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Paramilitary Police Are Changing Law Enforcement in the Suburbs

SWAT teams, riot gear, armored vehicles, and other super-sized police equipment and tactics are spreading into smaller spaces and conflicts.

• KRISTON CAPPS
 
• @kristoncapps
 
• Aug 11, 2014
 
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Police in riot gear respond to demonstrators protesting at the McDonald's headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, in May. (Jim Young/Reuters)

Of the many tragic images to emerge from Ferguson, Missouri, over the weekend, one of the most disturbing—and increasingly common—was the sight of a military vehicle patrolling suburban streets. Protesters outraged by the police killing of 18-year-old Ferguson resident Michael Brown were met bypolice in riot gear, police carrying assault rifles, and police aboard a LENCO BearCat, a type of military armored vehicle.

According to a public information officer with the St. Louis County Police Department, the county dispatched two armored vehicles on Saturday in response to "unrest." Yet it was not until Sunday that some grieving community members answered perceived injustice with violence, looting about a dozen shops. As of Saturday, when the BearCat took to the streets of Ferguson (population 21,000), protesters were assembling peacefully.

St. Louis County is just one of the many municipalities in the U.S. that now commands access to military equipment meant for war. The paramilitarization of suburban police forces, or the suburbanization of paramilitary police forces, adds another question to those lingering over Brown's tragic death: Did the police response only make matters worse?

"There isn't a great amount of tracking on all the military equipment going out in the U.S.," says Samuel Bieler, a research associate with the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute. "But you can definitely see evidence of militarization of the police in the suburbs. You can find examples basically anywhere."

While the use of SWAT teams generally came to prominence in the 1970s as an answer to urban unrest (and as a form of police brutality), increasingly, the paramilitary tactics and equipment adopted by law-enforcement agencies are spreading beyond the cities to suburban areas and rural counties.
For example, the Indianapolis Star recently compiled a database of the equipment acquired by Indiana city and county law-enforcement agencies through the 1033 program, which parcels out surplus Department of Defense equipment. Among the findings: Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, which are armored vehicles designed to withstand improvised explosive device attacks, were dispersed to eight different municipalities, the smallest being Pulaski County, population 13,402.

Despite the fact that a Department of Homeland Security report once listedmore potential terrorist targets in Indiana than New York or California, the state has never been hit by a terrorist attack, much less an assault involving IEDs. The MRAP vehicles amount to only a small fraction of the $45 million in materiel that Indiana has acquired from the Pentagon since 2010. While such detailed findings aren't available for every state, The New York Times reports that 432 MRAP vehicles have been distributed to law-enforcement agencies across the states, in addition to 435 other armored vehicles, 533 planes and helicopters, and nearly 100,000 machine guns.

The police department of St. Charles, a suburb of St. Louis, possesses an MRAP vehicle. The Metropolitan Police Department for the city of St. Louis also owns two armored military vehicles, according to a spokesperson for the St. Louis County Police Department, which has acquired several military vehicles.

"The records kept on this equipment aren’t great," Bieler says. "It's certainly something that doesn't have the oversight you'd expect given the nature of the military equipment being distributed."

In a lot of cases, these advanced armored military vehicles are only ever used for parade pieces, Bieler says. That's in stark contrast to SWAT deployments. Peter Kraska, a professor and senior research fellow at Eastern Kentucky University, reports that between 1980 and 2000, police paramilitary teams registered a 1,400 percent increase in deployments. Earlier this year, the ACLU released a report showing that 79 percent of the SWAT team deployments reviewed by the organization executed search warrants on suspects' homes. In Maryland, the only state that tracks SWAT deployments, search warrants make up almost 90 percent of these actions.

A 2013 report from the U.S. Department of Justice tracks the militarization of police back to the 1920s, when law-enforcement agencies adopted a more regimented martial style. With the explosion of SWAT deployments since 1980, though, the DOJ frets that the "growing militarization of U.S. policing may be threatening community policing." It is only in more recent years, though, that police militarization has become so widespread.

Nowhere was that clearer this weekend than in Ferguson, where protesters demonstrated with their hands raised in surrender in the vicinity of police—a disgraceful sight in America. At a broader level, there is no research that tracks how police using military tactics and equipment affects civilian safety (or police safety, for that matter).
"How are these tactics actually working? Are they making citizens and police safer or are they increasing adverse outcomes?" Bieler asks. "There are some tactical case studies about riots, but that doesn’t cover what we’re seeing in police using SWAT teams for search warrants or riot gear for protests."

Right now, the people of Ferguson need answers to more pressing questions about Brown's death. But one question for Ferguson applies to law-enforcement agencies everywhere: Why did police deploy an armored military vehicle to a protest? What are the legitimate uses for an MRAP vehicle in a community that has never experienced terrorism?

"You can definitely see that, even in a small town like Ferguson, it says something important about the degree that militarization is now accessible to every law-enforcement agency," Bieler says. "Agencies that aren't in major metro areas are getting access to this military gear."

It is far from clear that a weapon of war is a tolerable answer to civil unrest even under the worst circumstances. Ferguson is hardly the only community where assemblies protected by the First Amendment have been met by paramilitary force. The police reaction following Brown's death—the latest in the hopeless litany of young black men killed by authorities—shows how far the militarization of law enforcement is spreading.

10 Insane Things the Pentagon Gave to Local Law Enforcement

The DoD has distributed everything from "extreme cold weather drawers" to San Diego police to grenade launchers to cops in a small Iowa county.  

• ROSS GIANFORTUNE
 
• 11:52 AM ET
 
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Police in Ferguson clad in SWAT gear watch protestors August 9, 2014. (Jeff Roberson/AP)

The Department of Defense Excess Property Program has seen a lot of criticism lately as news surfaces about how local police departments are using the Pentagon's extras. Pentagon equipment used by the St. Louis County Police in Ferguson, Missouri—the scene of civil unrest following the shooting of Michael Brown—includes multiple $47,000 trucks and scores of military rifles. The New York Times highlighted the program and produced an interactive graphic to show the flow of weapons from Defense to police. According to the Times, the program started as a countermeasure to high crime in the 1990s.
Using data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and covering 2006-2014, we looked into the type and cost of equipment that local law enforcement has been receiving from the Pentagon. Items ranged from aircraft (some costing over $5 million each) to screws and washers (36 cents each). Most of the equipment filtering down to local law enforcement will not surprise the average citizen—mostly rifles, handguns, and related equipment—but we found a lot of questionable line items.
1. 240 pair of "DRAWERS, EXTREME COLD WEATHER" for a total cost of $1,770.65. San Diego County, California.

La Jolla Beach, San Diego (kan_khampanya/Shutterstock.com) 

The documentation on just where the equipment goes is not clear, so a lot of the equipment could be used in county jails, by county or city law enforcement, or any other number of places. But one thing's for sure: Almost no one in San Diego County, California, needs underwear for "extreme cold weather." San Diego is one of the most pleasant places in the world, weather-wise, with a year-round average temperature of 75 degrees.
2. 200 pairs of "SOCKS" for a total cost of $468. Wichita County, Texas.
The Pentagon gave or sold a lot of socks to different counties. The document contains 175 line items with the word "socks" in them, with nearly every state receiving the all-important garments. Wichita, Texas, received 200 pairs of Pentagon-issued socks, presumably for inmates at the James V. Allred Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Otherwise, law enforcement in Wichita County is swimming in socks.
3. 18 units of "HAMMER, HAND" for a total cost of $2,683.86. Oakland County, Michigan.
Oakland County is part of the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, Michigan, Metropolitan Statistical Area and has a population of 1,202,362, but that does not explain why the local law enforcement needed to receive 18 hammers from the Defense Department at an average cost of $149.10 each. Considering Sears sells a Craftsman hammer for a quarter of the same price, it seems odd that the Pentagon is buying hammers at such a price in the first place.
4. One "1996 FORD EXPLORER" for a total cost of $24,500.00. Estill County, Kentucky.
The notion that a county of 15,000 could need a police department sport utility vehicle is completely reasonable, but at issue is the specific vehicle. In 2012, Estill County received a Ford Explorer valued at $24,500, which is more than 11 times the current Kelly Blue Book value for a 1996 Ford Explorer (just over $2,100).
5. One "BOAT, FISHING" for a total cost of $100.00. Aroostook County, Maine
Aroostook got $7,441,065.48 worth of equipment from the Pentagon—including 65 rifles, 25 pistols, and a $138,870 truck. It appears the Aroostook is the second-largest county by geography in the United States, but it's very curious that "the county" received a fishing boat from the Defense Department. One wonders how that aids in law enforcement activities.
6. 58 "HELICOPTER, UTILITY" for a total cost of $53,491,640.00. Brevard County, Florida.

(Brevard County Sheriff)

As highlighted in pieces in the Times, helicopters are a popular item. The District of Columbia received five helicopters, Los Angeles County received one, and even Stephens County, Oklahoma—population 45,000—received one. However, the Space Coast's Brevard County got a mind-boggling 58 helicopters from the Pentagon. The department even features its aviation unit online.
7 (tie).
1 "MINE RESISTANT VEHICLE" for a total cost of $733,000.00. Dekalb County, Georgia.
1 "MINE RESISTANT VEHICLE" for a total cost of $412,000.00. Montgomery County, Kansas.
3 "MINE RESISTANT VEHICLE(s)" for a total cost of $1,236,000.00. Honolulu County, Hawaii.
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight highlighted a video from the police in Doraville, Georgia, located in Dekalb County, showing off the police department's mine-resistant vehicle. It could be this one that nearly cost three quarters of a million dollars, shown in the video during a training exercise.
Dekalb County is not the only county to receive such a vehicle. The phrase "MINE RESISTANT VEHICLE" occurs 341 times in the document, suggesting the Pentagon had a huge excess of such vehicles after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Honolulu County, Hawaii, received three mine-resistant vehicles, despite the fact that Hawaii rates 36th in crime in the United States and does not have a problem with landmines.
Perhaps most curious is the acquisition of such a vehicle in Montgomery County, Kansas. Montgomery County is only the seventeenth-most populated county in the state of Kansas and is over 100 miles from the state's largest city: Wichita.
8. 92 pairs of "SNOWSHOES" for a total cost of $6,191.60. El Paso County, Texas.
Several counties received snowshoes from the Pentagon's excess equipment (including counties in Idaho, Montana, and Illinois)—but El Paso County, Texas While El Paso does get some snow because of its elevation, the county has a median snow measurement of 0 inches, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The likelihood that law enforcement would need to wear snowshoes is low.
9. One "TRUCK, ARMORED" for a total cost of $65,070.00. Lincoln County, Montana.
Lincoln County is a heavily wooded area on the Canadian border, with a sparse population of just under 20,000 people. It's also an area of low crime, which makes one wonder why a local police department received a $65,000 armored vehicle. Fear of invasion from the Royal Mounted Police?
10. Five "LAUNCHER, GRENADE" for a total cost of $3,600.00. Buena Vista County, Iowa

A Marine trains with a grenade launcher at Camp Pendleton in 2013. (Defense Department)

In a competition for the most well-equipped police department in the United States, Iowa's Buena Vista County Sheriff's Office must be near the top. The BVCSO is responsible for all law enforcement in the county of 20,000 and now certainly has the weaponry to do so. The BVCSO received two mine-resistant vehicles, four sets of night-vision goggles, 20 rifles, nine handguns, and eight shotguns from the Pentagon, among 180 line items in the document.
But the five grenade launchers are a bit shocking. Buena Vista County is not known for being a war zone; rather, it is a group of small communities in northwest Iowa. The need for multiple grenade launchers anywhere outside a war zone is questionable, but it's truly ridiculous for the BVCSO, considering its last two press-release-worthy law enforcement actions included a capsized boat and a traffic accident.

***

All of these line items bring up a host of other questions about the Pentagon's program. First, is training included for this weaponry? The spectre of improperly trained St. Louis County law enforcement has been raised in the reporting on the situation in Ferguson. And what about maintenance? Does Brevard County have a trained helicopter mechanic for its 58 helicopters?
But mostly: Who in the Pentagon approved these transfers? Defense spokesman John Kirby told reporters this week that the equipment "is made available to law enforcement agencies, if they want it and if they qualify for it." That statement suggests that someone in the Pentagon looked at an application from Buena Vista County for five grenade launchers and did not bat an eye.

Police Use Radar Device To See Inside Your House

Police Use Radar Device To See Inside Your House

The latest example of battlefield technology finding its way home to civilian policing

Ronald Bailey|Jan. 20, 2015 12:47 pm

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forwardprogressivesSome 50 police agencies including U.S. marshals and the FBI have been using for two years Range-R doppler radar devices that can see 50 feet through walls, including brick and concrete ones, to detect the location of people inside their houses. And in some cases law enforcement officers are using with them without search warrants. As USA Todayreports:

The radars were first designed for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. They represent the latest example of battlefield technology finding its way home to civilian policing and bringing complex legal questions with it....

The radars work like finely tuned motion detectors, using radio waves to zero in on movements as slight as human breathing from a distance of more than 50 feet. They can detect whether anyone is inside of a house, where they are and whether they are moving.

Certainly, such information could be vital to the protection of police officers who are executing valid search warrants based on probable cause. The problem is that law enforcement has not always sought a warrant before deploying the technology. The USA Today article cites the case of fugitive parolee Steven Denson in which the Marshals Service used the radar device to detect his presence in a house in Wichita, Kansas.

L3 CommunicationsThe marshals had an arrest warrant for Denson, but not a search warrant for that location. Interestingly, the marshal's report did not mention the use of the radar; merely that they "had developed a reasonable suspicion" that Denson was in the house. An interesting omission. Denson challenged his arrest arguing that marshal's would not have had a reasonable belief that he was in the house without the use of radar device.

The Tenth Circuit of the U.S. Appeals Court disagreed, noting that the marshals had sufficient independent evidence of his presence, e.g., Denson had opened an electric utility account for the house, a whirring electric meter outside, and the fact that an unemployed Denson was likely to be home at 8:30 a.m. On that basis, the Appeals Court upheld his arrest. The Appeals Court did note...

...the government brought with it a Doppler radar device capable of detecting from outside the home the presence of “human breathing and movement within.” All this packed into a hand-held unit “about 10 inches by 4 inches wide, 10 inches long.” The government admits that it used the radar before entering — and that the device registered someone’s presence inside. It’s obvious to us and everyone else in this case that the government’s warrantless use of such a powerful tool to search inside homes poses grave Fourth Amendment questions. New technologies bring with them not only new opportunities for law enforcement to catch criminals but also new risks for abuse and new ways to invade constitutional rights. ...

Unlawful searches can give rise not only to civil claims but may require the suppression of evidence in criminal proceedings. We have little doubt that the radar device deployed here will soon generate many questions for this court and others along both of these axes. At the same time, in a criminal proceeding like ours the government is free to rely on facts gleaned independently from any Fourth Amendment violation.

The Appeals Court specifically cited the 2001 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case ofKyllo v. United States in which federal agents scanned a house with a thermal imager with the goal of detecting heat emitted from grow lights used in marijuana cultivation. Based on the imager's finding that a lot of heat was emanating from the suspect's garage, the agents obtained a search warrant and raided the house. The U.S. Supreme Court remanded the case after holding:

Where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a Fourth Amendment "search," and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant.

On the basis of that standard, if the only clue that Denson was at home were the result of the radar scan, then he presumably would have had a case against the Marshal Service's intrusion into his residence.

In any case, Range-R is certainly not the last word in radar surveillance. USA Todaynotes:

Other radar devices have far more advanced capabilities, including three-dimensional displays of where people are located inside a building, according to marketing materials from their manufacturers. One is capable of being mounted on a drone. And the Justice Department has funded research to develop systems that can map the interiors of buildings and locate the people within them.

With regard to a person's reasonable expectation of privacy, the majority in Kyllo noted:

...in the case of the search of the interior of homes–the prototypical and hence most commonly litigated area of protected privacy–there is a ready criterion, with roots deep in the common law, of the minimal expectation of privacy that exists, and that is acknowledged to be reasonable. To withdraw protection of this minimum expectation would be to permit police technology to erode the privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. We think that obtaining by sense-enhancing technology any information regarding the interior of the home that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical “intrusion into a constitutionally protected area,” Silverman, 365 U.S., at 512, constitutes a search–at least where (as here) the technology in question is not in general public use. This assures preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted. On the basis of this criterion, the information obtained by the thermal imager in this case was the product of a search.

The "not in general public use" standard seems awfully permeable on its face. One dystopian interpretation is that the more widely surveillance technologies are deployed the less reasonable our expectations of privacy will become.

Ronald B

Anal Probes Run Amok

Trump’s Decision on Military-Style Weapons Will Harm Communities

Trump’s Decision on Military-Style Weapons Will Harm Communities

By Adam Bates

This article appeared on USA Today on August 31, 2017.

In 2004, then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s SWAT team in Maricopa County, Ariz., raided a suburban home looking for illegal firearms.

The raid was a comedy of ineptitude.

The officers drove their armored vehicle into a parked car on the street. They changed into military-style uniforms on the lawn, leading a neighbor to conclude that they might have been amateur paintballers or even gang members. One of the many tear gas canisters police fired into the home apparently sparked a fire and set the home ablaze. A dog trying to flee the fire was scared back into the home, where it died.

Administration should learn from mistakes of Arpaio. Disastrous SWAT raids added proof that supplies not only unnecessary, but dangerous.

Instead of a cache of illegal weapons, the raid recovered an antique shotgun and a legally owned 9mm handgun, and officers made only one arrest — for a failure to appear in court over traffic violations.

It should go without saying that military weapons and tactics should be reserved for the most pressing circumstances. Yet the Trump administration is taking the country backward by again giving police departments access to the most dangerous artillery that is often unnecessary for local officers.

This week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the reversal of an Obama-era rule that limits the transfer of certain military equipment to state and local police agencies.

The Pentagon’s 1033 program has provided military surplus equipment to state and local law enforcement agencies for a couple of decades. The Obama administration made a slight modification to the program by banning the transfer of some military equipment such as high-powered rifles, grenade launchers, bayonets, and some armored vehicles and camouflage uniforms.

Militarized law enforcement came under intense scrutiny in 2014 after Missouri teen Michael Brown was killed by police officer Darren Wilson. Police met protesters with tanks, tear gas and military-grade weapons, escalating an already tense situation. Observers could have easily been forgiven for mistaking the officers for occupying soldiers.

One photo from the protest quickly went viral and came to symbolize the oppressive, dangerous nature of overly militarized law enforcement. It showed multiple officers in full military gear, pointing riffles at a young, black male who was holding his hands in the air. The officers seem to be saying, do what we say or we’ll kill you.

That kind of military-tinged imagery is exactly what led some police chiefs to renounce their participation in the weapons program. Brandon del Pozo of Vermont’s Burlington Police Department said the equipment was starting to twist the perspectives of his officers:

“We have the resources to handle all but the most inconceivable public safety scenarios. Amassing a worst-case scenario arsenal of military equipment results in officers seeing everyday police work through a military lens. When I realized what a small role the military played in equipping our police, I concluded it was better to return the items.”

Del Pozo has his finger on a fundamental question: Can police departments be flooded with military weaponry and technology without blurring the distinction between law enforcement work and military occupation?

The history of SWAT teams, like the one in Maricopa County, provides an ominous answer.

SWAT teams originated as a response to demanding and dangerous circumstances such as hostage situations, civil unrest and active shooters. But as traditional law enforcement goals gave way to the incentives of the war on drugs, the mission of militarized police units began to creep. Rather than being reserved for emergency situations, the vast majority of SWAT raids today result from search warrants, usually for drugs.

Abuses of military tactics and equipment are inevitable. Police officers, like all people, respond to incentives.

We can, of course, imagine unlikely scenarios in which the police might need .50 caliber rifles, but there is a cost to turning responses to outlandish possibilities into policy prescriptions. Without adequate transparency, accountability and training, that cost will continue to be paid in lives.

Every Cop Involved in the Arrest of This Utah Nurse for Refusing to (Illegally) Draw a Patient’s Blood Needs to Be Fired

Every Cop Involved in the Arrest of This Utah Nurse for Refusing to (Illegally) Draw a Patient’s Blood Needs to Be Fired

The Supreme Court decision forbidding unwarranted blood collection is a year old.

Scott Shackford|Sep. 1, 2017 11:07 am

Shall we ease into our Labor Day weekend with an absolutely repulsive video of a police detective abusing his authority against a completely innocent person for no real justifiable reason? Oh, why not?

Behold, Salt Lake City Police Det. Jeff Payne arresting Nurse Alex Wubbels in July for refusing to violate an unconscious—comatose, actually—man's rights by drawing his blood for the police without any sort of warrant whatsoever:

What Payne did here is patently, inescapably wrong in just about every possible way. Just one year ago the Supreme Court ruled that police must get a warrant or consent in order to draw a person's blood. It's utterly inconceivable that Payne, who is a trained phlebotomist with the police, did not know this. According to coverage from the Salt Lake Tribune, Payne acknowledged that he didn't have probable cause to get a warrant, but nevertheless insisted he had the authority to demand Wubbels draw blood.

But Payne did not have the authority to demand the blood draw and Wubbels was not "interfering" with a police investigation as they insisted at the time. Unsurprisingly, she was released later at the hospital and was not charged with any crime.

In fact, the claim that this blood draw was part of an "investigation" at all adds another layer of revulsion to Payne's behavior. The unconscious man Payne wanted blood from was not suspected of any crime and had done nothing wrong. He was, in fact, a victim of a crime.

The patient, William Gray of Idaho, was driving a semi truck in Northern Utah when he was struck head-on by a man who veered into oncoming traffic on a highway in Wellsville on July 27. That driver, who died in the crash, was fleeing from the police in a high-speed chase. Utah Highway Patrol officers were responding to calls about an erratic driver, and the man, Marco Torres, 26, led police on a chase rather than get pulled over and detained.

So Gray's terrible injuries were a consequence of a police chase that he had absolutely nothing to do with. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. According to the coverage of the arrest, Payne said that he wanted to draw blood from Gray to check for drugs in order to "protect" him in some fashion, not to punish him, and that he was ordered to go collect his blood by police in Logan. It is not made clear in any coverage what exactly the police would protecting him from by drawing his blood without his consent while he was unconscious. Payne also said it was his watch commander, Lt. James Tracy, who told him to arrest Wubbels if she refused to draw blood.

Payne has been suspended from the police's blood draw program but remains on duty. He needs to be shown the door. It doesn't matter if he was just following orders, he should have known he didn't have the authority. For that matter, Wubbels herself was just following orders. She served the hospital, which had strict guidelines for drawing blood that the police were attempting to bully her into ignoring.

Tracy needs to be shown the door, too. We don't see Tracy in the video acting the way Payne did, but it's very clear from the Tribune's coverage that the lieutenant did also insist that he had the authority to force Wubbels to draw blood, even though he most assuredly did not.

In fact, here's a longer video from Deseret News that shows toward the end what appears to be Tracy being a condescending jerk to Wubbels while she's being detained, even though he's completely in the wrong:

How the NRA’s allegiance to cops undermines its credibility on gun rights

How the NRA’s allegiance to cops undermines its credibility on gun rights

By Radley Balko July 11 at 2:10 PM

Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News)

At long last, someone from the National Rifle Association has spoken up about Philando Castile. Sort of. During a CNN segment, NRA spokeswoman and pundit Dana Loesch said this:


I think it’s absolutely awful. It’s a terrible tragedy that could have been avoided. I don’t agree with every single decision that comes out from courtrooms of America. There are a lot of variables in this particular case, and there were a lot of things that I wish would have been done differently. Do I believe that Philando Castile deserved to lose his life over his [traffic] stop? I absolutely do not. I also think that this is why we have things like NRA Carry Guard, not only to reach out to the citizens to go over what to do during stops like this, but also to work with law enforcement so that they understand what citizens are experiencing when they go through stops like this.

As Jacob Sullum points out at Reason, this is pretty weak stuff. A law-abiding gun owner was shot and killed by a cop after doing everything he was supposed to do. It then took more than a year for anyone from the nation’s largest gun rights organization to comment, and when she did, she offered a vague, heavily qualified, quasi-criticism of the cop while implying not only that Castile contributed to his death but also that he might be alive if only he were carrying an NRA Carry Guard card.

This is about par for the course for the NRA. This is the group that claims to be the only thing preventing the government from obliterating the Second Amendment, yet they’re noticeably quiet about the people doing the most violence to the Second Amendment — the armed, badge-wearing government employees we call law enforcement officers. For all the NRA’s dire warnings about government gun confiscation, the real, tangible threat to gun-owning Americans today comes not from gun-grabbing bureaucrats but from door-bashing law enforcement officers who think they’re at war — who are too often trained to view the people they serve not as citizens with rights but as potential threats. Here, the NRA just doesn’t want to get involved.

Take the issue of police raids. When I started writing about the massive increase in the use of SWAT teams, no-knock warrants and “dynamic entry” police raids back in the early 2000s, I was at first surprised at how quiet the NRA was about the issue. When I wrote about the story of Cory Maye, a black Mississippi man on death row after shooting a white police officer during a botched, midnight raid on his home, a number of prominent gun rights advocates spoke up on Maye’s behalf — as many have with Castile. (Maye claimed that he thought his home was being invaded by criminals.) And yet as with Castile, the NRA was silent. It’s been that way ever since.

But this wasn’t always the case. Back in the 1990s, the NRA was sharply and very publicly critical of aggressive police tactics, at least at the federal level. Recall Wayne LaPierre’s (in)famous quote deriding ATF agents as “jack-booted thugs.” The NRA was widely ridiculed for that criticism — unfairly I think. Though the group’s rhetoric could be unhinged at times, so could ATF’s tactics. As scholars like Dave Kopel have documented, ATF of the 1990s was brutal, ruthless and dangerously unaccountable.

ATF quieted down when the Bush administration took over, and so did the NRA’s criticism. Today, the agency still uses aggressive, constitutionally dubious tactics, but its targets tend to be minorities, the poorand the mentally ill — people less likely to be card-carrying members of the NRA.

But while the NRA has occasionally spoken out over the years about federal abuses, the group has always been reluctant to criticize local police. As has now been well documented — first by the work of criminologist Peter Kraska, and later by surveys from groups like the ACLU — we’ve seen a massive rise in the use of “dynamic entry” tactics, in which cops break into houses, often at night, in an effort to take the occupants by surprise: whether by the ever-growing number of SWAT teams, or by narcotics units, gang units, drug task forces and other specialized units. Most of these raids are to serve drug warrants, although they’ve been justified for an ever-growing list of infractions, some incredibly petty. Drug warrants often rely on dirty information. Cops often face pressure to nab suspected drug dealers quickly or to seize a drug stash before it’s moved. That can make shortcuts tempting. This is where we get the wrong-house raids that are particularly dangerous for gun owners. These raids are designed to distract, confuse and disorient. So it’s of no surprise that when they go wrong, innocent people (or even people guilty of drug crimes, for that matter), might confuse the raiding cops for criminals.

To make matters worse, some police agencies consider legal gun ownership a reason to use these tactics. We covered one such incident here at The Watch. In 2014, police in Iowa conducted a violent dynamic-entry raid on a man suspected of credit card fraud. Their justification for the heavy-handed tactics? The suspect’s roommate had a legal gun permit. Imagine if the roommate — who had done nothing wrong — had been home. He likely would have reached for his gun. He might well be dead.

In fact, there’s a long list of legal gun owners who were shot dead under precisely those circumstances. One of the more infamous examples is Donald Scott, a gun-rights advocate shot down in his own home during a fruitless marijuana raid in 1992. Just a few of the other examples:

Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old woman killed in her home in 2006 when she pointed a rusty revolver at cops who had broken into her house after a bad tip from an informant.
Jason Wescott, killed by Florida police in 2014 after an informant told the cops he had bought some pot from Wescott. The informant later said he had lied. Wescott had earlier been the victim of some threats. When he reported the threats to the police, they advised him to arm himself. The same police agency then raided Wescott’s home over what was alleged to be a small amount of marijuana. When he displayed the gun, they killed him.
In 2007, some Florida cops posing undercover as drug dealers were conducting buys on the lawn of 80-year-old Isaac Singletary. Mistaking them for actual drug dealers, Singletary demanded they leave. When they didn’t, he came out of his house holding a handgun. The undercover cops shot him dead.

In 2014, Georgia police shot and killed David Hooks when he confronted them with a shotgun during a raid on his home. The police claimed an informant told them he saw meth in Hooks’s truck when he trespassed onto Hooks’s property to steal his other vehicle. They found no drugs. Hooks had both passed background checks and had a security clearance.

There are of course many others. There are lots of other examples in which police have injured or killed people during these raids after mistaking some other object in the victim’s hand for a gun. I suppose those aren’t specifically gun-rights cases, but they’re part of the same problem.

There are also the examples like Cory Maye, in which the victim of a botched or mistaken raid was prosecuted after understandably mistaking the cops for criminal intruders, and reaching for a gun to defend themselves or their families. (See also Ryan Frederick, Marvin Guy or Matthew David Stewart.) More recently, Henry Magee was no-billed by a grand jury in Texas after killing a cop during a pot raid on his home, and Ray Rosas was acquitted by a jury after wounding three officers during a raid in which police appear to have been looking for Rosas’s nephew, who didn’t live in Rosas’s home. Rosas in fact had previously been subjected to death threats after testifying against a gang member.

As far as I know, the NRA did not vocally support any of these legal gun owners. They didn’t criticize the police. They didn’t call for a change in police tactics.

As the Castile shooting demonstrates, it’s about more than just raids. It’s about police training and mindset, too. As we have also pointed out here at The Watch, the officer who shot Castile had recently attended a “Bulletproof Warrior” class, one of series of incredibly popular classes run by Dave Grossman and Jim Glennon. These classes teach cops to see see threats everywhere, and to adopt a starkly cynical, apocalyptic view of the world — similar to the view often provided by NRA head LaPierre, and that Loesch adopted in her recent, much-discussed NRA promotional video. The police officer who shot John Crawford — gunned down in an Ohio Walmart as he held a pellet gun he was considering buying — had recently attended a “pep talk” presentation that cited Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech and other mass shootings to motivate officers to confront “active threats” with “speed, surprise and aggressiveness.”

While some police agencies are moving more toward de-escalation and conflict resolution, there’s a competing philosophy pushed by personalities like Grossman that cops aren’t killing enough people and need to act more instinctively — to move beyond fear or reservation when taking a human life. That latter philosophy is taking hold even in jurisdictions with a history of police violence.

To the extent that the NRA has addressed any of this, it has been to disparage critics. A 2014 article in the organization’s magazine, for example, mocked critics of police militarization, and cautioned against “a ‘knee-jerk’ reaction to every use of force situation caught on camera.” And in this video, the NRA’s Dom Raso, a former Navy SEAL, discusses the benefits of police militarization with a New Jersey SWAT commander, before the two roundly dismiss concerns about what effects militarization might have on police tactics and mindset.


To their credit, there are gun-rights advocates who have worried about these issues for years. They just aren’t the NRA. (I should disclose here that generally speaking, I favor the right to own and carry a gun.) In one recent example, David French wrote about the police shooting of Andrew Scott at National Review:


Imagine you’re up late one night. It’s after midnight, and maybe you’re finishing a movie. Or perhaps you’re reading a book, and it’s too good to put down. Or maybe you’re like a young man named Andrew Scott: You’re playing video games with your girlfriend.

You hear a loud pounding on your front door. You’re not expecting anyone, and no one is shouting or yelling anything from the other side. Instead, the pounding continues, and the door rattles on its hinges. If this happened to me, living in a rural part of Tennessee, I’ll tell you exactly what I’d do — I’d answer the door warily, with a gun at my side.

After all, my home is my castle. It’s where my wife and kids are, and it’s hard to imagine a situation where there’s loud pounding, that late, that doesn’t involve a degree of urgency. I have a constitutional and a human right, guaranteed under the Second Amendment, to defend my family, my life, and my home.

Unless, of course, the people pounding on the door are cops who 1) had no search warrant, 2) didn’t turn on their emergency lights, 3) didn’t identify themselves as police, 4) misunderstood a neighbor’s directions, and 5) showed up at the wrong house, the house of a completely innocent man. Then, my right to defend myself turns into a right to die in two seconds flat, without firing a shot or even clambering a round.

That’s the effective holding of a panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, a holding that the entire Circuit declined to review en banc just last week.

That ruling came just before the Supreme Court ruling in the Angel Mendez case. There, police officers illegally entered Mendez’s private residence without knocking or announcing. When Mendez reached for a BB gun, the police opened fire, severely injuring Mendez and his wife. The court ruled that qualified immunity for police officers prevents Mendez and his wife from suing the officers for their injuries. (That’s a rough summary of a complicated case — see the previous link for a more thorough discussion.) The ACLU, the NAACP and the conservative Rutherford Institute all submitted amicus briefs on behalf of Mendez. The NRA did not.

The only recent instance I can recall in which the NRA did oppose the wishes of law enforcement was when the group fought back against the Indiana legislature’s attempt to overturn a (widely mischaracterized) Indiana Supreme Court ruling about the Castle Doctrine and home defense. (To their credit, they were right about that one.)

Because the NRA was active in denouncing the aggressive police tactics ATF was using against (mostly white) gun owners, and because the group has been silent when those same sorts of tactics are used against black people to serve drug warrants, some critics have accused the group of only favoring gun rights for white people. I think it’s probably more complicated than that. The NRA, for example, was way out front in defending Shaneen Allen, a black woman facing some pretty serious prison time after an honest mistake put her in the grip of New Jersey’s asinine gun and sentencing laws. In fact, they were defending her long before a few liberal groups finally came around. And many of the cases already mentioned above — during which the NRA stayed silent — involved white people.

A more accurate criticism might be that the NRA’s allegiance to law enforcement has made the NRA indifferent to the ways that police tactics, use-of-force policy and police training violate the rights of gun owners (and those perceived to be carrying guns). And as with most bad criminal-justice policy, the laws, policies and training disproportionately violate the rights of blacks and Latinos — and the NRA is indifferent to that, too. The group does itself no favors when its figurehead spouts lazy, racist dog-whistles; when its aforementioned record of criticizing ATF goes silent when the agency’s aggressive tactics are aimed at minority neighborhoods.

Its history of putting unapologetic bigots in its leadership doesn’t help, either. Perhaps the best illustration of the problem is Ted Nugent, the NRA’s celebrity, unabashedly bigoted board member. The grizzled rocker is regularly warning us of impending government tyranny, but then defends, for example, the killing of Eric Garner, or the South Carolina police officer who body-slammed a high school girl (by describing the girl as an “animal,” no less).

I doubt you’d find many NRA members who would say the Second Amendment applies only to white people. But when you speak out only on gun issues that primarily affect white people, when you mostly stay silent when black gun owners are violated, when you provide a platform for a celebrity spokesman who openly spews racial slurs, and when you demagogue fear of crime by conjuring images of black people, you certainly can’t blame black and Latino people for asking the question.

In short, the NRA seems to think we’re at risk of creeping tyranny and abuse of power from all sectors of government except from the men and women armed, badged and entrusted with the power to kill. That’s a problem, because if armed agents who enforce the laws on the ground aren’t required to respect our rights, our rights don’t really exist.

The Supreme Court could rule the NRA’s way on the Castle Doctrine for the next 25 years, but if the police continue to kick down doors with impunity, law-abiding gun owners will be at risk, and the Second Amendment will be more of an empty gesture than a constitutional protection. The Supreme Court could rule the NRA’s way on conceal carry for the next 25 years, but if the organization keeps pushing the line that cops are at war, that the populace is dangerous, and that every citizen is a possible threat, the right to carry a gun in public will always be constrained by cops conditioned to see every weapon as a threat to their existence.

Finally, the Supreme Court could rule the NRA’s way and abolish all the state laws like those that ensnared Shaneen Allen, but as long as the NRA and its allies push rhetoric that makes white people (and white cops) see all crime with a black face, the right to bear arms for people who look like her — or who look like Philando Castile — exist only in theory.



Radley Balko blogs about criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for The Washington Post. He is the author of the book "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces." Follow @radleybalko