No Se Nada

You may have heard of the case in Atlanta last week of a woman in her 80's shot by police. They were raiding her house on a no-knock drug warrant, she apparently didn't realize it was the cops and shot at them with a handgun, they shot back and killed her.

Straightforward, of course. Right. Are these cases ever straightforward? Where would we be if we didn't hear claims that the police lied in getting the warrant and tried to get their informant to lie after the raid:

But in an interview broadcast Monday by the local Fox affiliate, the informant, whose identity was concealed, said he had never been to the house in question and had not bought drugs there. Ms. Johnston's family has said that she lived alone.

"They were going to pay me just to cover it up," he said in the interview, arranged after he placed a call to one of the station's reporters on Thursday. "They called me immediately after the shooting to ask me, I mean to tell me, 'This is what you need to do.' " He added that the officers told him explicitly that he was needed to protect their story.

This event is obscene enough by itself, but it illustrates a larger problem we're facing as a country. The Cato Institute has an interactive "raidmap" up titled "Botched Paramilitary Police Raids: An Epidemic of 'Isolated Incidents'". Based on a google maps frame, it dots the country with markers for various incidents where paramilitary units have killed innocent people, raided innocent subjects, or were involved in various other excesses. In a typical case that occurred a few miles from here:

On September 29, 1999, a Denver SWAT team executes a no-knock drug raid on the home of Ismael Mena, a Mexican immigrant and father of seven. Mena, believing he is being robbed, confronts the SWAT team with a gun.

Police say they fired the eight shots that killed Mena only after Mena ignored repeated warnings to drop his weapon. Mena's family says police never announced themselves, and fired at the man shortly after entry.

The police later discover they've raided the wrong home, based on bad information from an informant. They find no drugs in Mena's house, nor are any later found in his system.

In 2000, a special prosecutor's investigation into the Mena shooting would find no wrongdoing on the part of the SWAT team. A separate internal affairs investigation also cleared the SWAT team of wrongdoing, but did find that the officer who prepared the search warrant for Mena's home had falsified information.

As the shooting gained traction in the media, Denver city officials began to portray Mena as a Mexican criminal refugee wanted for murder (Mena had shot a man in Mexico in self-defense, but was cleared of any wrongdoing), in what critics called a "blame the victim" strategy. Members of the police department also later started a "Spy file" on a citizens' organization agitating for a more thorough investigation of Mena's death. The intelligence unit that kept the files on Mena's supporters was the head of the SWAT team that conducted the raid on Mena's home.

Weeks later, new details began to emerge about the Mena case that called the special prosecutor's conclusions into question. Mena's family eventually hired a former FBI agent named James Kearney to conduct a private investigation into the shooting. Kearney became convinced that Denver police shot Mena without provocation, and planted the gun to cover up the botched raid. Kearney found evidence not uncovered by previous investigations, including two slugs in the floor of Mena's apartment that suggest the raid didn't happen as the SWAT team claims it did.

In 2000, Mena's family finally settled with the city of Denver for $400,000. Since the Mena shooting, the city of Denver has settled a $1.3 million lawsuit after police shot and killed a developmentally disabled teenager, and face another suit in which police raiding a home in search of a domestic violence suspect shot and killed a man (not the suspect) in bed when they mistook the soda can in his hand for a gun.

In one final, bizarre twist to the Mena case, it was revealed months after the raid that Colorado Rockies second baseman Mike Lansing was permitted to ride along with the SWAT team on the raid ending in Mena's death. Media inquiries later discovered that it's fairly common for members of the Denver baseball team to accompany police on SWAT raids, despite the raids' volatile nature.

Sources:

Alan Prendergast, "Unlawful Entry; The high price of Denver's drug war: lies, bad busts, cops in harm's way -- and the death of an innocent man," Denver Post, February 24, 2000.

Howard Pankratz, " Informant: Error led to fatal raid Police tipster says his mistake brought officers to Mena's door," Denver Post, August 12, 2000, p. A1.

Amy Herdy, "Findings complicate Mena case," Denver Post, January 23, 2003, p. 10.

"Rockies outfielder defends 'ride-alongs," Orlando Sentinel, July 18, 2000, p. C5.

Tina Greigo, "Blaming the Victim," Denver Post, February 17, 2001, p. B7.
Kevin Vaughan, "Former FBI agent fights to renew Mena suit," Rocky Mountain News, November 17, 2005, p. A36.

Bruce Finley, "$400,000 settles Mena case Webb steps in to broker deal in fatal no-knock raid," Denver Post, March 24, 2000, p. A1.

September 29, 1999

There is absolutely no excuse for events like this. We allow these events to go by with relatively little public rage because many of us believe, even subconsciously, that we are engaged in a war. We willingly trade some of our civil liberties and yes, the risk of being wrongly killed by our own agents, for stability and security. This was made abundantly clear in the easy passage of the second version of the Patriot Act. We each make this tradeoff choice - stability and security vs. civil liberty and wrongful death/injury risk - for ourselves, individually. How our government ultimately balances the equation reflects a sort of unspoken collective decision, the sum of our feelings on the equation. Are strong-arm paramilitary police raids an acceptable tradeoff in our war on drugs? To this point we have apparently decided so.

I have written previously about death-by-government. I consider it the ultimate sin of a government for the people, by the people. But ultimately our national, state and local governments do what we let them do. It is past time to question the balance we afford our agent protectors in our desires for stability and security. For we are ultimately not secure if we face a real and everyday risk of being killed by the very people we hire to protect us.