Rise of the Warrior Cop (15 page)

O
N
O
CTOBER
3, 1969,
SEVEN NARCOTICS AGENTS STORMED
apartments B and D at 8031 Comstock Avenue in Whittier, California, in a predawn, no-knock raid. Two officers were from the California State Bureau of Narcotics, four were from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and the last was Det. Sgt. Frank Sweeney, a police officer from the tiny nearby town of Vernon. In apartment B, fifty-year-old Florence Mehan was asleep with her twelve-year-old daughter Susan.

“I saw three men,” Mehan told the
Los Angeles Times
. “One of them grabbed me by the arm. I screamed and I ran out. I thought they were going to attack me.” Susan said, “They just grabbed Mommy and said they had a search warrant to look for marijuana.”

The officers had raided the wrong apartment. Their search warrant was for apartments B and D at 8033 Comstock Avenue. Those apartments were both on the second floor.

Mehan’s other daughter, Linda, who was twenty-three, lived on the second floor—though not in either of the targeted apartments—along with her husband, twenty-two-year-old Heyward Dyer and
their twenty-two-month-old son Francis. Heyward Dyer awoke to the screaming and commotion from the mistaken raid in his mother-in-law’s apartment, went downstairs to investigate, and was confronted by several police officer guns aimed in his direction.

The narcotics team eventually realized that they had raided the wrong apartment. They immediately left to raid apartments B and D on the second floor. In the meantime, Linda Dyer—seven months pregnant at the time—was also awakened by the noise. She went downstairs with Francis to check on her mother and sister. At some point she handed the baby to her husband.

As the police raided apartment B, Det. Sgt. Sweeney somehow mistakenly fired his .223-caliber rifle into the floor. The bullet ripped through the floor, then through the ceiling of the apartment below, where Heyward Dyer was standing, holding his son. The bullet pierced Dyer’s skull, killing him instantly. As his father fell, the infant Francis Dyer went crashing to the floor.

From press accounts, the police never made clear why a police officer from Vernon went along for a raid in Whittier, and why he was carrying a rifle when neither the California Bureau of Narcotics—which directed the raid—nor the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department allowed it. Police agencies were (and still are) also supposed to notify any agency with overlapping jurisdiction during such raids, in part because local departments—especially in small towns—tend to have local knowledge. One example would have been knowing that this apartment complex had an odd way of assigning addresses. No such notification ever happened. The police did arrest one man in apartment D for possession of “two red capsules” and “two white capsules” believed to be illegal narcotics, along with 150 marijuana seeds.

By 1969, California was one of twenty-five states that had a no-knock law. Of course, Los Angeles County was also where
Ker v. California
had originated, the case in which the US Supreme Court six years earlier had (mostly) given its stamp of approval to the “destroying evidence” exception to the knock-and-announce rule, and
William Brennan had warned of the consequences of such a dangerous precedent.

Though Nixon wouldn’t officially “declare war” on drugs until 1972, the modern drug war effectively began with his inauguration in 1969. It seems likely, then, that Heyward Dyer was the modern drug war’s first innocent fatality. There would be more. Many, many more.
⁷⁸

F
IVE YEARS OF UNREST AND INCREASINGLY MILITARIZED
police actions culminated with America’s very first SWAT raid in the final months of the 1960s. The December 1969 raid on the Los Angeles headquarters of the Black Panthers was also about as high-profile a debut for Daryl Gates’s pet project as he could possibly have imagined. Practically, logistically, and tactically, the raid was an utter disaster. But in terms of public relations, it was an enormous success.

The Black Panther Party hit its peak in 1969. Started in Oakland just three years earlier by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the activist group’s mix of Marxism, militance, and black nationalism quickly found a following in the counterculture. Panthers often espoused their revolutionary rhetoric and illustrated their “by any means necessary” motto by toting loaded rifles and handguns during public protests and demonstrations. It wasn’t just talk. In a little over three years, nine police officers and ten Panthers had died in police-Panther confrontations across the country. By 1969, the group was ten thousand strong and had become a bright, blinking flash point on the radar of police in every city in which it had established a presence. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had made the Black Panthers a top priority and, naturally, had publicly “declared war” on them.
⁷⁹

There are conflicting accounts of the events that led up to the Panther SWAT raid. According to Gates’s autobiography, sometime before the final confrontation, LAPD captain Ted Morton received a complaint from a woman about noise coming from a loudspeaker in
a building occupied by the Panthers. When Morton went in to investigate, he was greeted with several guns and warned to leave immediately. Morton returned to the police station and wrote up a report, and within a few days Gates and the LAPD brass began drawing up plans to raid the building on charges of assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon.
⁸⁰

Based on interviews with several Black Panthers who were in the building the morning of the raid, as well as with LAPD SWAT officer Patrick McKinley, journalist Matthew Fleischer offers a different narrative:

On November 28, 1969, more than 250 police officers surrounded the Los Angeles [Black Panther] headquarters during a community meeting, sealing the facility off in what Panthers now call the “test run.”

On December 4, Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, was shot to death at point-blank range while he was sleeping, during a raid by the Chicago Police Department. The incident drew international outrage. Back in LA, there wasn’t a Panther alive who didn’t think a similar raid by the LAPD was coming their way.

They were right. As it turns out, the night of the test run, police claimed to have seen three Panthers—Paul Redd, “Duck” Smith and Geronimo Pratt—in possession of illegal firearms. The LAPD secured an arrest warrant for the three, as well as a search warrant for the 41st and Central headquarters and two known Panther hideouts.
⁸¹

By all accounts, the raid began at about 5:30 AM on December 6, 1969. The Black Panther building was well armed and well fortified. Gates and his SWAT team had put together blueprints of the building from intelligence they had collected from informants. Unfortunately, the blueprints critically misplaced a massive pile of dirt that the Panthers had built while digging out escape tunnels. The police had the dirt pile off in a corner. It was actually directly behind
the back door, the same door through which the assault team was to make its surprise entry.
⁸²

When they tried to open the back door, the dirt pile prevented them from entering. They’d have to go through the front door. As they did, a helicopter swarmed overhead, and other officers began scaling the sides of the building. By plan, Gates’s SWAT team was supposed to have made entry and secured the inside of the building by this point. Instead, a Panther lookout on the roof screamed, “They’re here!” to his confederates inside. By the time the SWAT team breached the front door, the Panthers were ready and greeted them with a storm of bullets. Three officers went down.

Even worse, the SWAT team had entered an alcove with no escape except through the door they had just entered. Fortunately, the gunfire had started immediately, which let the officers know their cover had been blown. They dragged out their fallen colleagues and retreated. As Fleischer puts it, “If the Panthers had held their fire for a few moments more, the entire SWAT team would have made it into the alcove—and been shot to pieces.”
⁸³

Over the next three hours, LA police and the Black Panthers exchanged over five thousand rounds in a crowded city setting. The entire neighborhood was evacuated, and the surrounding streets were shut down just before the morning rush hour. Los Angeles police chief Ed Davis was in Mexico at the time, making Gates the acting chief. After a couple hours of gunfire, Gates and his SWAT officers came up with a new idea—they would use a grenade launcher on the building. Gates contacted the Marines at Camp Pendleton. He was told that, at the very least, he’d need permission from the Department of Defense. He’d probably also need it from the president. Gates writes in his book, “I called Mayor Sam Yorty next and asked if he would make the call to Washington. My words seemed unreal. Anytime you even
talk
about using military equipment in a civil action, it’s very serious business. You’re bridging an enormous gap.”
⁸⁴

Yorty agreed, and within an hour the Department of Defense gave Gates permission to use a grenade launcher on the Panthers building. It’s a remarkable anecdote, not because Gates sought permission
to use the weapon, or even because the Pentagon gave it to him. Given the circumstances, it may not even have been all that unreasonable a request. The story is remarkable because of the procedures, the caution, and the trepidation that went into procuring the grenade launcher. About twenty years later, the Pentagon would begin giving away millions of pieces of military equipment to police departments across the country
for everyday use
—including plenty of grenade launchers.

The accounts of the raid again differ about how it ended, but after hours of gunfire the Panthers finally waved a white flag to surrender. In the end, four Black Panthers and four LAPD officers were wounded. Somehow, no one was killed. Six Panthers were arrested, booked, charged, and jailed. If the objective of the SWAT team was to serve the warrants and make the arrests with no fatalities, then the raid was a success. But of course it was far from that. The SWAT officer McKinley summed up the raid to Fleischer. “Oh God, we were lucky. . . . I’m extremely proud of what we did that day. We got our targets and no one died. But oh God, were we lucky.”

Gates’s surprise tactics had one unexpectedly deleterious effect: they gave the Panthers a plausible argument of self-defense. The Panthers awoke to men with guns breaking down their door and firing bullets into the walls. Paramilitary police tactics were new at the time, and the mixed-race jury apparently found them pretty alarming. All six Panthers were acquitted of the most serious charges, including conspiracy to murder police officers. That again is a stark illustration of how much standards and expectations have changed since then. It’s nearly unthinkable that a self-defense claim under similar circumstances would be successful today. Indeed, several subjects of these sorts of raids have made that argument, and they almost always have failed.

Though it was only by sheer luck that the bumbling raid wasn’t a bloody disaster, and the tactics themselves ultimately contributed to acquittals of the very dangerous suspects the entire operation was designed to put in prison, the country’s maiden high-profile SWAT raid was also a massive, uncompromising show of force against an
organization that was widely feared and despised by politicians, law enforcement officials, and most Americans whose politics fell outside the far left. Activists and editorial boards raged, but the Black Panther raid was a public relations triumph. Within five years the Panthers would splinter, fizzle, and for the most part evaporate. SWAT would grow, spread to other cities, and become a pop culture phenomenon.

By the time Gates died in 2010, the institution he started had spread to nearly every city in the country, to most federal agencies, to most medium-sized towns, and even to small and tiny towns. The wisdom of limiting SWAT
assaults
to genuine emergencies was long gone. Across the country, the tactics Gates had conceived to stop snipers and rioters—people already committing violent crimes—had come to be used primarily to serve warrants on people suspected of nonviolent crimes.

The Numbers

Percentage of Americans who thought the Supreme Court was too soft on criminals in 1965: 48 percent