[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Sign-in] [Mail] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
|
Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: Pursuing drugs and guns on scant evidence, D.C. police sometimes raid wrong homes — terrifying the innocent Sallie Taylor was sitting in her apartment in Northeast Washington one evening in January 2015 watching “Bible Talk” when her clock fell off the wall and broke. She turned and looked up. Nine D.C. police officers smashed through her door, a shotgun was pointed at her face and she was ordered to the floor. “They came in like Rambo,” said Taylor, a soft-spoken 63-year-old grandmother who was dressed in a white nightgown and said she has never had even a speeding ticket. The heavily armed squad thought they were searching the residence of a woman arrested two miles away the previous night for carrying a half-ounce vial of PCP. Taylor, who did not know the woman, was terrified. Trembling, she told police that the woman did not live there. Officers spent 30 minutes searching the house anyway, going through her boxes and her underwear drawer. They found no drugs and left without making an arrest. Above: “They came in like Rambo,” Sallie Taylor, 63, recalls of the night in January 2015 when nine D.C. police officers broke through the door of her Northeast Washington apartment to search for drugs. Taylor found herself facing a shotgun. Police thought they were searching the home of a woman arrested on a drug charge the previous night, but Taylor did not know the woman. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) The search warrant executed at Taylor’s apartment cited no evidence of criminal activity there. Instead, in an affidavit to a judge, police argued that they should be able to search for drugs there based on their “training and experience” investigating the drug trade. They relied on an address they found in a court- records system for the woman arrested with PCP. A Washington Post review of 2,000 warrants served by D.C. police between January 2013 and January 2015 found that 284 — about 14 percent — shared the characteristics of the one executed at Taylor’s apartment. In every case, after arresting someone on the street for possession of drugs or a weapon, police invoked their training and experience to justify a search of a residence without observing criminal activity there. The language of the warrants gave officers broad leeway to search for drugs and guns in areas saturated by them and to seize phones, computers and personal records. In about 60 percent of the 284 cases, police executing the warrants found illegal items, ranging from drug paraphernalia to guns, The Post found. The amounts of drugs recovered were usually small, ranging from residue to marijuana cigarettes to rocks of cocaine. About 40 percent of the time — in 115 cases — police left empty-handed. In a dozen instances, The Post found, officers acted on incorrect or outdated address information, subjecting such people as Taylor to the fright of their lives. Almost all of the 284 raids occurred in black communities. In 276 warrants in which The Post could determine a suspect’s race, just three originated with arrests of white suspects. The remaining 99 percent involved black suspects. In the District, 94 percent of people arrested in 2013 for gun or drug charges were black, according to FBI crime data. The 284 warrants reviewed by The Post differ from the usual pattern of police warrants. D.C. police have said at public hearings that the typical raid happens only after undercover officers or confidential informants have purchased drugs or guns from inside a home or police have conducted surveillance there. The searches are occurring at a time when public attention is highly focused on interactions between police and blacks nationwide, with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and concern about the aftereffects of the drug war. In Maryland this month, lawmakers proposed legislation that would require police to reimburse residents for damage to their property when police execute a warrant and find nothing. In Philadelphia, police were criticized in October by the executive director of the city’s citizen review board for harsh treatment of residents during raids. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects citizens from “unreasonable searches,” generally requiring government agents to obtain a warrant from a judge by showing they have probable cause to think that they will find a specific item at a specific location. In recent decades, police have been given wide latitude by the courts to conduct searches aimed at removing drugs and guns from the streets. D.C. police officers return to their cars after searching for the source of a marijuana odor on Clay Terrace in Northeast Washington in April 2015. Some search warrants have been issued even when no criminal activity at the targeted location has been witnessed. (Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post) Attorney Alec Karakatsanis, of the nonprofit group D.C.-based Equal Justice Under Law, said warrants that rely on training and experience as justification for a search subject the black community to abusive police intrusion based on flimsy investigative work. In the past two years, he has filed seven civil rights lawsuits in federal court challenging D.C. police’s practice of seeking search warrants based solely on an officer’s training and experience. “They have turned any arrest anywhere in the city into an automatic search of a home, and that simply cannot be,” said Karakatsanis, who spent three years studying the issue, starting when he worked at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. “It would work a fundamental change in the balance of power in our society between government agents and individual rights.” D.C. police, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the D.C. Attorney General’s Office defend the use of warrants based on police training and experience. In a written statement to The Post, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier did not distinguish between warrants based primarily on training and experience and those based on more-extensive investigation. She said that all of the warrants the department executed last year were constitutionally sound and that each warrant was reviewed by a police lieutenant as well as prosecutors and ultimately approved by a judge. “In the vast majority of those warrants, contraband and evidence was recovered in furtherance of criminal prosecutions, and gave MPD [the Metropolitan Police Department] the ability to bring closure to multiple victims of crimes in our city,” she said. “During that same time frame, MPD received very few complaints regarding the execution of those warrants.” Lanier said residents who are dissatisfied with police should speak with a supervisor at the department or the Office of Police Complaints. “We remain committed to unbiased constitutional policing,” she said. The U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a written statement that its prosecutors carefully review thousands of warrants each year to determine whether they meet the standards for probable cause. “Probable cause merely requires that the facts and circumstances available to the officer provide the basis for a reasonable person to conclude that evidence of a crime exists at a location,” the statement said. “Although no system is perfect, the law and the multiple layers of review provide safeguards to minimize the potential for errors.” Lee F. Satterfield, chief judge of the D.C. Superior Court, declined to comment, citing pending cases. Karakatsanis studied a year of warrants in which police searched for drugs based on training and experience and found that they recovered drugs one-third of the time. In response to Karakatsanis, then-D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan argued in 2014, “While Plaintiffs treat this success rate with contempt, finding drugs in one-third of similar police searches is strong evidence of probable cause.” Nathan also pointed out that the Supreme Court has held that probable cause cannot be reduced to a “precise definition or quantification.” In January, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg allowed the first of Karakatsanis’s cases to go forward, saying that “a talismanic invocation” of “training and experience” does not automatically satisfy constitutional requirements. The raids for which police do more investigative work appear to bring better results, The Post found. In February 2015, police searched a house in Southeast and seized an AK-47 assault rifle, two semiautomatic handguns and 100 grams of marijuana. In April 2014, police in Northwest found 25 grams of heroin, 330 grams of marijuana, a revolver and an assortment of ammunition. They also found $60,000 in cash. Perhaps the most successful raid among the 284 identified by The Post occurred after police made a traffic stop and found a revolver and four hollow-point bullets in the glove box. A search of the suspect’s house turned up two shotguns, a semiautomatic handgun and an assortment of ammunition. The suspect received a 10-month suspended sentence for firearm charges and served no time in jail. Most of the time, police find much less. Police told a judge that their training and experience investigating drug cases led them to think that they would find evidence of a PCP-trafficking operation when they raided the house of Margaret Brown in April 2014. Brown’s son had overdosed on PCP at a building across the street from her apartment in Northwest Washington. A vial containing a small amount of the drug, an eighth of an ounce, was found in his clothes. Police arrested him for possession of PCP, a felony, and he was later sentenced to four months in jail. The evening after his arrest, police in body armor burst through Brown’s front door. “They slammed me to the ground,” said Brown, 47, who had just returned home from her job in billing at a hospital and has never been convicted of a crime. “They were fully armed — guns pointed in my face like there was a major drug deal going down.” Brown said she sat handcuffed while police went through her belongings, knocking over furniture and even opening an urn containing her mother’s cremated remains. The search turned up a partially burnt marijuana cigarette. Brown told police that it belonged to her son, who she said has a marijuana card allowing him to legally possess the drug for medical reasons. They arrested her for misdemeanor possession, and she spent five hours in jail. Eight weeks later, prosecutors dropped the charge against her. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Ada (#0)
When you live in a dictatorship, which for all practical purposes the USA is, there is no such things as justice because the almost always corrupt judges and police will routinely violate your so called rights. And, when the police find so called evidence, as likely as not, they planted it.
|
||
|
[Home]
[Headlines]
[Latest Articles]
[Latest Comments]
[Post]
[Sign-in]
[Mail]
[Setup]
[Help]
[Register]
|
||