcement," he added. "Who is going to knock on all those doors to check if they are legal? It would take several full-time deputies just to do the checks. We don't have the resources for that."

His department frequently receives calls from people alleging that individual medical marijuana growers have too many plants, he said.

"When that happens, we have to take a deputy off another case to check it out," he said. "It's time-consuming."

That quote is from 2010, presumably before the cuts to Sheriff Gilbertson's department. But all of the other stories ran after the rape in August of last year. It's also true that multi-jurisdictional anti-drug task forces are usually funded with federal grants. Gilbertson couldn't redirect the task force to more conventional police duties if he wanted to. They don't report to him. But they're also staffed and at least partially funded by local law enforcement agencies like Gilbertson's, and there's no obligation to participate. (As a point of fact, according to the R.A.D.E. Interagency Narcotics Team website, the Josephine County Sheriff's Office is not a current participant in the program, although it has been in the past. The police department in Grants Pass, the county seat of Josephine County, is a participant.). Moreover, while there's abundant federal funding for anti-drug efforts, there's little to none for more conventional policing. That and policies like drug-related asset forfeiture skew local police agencies to make drug investigations a far higher priority than they otherwise would. There's just much more money to be had for drug arrests.

The story reminds me of Jessica Shaver, whom I wrote about in 2011. When Shaver was assaulted outside a bar, she was forced to track down her assailant herself because no one at Chicago PD seemed interested in investigating the crime. But when a neighbor later reported some pot smoke coming from her apartment, Shaver was hit with a full-on SWAT assault.

The problem here isn't that there are no resources available for law enforcement officers to respond to 911 calls in Josephine County. It's that federal, state, and local officials have decided that preventing Josephine County residents from getting high is more important than preventing them from getting raped.

MORE: The partisan political reactions to this story are typically awful. Wonkette's Rebecca Schoenkopf mockingly calls Josephine County a "libertarian paradise," and chides the dumb rubes for rejecting property tax increases that would (allegedly) fund police officers to respond to 911 calls. (More likely: It would fund more drug raids.) The post then takes the obligatory shots at people who favor local government over national government. You can find similar reactions at ThinkProgress and The Stranger.

Here's the thing. Maybe part of the reason Josephine County is facing budget woes is because more than half the land in the county is owned by the federal government. The federal government doesn't pay property taxes. And property taxes are primarily how local government is funded. Perhaps, just perhaps, the county's residents reject the idea that their federal tax dollars are going toward buying up local land that is sapping the county's tax base, and they resent the notion that if they then want basic services -- like police protection -- they are then asked to make up the difference through higher property taxes. And perhaps -- just perhaps -- they also resent the federal government because while county residents can't get the local cops to respond to a woman being raped, the federal government is imposing its will on the state by funding task forces to raid medical marijuana facilities in a state where voters have expressed a clear will to legalize the drug for medicinal purposes.

But that would require an analysis of this story that involves some nuance, extra reading, and empathy. Better to just make Ayn Rand jokes and mock the dumb, low-income bumpkins for mistrusting the government.

Some Late-Morning Links: Ft. Worth Police Kill Two In Two Days, Beaver Attack, SWAT Team Raids Sex Show

2013-05-29T11:06:06-04:00

-- A three-mile stretch of road in D.C. has yielded $28 million in red light and speed cameras since 2011. I can personally vouch for the fact that on one part of this route, there's a traffic merge for which it would actually be more dangerous to drive the speed limit.

-- It's funny how quickly a dogged, determined reporter can morph into a "partisan attack dog" if one happens to look fondly on the politicians she's investigating.

-- In Ft. Worth, two police killings in a matter of days. In the first story, an unarmed asthmatic man died after getting Tasered during a drug raid. In the other story, a man was killed by police responding to a neighbor's burglar alarm when he himself walked out of his house to investigate. He was armed, but he was also on his own property.

-- The beavers are coming.

-- Atheists have now donated over $100,000 to Oklahoma tornado victim Rebecca Vitsmun and her family. (Disclosure, a friend of mine started this campaign. I also donated.)

-- Justice Scalia continues to take the stick-your-fingers-in-your-ears approach to the fact that there are innocent people in America's prisons.

-- Utah town sends a SWAT team to break up a sex show. Sure. Sounds like a perfectly proportional response.

When Congress Voted Down The Fourth Amendment

2013-05-24T11:36:49-04:00

Earlier this month, President Obama nominated North Carolina Rep. Mel Watt to head up the Federal Housing Finance Authority. Here's a fun little nugget about Watt that has little relevance to the job he's seeking, but has lots of relevance to the current debates over leaks, press investigations, wiretapping, and such:

Back in early 1995, the new Republican majority set out on its "limited government" agenda with a bill to chip away at the Exclusionary Rule, the policy that says evidence found in the course of an illegal search can't be used against the suspect at trial. (Though there are some exceptions.) During the debate, Watt introduced the following amendment to the bill:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That of course is the exact language of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The House killed Watt's amendment by nearly a 3-1 margin.

There have been a number of public opinion polls over the years showing majorities of American opposed to the Bill of Rights when they aren't told the language they're being polled about is actually from the Bill of Rights. Probably the most famous example came in an April 1969 segment of 60 Minutes focusing on a poll commissioned by the show which asked respondents questions like should the government be able to ban peaceful demonstrations?, and should the government be allowed to censor news stories?, and should the government be able to try someone again after they've been acquitted were already prohibited by the Constitution?. In each case, a majority sided in opposition to the Bill of Rights.

Ten years later, a Gallup poll found that 80 percent of Americans couldn't identify the freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and nearly 40 percent thought the press had too much freedom.

During the height of the drug war, a September 1989 poll by the Washington Post and ABC News found that 62 percent of Americans said 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." Another poll showed 70 percent support for warrantless drug raids on public housing tenants, a policy later adopted by the Clinton administration before it was shot down in federal court. Other polls taken in the late 1980s and early 1990s showed majority support of government-mandated drug testing for a wide variety of professions, including hotel employees, lawyers, professional athletes, and entertainers. A 2002 Gallup poll found 7 in 10 Americans thought public schools should be permitted to randomly drug test all students.

In 1991, the American Bar Association commissioned a poll that found that only "one-third of adult Americans can correctly identify the Bill of Rights and fewer than 1 in 10 know it was adopted to protect them against abuses by the Federal Government." That was about the time that the right was making a big to-do about the Supreme Court decision holding that laws against desecration of the American flag were unconstitutional. Polls taken from the era consistently found that Americans opposed the ruling by about a 3-1 margin. Amusingly -- or perhaps horrifyingly -- while these polls consistently show that startlingly high percentages of Americans oppose basic civil rights protections from government abuse, this particular poll found that 3 and 4 respondents thought the Constitution should guarantee everyone free health care.

Most recently, a HuffPost poll taken just last month found that a third of Americans -- and 55 percent of Republicans -- support making Christianity the official state religion. Oddly, at the same time, six in 10 Republicans also concede that doing so would be unconstitutional.

All of which is a good reminder of why we have a core set of basic rights that we don't put up for a vote. (Hell, you might even call them inalienable!) It's worth remembering the next time you hear a politician cite public opinion polls in defense of some new law that will give the government more power, and the rest of us less freedom. As the old saying goes, democracy is three wolves and two lambs deciding what's for dinner.

Raid Of The Day: Lewis Cauthorne

2013-05-23T10:39:51-04:00

Morning Links: Narc Cop Costs NYC $1 Million In Lawsuits; The .05 Debate; A Congressional Fourth Amendment Alliance

2013-05-23T09:28:49-04:00

-- Great new Colorado law requires all police agencies in the state to give officers dog training.

-- Fun photography theme recreates childhood photos years later.

-- When did we start throwing spears?

-- One narcotics lieutenant and his team have cost New York City more than $1.5 million in lawsuits and settlements. Naturally, he's been promoted.

-- One man's quest to create an early-20th century "Internet."

-- An unusual alliance emerges in Congress to shore up the Fourth Amendment.

-- Steve Chapman on the nonsense proposal to lower the national BAC limit to .05.

-- It's time to talk about our irrational child pornography laws.