Rise of the Warrior Cop (49 page)

In 2003 Police Chief Raymond Kelly estimated that at least 10 percent of the city’s more than 450 monthly no-knock drug raids were served on the wrong address, were served under bad information, or otherwise didn’t produce enough evidence for an arrest. Incredibly, Kelly made that estimate in
defense
of the way the NYPD was handling these raids. Some forty-five times per month, innocent New Yorkers were getting raided, terrorized, sometimes injured, and nearly killed. (Police officials would argue that in a significant percentage of cases where a raid came up empty the suspects weren’t actually innocent; they were just successful at moving their stash before police could serve the warrant.) And the city’s police chief found that figure acceptable. It was just more collateral damage. Kelly also admitted that the NYPD didn’t keep track of botched raids, leading one city council member to speculate that the percentage could be even higher.

So what about the city’s judges, the public servants charged with protecting the Fourth Amendment?
Newsday
found that many courts in the city didn’t even keep no-knock warrants on file after they were issued and executed. That is, not only did the courts not notice or care about what was happening, but they made it impossible for anyone
else to investigate possible patterns of abuse. The paper reported that Judge Juanita Bing Newton, who oversaw all the city’s criminal courts at the time, said “she doesn’t necessarily believe the court’s role in record-keeping is as a ‘Big Brother,’ to check the police and district attorney,” a statement that not only showed an astonishing lack of concern for the rights of New Yorkers, but suggests that Newton didn’t actually know the origin of the phrase “Big Brother.”

After Spruill’s death, New York State Supreme Court judge Brenda Soloff refused to unseal the affidavit and search warrant authorizing the raid—there was “no significant need,” she found. Apparently the death of an innocent fifty-seven-year-old woman and the city government’s regular terrorization of its citizens weren’t “significant” concerns. In favor of keeping the documents sealed, Soloff cited concern for the safety of the confidential informant—the same informant who had given nothing but bad information in the past, and whose tip was the reason an innocent woman was dead. (The concern wasn’t valid anyway—the documents could have been released with the informant’s identity redacted.)

A day after the New York City Council held hearings on no-knock raids in response to Spruill’s death, Manhattan borough president Virginia Fields held hearings of her own. According to the
Village Voice:

Dozens of black and Latino victims—nurses, secretaries, and former officers—packed her chambers airing tales, one more horrifying than the next. Most were unable to hold back tears as they described police ransacking their homes, handcuffing children and grandparents, putting guns to their heads, and being verbally (and often physically) abusive. In many cases, victims had received no follow-up from the NYPD, even to fix busted doors or other physical damage.

Some complainants reported that they had filed grievances with the [Civilian Complaint Review Board] and were told there was no police misconduct. Unless there is proven abuse, the CCRB disregards complaints about warrants that hold a correct address but are faulty because of bad evidence from a [confidential informant].
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Perhaps no one was more victimized by the battlefield mentality that had set in at the NYPD than Walter and Rose Martin. The Brooklyn couple, both in their eighties, were wrongly raided
more than fifty times
between 2002 and 2010. The couple filed numerous complaints with the police department. They wrote letters to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly. They were ignored. In 2007 they at least got someone at the NYPD to try to wipe their address out of the department’s computer system. But the raids continued. It wasn’t until the couple went to the media in 2010 that the city finally looked into the problem. Back in 2002, someone had used the Martins’ address as a dummy address to test the department’s new computer system. When the new system was implemented, no one removed their address. So anytime NYPD cops in certain precincts used the system for a warrant and forgot to remove the dummy address to put in the correct one, the police would end up at the Martins’ door.

At least that was the official explanation. But the
New York Daily News
tracked down the previous owner of the house, who said he too had been frequently visited by cops, going back to 1994. It seems safe to say that NYPD cops weren’t repeatedly terrorizing an elderly couple deliberately. But the Martins’ inability to stop the raids until they went to the media is more evidence that even after the Spruill incident, the department just wasn’t all that concerned about mistaken raids and the rights of New Yorkers.

“They should have listened to us all those years when we tried to tell them something was happening,” Rose Martin told the
Daily News
. That was certainly true in her case. It was also true of the dozens, probably hundreds, of complaints from victims going back to the early 1990s.
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Despite public outcry, intense media coverage, and promises for reform by public officials, change after Alberta Spruill’s death was slow and sparse. The key recommendation from the Fields report was that the NYPD produce an annual report detailing “all statistics regarding the execution of warrants.” Fields believed that such a report would provide some transparency and accountability in the issuance
and execution of drug warrants, particularly those authorizing no-knock raids. The NYPD issued no such report in 2005.

There were a few positive developments. The city did implement some procedures that increased the amount of time it takes to obtain a drug raid warrant from two to twenty-four hours. Consequently, the total number of drug raids did drop, from 5,117 in 2002 to 3,577 in 2003. That decrease isn’t insignificant, but the post-reform figure in 2003 was still 250 percent higher than the number of annual raids just ten years earlier. Judges and police were also required to attend training workshops on proper drug investigation techniques and the issuance of narcotics warrants. The city also restricted the use of flash-bang grenades, and finally prohibited them completely in 2010.

It would be hard to come up with a more sympathetic drug raid victim than Alberta Spruill. But even after her death, after the revelation of dozens of similar botched raids, after intense media exposure in the country’s largest city, and after promises for substantive reforms to prevent similar incidents from happening again, it wasn’t long before drug policing in the city returned to business as usual—and the mistaken raids started up again.
³⁶
By 2006, the number of citizen complaints about residential search warrant raids had swelled to 1,065, a 49 percent jump over 2002, the year
before
the Spruill raid.
³⁷
If it couldn’t happen in New York City after this incident, real reform would be a long, tough slog, if it was possible at all.
³⁸

J
UST BEFORE THE FEDERAL ASSAULT WEAPONS BAN WAS SET
to expire in 2004, the National Institute for Justice released a study looking at the use of assault weapons in violent crimes. Drawing on crime data from several American cities, the report found that assault weapons were “rarely used in gun crimes, even before the ban” was put in place. Moreover, because assault weapons are so rarely used by criminals, NIJ found that, “should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence were likely small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.” The report also found that the use of such high-powered weaponry to kill police officers was “very rare.”
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The NIJ study was used by gun rights groups to argue against renewing the assault weapons ban. But it was also a strong piece of evidence undercutting the common argument from law enforcement officials that SWAT teams and military gear were essential because the police were in a nonstop arms race with drug dealers and other criminals—call it the North Hollywood Shoot-out Argument.

And in fact, the 2004 NIJ study was only the most recent to cut against that argument. In 1995 the Justice Department had released a study showing that 86 percent of violent gun crimes in the United States involved a handgun. The most popular weapon used in homicides at the time wasn’t an automatic weapon but a large-caliber revolver. Just 3 percent of murders in 1993 were committed with rifles, and just 5 percent with shotguns.
⁴⁰
A 1997
Palm Beach Post
investigation of area SWAT raids found that of 309 recent arrests made by the twelve SWAT teams in Palm Beach County, Florida, only 60—or 19 percent—produced weapons of
any
kind.
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A five-year investigation in Orange County, Florida, in the mid-1990s likewise found that just 13 percent of SWAT raids turned up weapons.
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In 2007 I asked David Doddridge, a retired narcotics cop and LAPD veteran, about the argument that SWAT tactics are necessary because drug dealers are increasingly well armed. “It just isn’t true,” he said. “In twenty-one years at LAPD, I never once saw any assault weapons on a drug raid. Drug dealers prefer handguns, which are easier to conceal. Occasionally you’ll find a shotgun. But having a bunch of high-powered weaponry around is just too much trouble for them. It’s too much for them to worry about.”
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Doddridge’s experience isn’t universal, but it is common among drug cops I’ve talked to. There do seem to be more higher-powered arms around the border, and obviously cops who investigate the sale and smuggling of illegal guns will tend to find a greater quantity of more powerful weapons in the course of their work.

But even when the crime rate was peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was little evidence that murderers were using high-powered weapons. In a 1991 paper for the Independence Institute
(a libertarian think tank), researchers David Kopel and Eric Morgan ran a survey of dozens of American cities and found that, in general, fewer than 1 percent of the weapons seized by police fit the definition of an “assault weapon.” Nationally, they found that fewer than 4 percent of homicides involved rifles of any kind. And fewer than one-eighth of 1 percent of homicides involved weapons of military caliber. Even fewer homicides involved weapons commonly called “assault” weapons. The proportion of police fatalities caused by assault weapons was around 3 percent, a number that remained relatively constant throughout the 1980s.

Kopel and Morgan also interviewed police firearms examiners. In Dade County, Florida—where
Miami Vice
had propagated the image of machine gun–toting drug dealers spraying bullets all over the city—Kopel and Morgan found that the use of assault weapons in shootings and homicides in the city actually
declined
throughout the decade. A police lieutenant in Washington, DC—the most violent city in the country at the time—told the authors that the preferred weapon of criminals in the nation’s capital was the pistol.
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But more generally, the argument that well-armed criminals have made cops’ jobs more dangerous than ever just isn’t backed up by the data. The job of police officer has been getting progressively safer for a generation. The number of officer fatalities peaked in 1974 and has been steadily dropping since. In fact, 2012 was the safest year for police officers since the 1950s. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, the homicide rate for police officers in 2010 (the last year for which data is available) was about 7.9 per 100,000 officers. That’s about 60 percent higher than the overall homicide rate in America, which is 4.8. But it’s lower than the homicide rates in many large cities, including Atlanta (17.3), Boston (11.3), Dallas (11.3), Kansas City (21.1), Nashville (8.9), Pittsburgh (17.3), St. Louis (40.5), and Tulsa (13.7). In fact, of the seventy-four US cities with populations of 250,000 or more, thirty-six have murder rates higher than that of police in America. You’re more likely to be murdered just by living in these cities than the average American police officer is to be murdered on the job.

Proponents of police militarization will argue that these figures show that militarization is working—it’s making cops safer. It’s a convenient way to frame the debate. If police fatalities go up, it’s an indication that criminals are getting more dangerous and cops need more firepower. If police fatalities go down, it means militarization is working. But it’s far from clear that bigger guns and more aggressive tactics are responsible for the drop. For example, assaults on police officers have also been dropping, a statistic that isn’t explained by cops in SWAT gear performing more drug raids. The most likely explanation is that killings of police officers have declined for the same reasons the overall crime rate has dropped over roughly the same period. (Criminologists are still fighting over what those reasons are.)