I am struck by two simultaneous episodes of terrible policing right here in Massachusetts this week.
The first is the Home invasion by a SWAT team attacking an innocent Hispanic couple in Worcester (emphasis mine):
A woman said police and a SWAT team mistakenly raided her Worcester apartment and that she was frisked by an officer before being allowed to put clothes on.
Marianne Diaz told the Telegram & Gazette she awoke to state police detectives and a SWAT team breaking down her door on Wednesday morning.
The 23-year-old Diaz said she knelt with her frightened daughters beside her as police officers with shields pointed guns in her direction.
“Stop (expletive) crying and take care of your (expletive) kids,” she claimed one officer told her.
She said a female officer later frisked her even though she was naked. Ten minutes passed before she was allowed to cover herself up, she added.
Diaz’s fiance, Bryant Alequin, said he suffered a minor back injury during the raid. Their roommate, Joshua Matos, said doctors told him his wrist — which had been recovering from a fracture — was refractured.
Once again an innocent Hispanic woman is abused, children are terrorized, and her Hispanic fiance was injured. Once again a District Attorney (Joseph Early) defends the actions of these uniformed thugs.
Meanwhile, a drunken white racist harrassed and assaulted minority (Black, Asian, and Indian) passengers on a Red Line train Friday night. Fortunately, the episode was videotaped by another passenger.
When the woman who videotaped the incident reported the assault to MBTA police — complete with this raw video — the MBTA police nevertheless allowed the white perpetrator to walk away. Once again, a white male perpetrator terrorizes and assaults minority passengers and is allowed to walk away unimpeded by uniformed and heavily-armed police. I’m reminded of the similarly lackadaisical response of MBTA police to the Red Line car operating at full speed with an open door. Why are there so many MBTA police, so heavily armed, when they have so little concern for actual emergencies?
I’m glad that at least MBTA Lt. Richard Sullivan agrees that “Conduct and behavior such as [this] will not be tolerated on the MBTA” — at least when on-camera and on the record for local journalists. I’m glad that Mr. Sullivan promises to “talk to all parties involve (sic), to include the police officers.” I can’t help but wonder what, if any, disciplinary proceedings “talk to” includes.
Some of us want to believe that we here in Massachusetts are immune from the transformation of America into a police state, where state-sponsored uniformed and heavily-armed thugs harass, abuse, and injure innocent victims with impunity while ignoring clear evidence of crimes committed by favored demographic groups.
We are NOT immune.
I voted for Maura Healey as Attorney General. I take her at her word regarding police abuses like this. I await with interest her response to these two examples of terrible police work by state agencies within her jurisdiction.
is common, but it’s also been abetted by lawmakers and the judicial system. Lawmakers wrote laws to allow this stuff based on decisions made by the Supreme Court. Judges and magistrates often sign off on warrants for these raids without very much scrutiny. A half-assed tip from a confidential informant is enough for a warrant to knock down a door unannounced.
The no-knock raid, as opposed to an announced raid, started with the Nixon Administration. Police, it should be said, were not asking for it, but the Nixon Administration pushed for it. Right from the beginning, their were problems with unintended deaths based on bad information. They discontinued the practice in the 1970s, only to have it picked up by the Reagan Administration. Joe Biden actually wrote the legislation in 1980. The excuse/reason for no knock raids were the rise of SWAT teams, which the Feds financed, and the “war” on drugs.
But it’s not just law enforcement. The judicial system has abetted the no-knock raid. Ker v. California had degraded 4th amendment protections by extending the exigent circumstances exception to the possibility that by announcing themselves suspects would be able to destroy evidence (1963). Legislation would follow. Rockefeller’s drug laws included no-knock raids and stop-and-frisk. Wikipedia cites research that “The number of no-knock raids has increased from 3,000 in 1981 to more than 50,000 in 2005, according to Peter Kraska, a criminologist at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond.”
The “mistake” in Worcester, is unfortunately a good outcome. Many innocent people have been killed. Last year, police threw a grenade in a baby’s crib during a no-knock raid.
and wreck the place looking for the stuff on their warrant, the homeowner is out of luck. The city and cops owe nothing for damage they’ve done, according to the Supreme Court.
…and only used in cases of imminent danger like a hostage situation. Even if the cops were correct about the address and found the drugs they were looking for, that is not a reason to go in guns blazing.
This is true. Because SWAT should be a last resort, I suggest that we should also demand much more rigorous validation that the targeted address is correct.
Part of what makes the Worcester invasion so egregious is that the police had already arrested the targeted suspect at a different address earlier the same month. The address invaded by the SWAT team was an OLD address for the suspect, and the police already knew that the suspect had moved to a new address.
THIS home invasion should never have taken place at all, no matter how restrained the SWAT team was.
According to Mark Bail and kirth-these victims (and yes that’s what they are) have no recourse to sue the local police department? They should at least be entitled to some compensation for property damage, not to mention all the emotional tolls. And that compensation should come out of the cops operating budget rather than the city’s. They fucked up, they should be responsible for clean up.
I doubt they’ll see a dime for the emotional damage that was caused.
Empty home destroyed in 4-hour SWAT siege, innocent woman left with $100,000 in damages
I don’t know otherwise. It can be hard to sue governments (and large businesses).
and contradicts the fundamental principles of all constitutional republics.
This abuse of power must not be tolerated.
I call on Atorney General Healy to investigate to ensure justice is done.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
HERE. Potty mouth arrested for saying F the cops as he walks by and is followed arrested and choked by cops that appear to be hanging out trying to incite a problem.
Granted potty mouth is not as sympathetic, but only thugs need to retaliate when disrespected.
This abuse by uniformed thugs must stop.
When will the officials like Attorney General Maura Healey — whom we elect to protect us — do so?
First they came for the Blacks. Then they came for the Hispanics. Then they came for the videotapers. Then they came for the loud-mouthed.
How long before they come for you and me?
Haven’t they already come for you?
(I keed, I keed)
Even I am unlikely to match the protagonist of the video in the sue-kennedy clip. As rowdy as the subjects of that clip are, none of them should have been handled the way they were by police.
tricky. Ultimately, this needs to be fixed by statute, rather than by case law as it currently is.
This house in Greenwood Village, Colorado was destroyed by a SWAT team that chased a shoplifter into it. The owner of the house was not home
SWAT was pushed by the Fed’s, which were given grants and equipment for military-type stuff for the “drug war.” There were huge incentives for police forces to form SWAT teams and also work with federal agencies and the National Guard to prosecute the “drug war.”
I suppose the Massachusetts judiciary could be more diligent when they grant warrants. There is a fair amount of informants giving police false addresses or dated information that leads to some bad no-knocks. I don’t know how many of these they have to process, but the judges might be easier to work with than the legislators.
The police are a powerful voting block. Politicians run a huge risk of being accused of soft on crime. It would be most unpleasant to start the ball rolling on that. I suppose it’s also good that libertarians are as concerned about these developments as civil libertarians. Waco and Ruby Ridge are examples of the same tendencies, just at the federal level.
Images like this are not yet widely circulated. I’m not sure what the best approach is, probably changes in both statute and case law.
I guess that if the answer to an attempt at curbing abuses like these is “you’re soft on crime”, it supports my argument that we have become a police state.
There is a world of difference between the victims of the Worcester home invasion — Marianne Diaz, her terrified children, Bryant Alequin — and the residents of Waco or Ruby Ridge. I reject any attempt to conflate them.
We are talking about a state-sponsored gang of uniformed heavily-armed thugs who terrorized a completely innocent woman, her children, and her fiance. That should NEVER happen in this state, and when it does it should be a career-limiting or career-ending “mistake” for all parties involved.
How did we get to the point where upholding the Bill of Rights is politically risky given that we may not have had a Constitution without promises to add such protections?
Why is there so much reluctance to trust government to promote the general welfare, but people seem to be OK with government playing fast and loose with persons and property?
with the government playing fast and loose. We’re just waking up to the rightward shift our country has taken over the last 30 or 40 years.
Drugs provided the excuse, and conservatism (on both the right and left) did the rest. Tough on crime. The judiciary made some decisions that eroded the protections of the Bill of Rights.
I’ve been reluctant to loosen those laws, at least compared to some here, and I want to especially throw the book at the pushers and the cartels, but I also believe that such people do and should have constitutional rights. Those two concepts don’t strike me as mutually exclusive. Protecting the guilty in these regards is sine qua non for ultimately protecting the innocent.
which you’re aware of, allowed a serious amount of demagoguing and spending on law enforcement. Drugs were the excuse.
You don’t fight a war without war-like weapons. You don’t fight an opposing army in a war with pistols. You get military training and weapons, i.e. SWAT and military equipment. It starts in the cities, but the Feds are giving the stuff away with grants. So everyone is applying for them. West Springfield, a very small city, ended up with grenade launchers at one point. This the the rationale.
There is a presumption of guilt in no-knock raids. They get a warrant, but the underlying assumption is that suspects will dispose of evidence if they aren’t surprised by a SWAT team breaking down a door. (That’s case law).
If you believe in protecting the suspected, how about the seizure of property based on the presumption that drug money went into the purchase of it. It’s called asset forfeiture. You can read about it here http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/special/forfeiture.html
…I guess it never occurred to me that the war on drugs would be treated as an actual war. In my mind it was metaphorical like LBJ’s war on poverty or the war on women referred to in recent campaigns. Yes, I do believe that asset forfeiture should only be carried out with due process that includes determination of who knew what about the purchase.
Ruby Ridge was a no-knock raid. They killed a kid and a woman holding a baby shooting through instructions. The government paid damages, and charges were dropped. Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris were acquitted. The rules of engagement of the federal agencies were found unconstitutional and changed to match those followed by local law enforcement agencies. It was a military response. As FBI Deputy Assistant Director Danny Coulson wrote a memo:
Waco was more problematic because David Koresh was nuts and they had accumulated some serious firepower. The FBI’s actions, however, was problematic.
I agree that Ruby Ridge was wrong and an embarrassment. Still, Randy Weaver and his family were still “out there” in comparison to victims of most of today’s home invasions.
Marianne Diaz, her terrified children, and Bryant Alequin were not heavily armed, they are not survivalists, they rented a working-class apartment in a working-class neighborhood of Worcester.
In my view, we are in the grip of hysteria hyped by the right-wing — ironically, the same right wing that rallies to support survivalists like Mr. Weaver. I use the term “hysteria” quite intentionally, because it has been manufactured for decades now.
To me, “anti-drug” hysteria, “anti-terror” hysteria, “anti-gang” hysteria — all of them — are hyped out of all proportion and used to rationalize our transition into a police state. Yes, we need to manage our drug problems. Yes, we need to manage and discourage would-be terrorists. Yes, gangs are a serious issue in urban neighborhoods.
Still, the political game is to use these to fan the xenophobic fears of mostly-white voters for whom these are problems that mostly happen to somebody else on TV — in hysterical news coverage, in lurid police-TV episodes, and in podium-thumping campaign rhetoric.
I think the right wing is using its control of the mainstream media to greatly exaggerate the drug threat, the terrorist threat, the gang threat, and all the other “threats” in order to create the political climate that allows the right-wing to impose a police state.
I think we need to stop it.
Weaver was a nut, no doubt. But the underlying problem is the militarization of policing. It’s not just knocking down people’s doors. It’s a matter of weapons AND tactics. It’s a matter of treating citizens like enemy combatants. At Ruby Ridge, their rules of engagement were to shoot on sight. That’s a rule for war, not for law enforcement.
There’s little about drugs on television these days. That was more in the 1980s and maybe some in the 1990s. I watch a major amount of crime television. There are things on drugs obviously (Breaking Bad, Weeds), but drugs are not otherwise too much of a focus. Fictional stuff is mostly forensics, sex crimes, and, of course, murder. True crime is mostly murder and disappearances among the middle classes. COPS is sui generis, but mostly pulling cars over, chasing uncooperative cars, and domestic disputes. There are series on gangsters then and now. The drug war is, I think, better looked at as part of the conservative zeitgeist that started with Nixon. It has/had a lot to do with a reaction to the 1960s generation, and the association of drugs with “those people.”
If you are not allowed to use the military for domestic law enforcement it would stand to reason that at least in terms of the spirit of the law, you also should not arm and otherwise treat local police departments as if they were the military.
The law here is started with case law. Statutes followed. Radley Balko discusses these issues in depth in The Rise of the Warrior Cop. Balko comes from a libertarian background, but he’s a good reporter. Libertarians are concerned with 4th Amendment overstepping.