Police Militarization in the US

[Pertinacious Tom]

Grand Jury Charges 1 Louisville Police Officer Involved in Breonna Taylor Shooting With 'Wanton Endangerment'
 

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Six months after Taylor's death, the grand jury declined to charge two of the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) officers involved in the deadly raid but indicted former LMPD Detective Brett Hankison on three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment. The charges are not directly related to Taylor's death, but rather for endangering her neighbors with wild shots.

"According to Kentucky law, the use of force[…] was justified to protect themselves," Republican Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron said at a press conference announcing the charges. "This justification bars us from pursuing criminal charges in Ms. Breonna Taylor's death."

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Lawyers for Taylor's family say she was asleep in bed with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, on the night of March 13, when LMPD officers serving a no-knock narcotics warrant broke down their door with a battering ram. Walker, a registered gun owner, shot at the officers believing it was a home invasion, hitting one officer in the leg. The officers fired back and hit Taylor eight times, killing her. No drugs were found.

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Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote this June that the reckless raid once again showed the moral bankruptcy and fatal consequences of the drug war: "The problem is the attempt to forcibly prevent Americans from consuming arbitrarily proscribed intoxicants, which is fundamentally immoral because it sanctions violence as a response to peaceful conduct that violates no one's rights. That problem cannot be solved by tinkering at the edges of drug prohibition."

AG Cameron is right that officers who come under fire are justified in defending themselves. He's right that this is the state of the law, but the laws and practices of the stupid drug war created the danger in the first place.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Strangers blast to through the door so her boyfriend started shooting.  You'd think the Well Regulated elk would be protesting this too. As it is the appearance of sidin' with the liberals and the darkies would be a twofold problem .

I'm not well regulated. Too much trouble. I have been addressing that stupid drug war fiasco since May though.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

The Legal Response to Breonna Taylor's Death Shows How Drug Prohibition Transforms Murder Into Self-Defense
 

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Legalities aside, it is clear that Mattingly, Cosgrove, and Hankison were the aggressors in this situation. The warrant that authorized their home invasion was based purely on guilt by association: Taylor's continued contact with an ex-boyfriend who was arrested for drug dealing that same night. The warrant was served in a reckless manner, using tactics that have led to fatal misunderstandings in cities across the country over and over again. And it was based on the immoral assumption that violence is an appropriate response to peaceful activities that violate no one's rights.

Earlier I said Walker "believed criminals were breaking into the apartment." It would be more accurate to say that criminals were breaking into the apartment—a reality that everyone would recognize but for the war on drugs. Taylor's death has been widely cited as an example of police abuse—actions that exceed the bounds of the law. But the real horror is what the law allows in the name of stopping Americans from consuming arbitrarily proscribed intoxicants.

It's the stupid drug war, stupid.

 

[BeSafe]

I watched an interesting interview the other day with a local drug lord in the Sinaloa cartel.

The interviewer asked "Are you more powerful than the Mexican Government?" 

His reply was "We're as powerful as they want us to be".

There's a lot of money being made in the stupid drug war.  That'll take a lot of political capital to change.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Cop Who Fired 16 Rounds at Breonna Taylor Said He Only Surmised That He Had Used His Gun
 

Myles Cosgrove, a Louisville, Kentucky, detective who participated in the fruitless and legally dubious drug raid that killed Breonna Taylor last March, told investigators the incident unfolded so quickly that he was not consciously aware of using his gun.

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A third officer, Detective Brett Hankison, blindly fired 10 rounds from outside the apartment, an act of recklessness that led the grand jury to charge him with three counts of wanton endangerment. Some of Hankison's rounds entered the unit behind Taylor's, which was occupied by a man, a pregnant woman, and a child. Hankison is the only officer who faces criminal charges in connection with the raid. State prosecutors concluded that the other two officers legally used deadly force in self-defense.

Cosgrove's description of the incident does not necessarily cast doubt on that conclusion, but it does underline the dangers inherent in the armed home invasions that police routinely use to enforce drug prohibition. Those dangers include not only the well-known risk that residents will mistake cops for robbers but the possibility that police will mistake their colleagues' gunfire for an assault by their targets. In such chaotic circumstances, there is also a risk that police will be injured or killed by friendly fire.

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During his post-indictment press conference, Cameron said "our investigation showed, and the grand jury agreed, that Mattingly and Cosgrove were justified in their return of deadly fire after having been fired upon by Kenneth Walker" (emphasis added). But he also made it clear that his prosecutors determined that charges against Mattingly and Cosgrove were not legally viable. "According to Kentucky law, the use of force by Mattingly and Cosgrove was justified to protect themselves," he said. "This justification bars us from pursuing criminal charges in Miss Breonna Taylor's death."

Since that is the way Cameron's office framed the issue, it is hardly surprising that the grand jury did not approve charges against Mattingly or Cosgrove. But it is clearly a stretch to say "the grand jury agreed" charges were inappropriate; that is what state prosecutors, who dominated the proceedings as the only legal experts who offered an opinion on the matter, told the jurors. Accepting that guidance in the absence of an alternative legal theory is not quite the same as agreeing with it.

The distinction struck at least one of the jurors as important. Last week that unnamed juror filed a motion seeking the public release of the grand jury record so that "the truth may prevail."

That truth includes not just Hankison's recklessness, which was glaring enough to justify criminal charges, but the gratuitous risks that all of the officers took that night. The Times notes that Hankison "had not anticipated a firefight" because he "expected one unarmed woman, who had no criminal record, to be home alone." In a saner world, that expectation would have cast doubt on the tactics that police decided to use, even leaving aside the weak excuse of a search warrant that was built entirely on guilt by association.

Based on scant evidence and the immoral logic of the war on drugs, these officers created the situation in which Cosgrove found himself reflexively firing 16 rounds down a dark hallway.

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It's the stupid drug war, stupid.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

And coming soon to a stupid drug war raid near you...

The U.K. has developed a new fighting drone designed to help soldiers breach urban defenses. The i9 uncrewed aerial vehicle can navigate indoors, locate and identify targets, and then open fire with not one but two shotgun barrels. Like all weaponized drones, a human operator must make the decision to shoot or not shoot.

The drone, revealed by the Times of London, was developed for the British armed forces. The drone is meant to act as a breaching weapon, flying into a small room or house occupied by enemy troops and neutralizing them from within.

Things like MRAP's that are developed for military use have a way of creeping into our civilian wars.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Just how many fucking times does it take to repeat the words Tom.

Are you bored yet?

Has it made a difference?

Is this an honourable way to make a living?

Millions.

No.

Yes, polls show support for the stupid drug war waning after decades of advocacy by libertarians.

Yes, for those who are paid to oppose the stupid drug war, it seems honorable to me. No one wants to pay me so I do it for free.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

A Month Before Louisville Drug Warriors Killed Breonna Taylor, They Knew the 'Suspicious Packages' She Supposedly Was Receiving Came From Amazon

https://reason.com/2020/10/09/a-month-before-louisville-drug-warriors-killed-breonna-taylor-they-knew-the-suspicious-packages-she-supposedly-was-receiving-came-from-amazon/

Even after Breonna Taylor broke up with Jamarcus Glover, he continued to receive packages at her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky. That arrangement had lethal consequences, because it was the main justification for the reckless, fruitless March 13 drug raid that killed Taylor, an unarmed 26-year-old EMT with no criminal record.

Police obtained the no-knock warrant to search Taylor's apartment by suggesting that Glover, who was arrested for drug dealing that same night, had been stashing "narcotics and/or proceeds from the sale of narcotics" there. But according to newly released transcripts of interviews with Louisville police officers, they knew a month before they invaded Taylor's home that Glover's packages contained neither of those things.

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It's the stupid drug war, stupid.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

5 year old article but a good summary of no-knock raids:

Cops do 20,000 no-knock raids a year. Civilians often pay the price when they go wrong.

https://www.vox.com/2014/10/29/7083371/swat-no-knock-raids-police-killed-civilians-dangerous-work-drugs

and when they go "right" they're pretty unsuccessful:

There isn't great data, but the ACLU's analysis showed that about 35 percent of SWAT drug raids turned up contraband, while 36 percent of them turned up nothing. (And 29 percent of SWAT reports didn't mention whether they found anything — a fact police are more likely to omit when they didn't find anything than when they did.) In forced-entry SWAT raids, the "success" rate of actually finding drugs dropped to about a 25 percent.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Bad cop! No MRAPs!

And no private prisons either.

Well, fewer of both anyway...

https://reason.com/2021/01/26/biden-orders-justice-department-to-phase-out-use-of-private-prisons/
 

President Joe Biden issued an executive order today to phase out the Justice Department's use of private prisons.

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"Today's executive order validates something we've been saying for years: No one should profit from the human misery that is caused by mass incarceration," David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's national prison project, said in a press release. "Prison privatization increases the potential for mistreatment and abuse of incarcerated people, and this move by the Biden administration will start curtailing this insidious practice."

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In the grand scheme of the U.S. criminal justice system, the order will not have a significant impact. State prison systems hold the majority of the roughly 2.3 million incarcerated people in the country. And of the federal prison population, only 15 percent are held in private prisons.

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CNN also reported that Biden will sign an executive order reinstating Obama-era limits on the transfer of military equipment to local and state law enforcement. The Pentagon's 1033 program distributes surplus military equipment to police. Most of those items are mundane things like cold-weather gloves and filing cabinets.

Amid national outrage over images of militarized police in Ferguson, Missouri, the Obama administration limited the program in 2015, prohibiting the transfer of such items as camouflage, .50-caliber ammunition, tracked armored vehicles, grenade launchers, and bayonets. Police departments in possession of these items were asked to return them.

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The 1033 program is not the most significant federal source of police militarization, though. The program is dwarfed by Department of Homeland Security anti-terrorism grants to local police, as well as shared revenue from property seizures and forfeitures.

It's a start anyway, so hat tip to Biden on those orders.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

unfortunately the same people who oppose de-militarizing (and I'm coming to hate that overly generalized phrase)  also oppose improved firearm control.

Thanks for the morning laugh!

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Kentucky Law Limits Use Of No-Knock Warrants, A Year After Breonna Taylor's Killing
 

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Beshear, a Democrat, invited members of Taylor's family to stand with him as he signed the bill, which passed the Republican-controlled legislature late last month. It prohibits law enforcement's use of warrants "authorizing entry without notice" except in certain circumstances.

No-knock warrants are still permitted, for example, in situations where "the crime alleged is a crime that would qualify a person, if convicted, as a violent offender" or if "giving notice prior to entry will endanger the life or safety of any person."

Such warrants must be executed by a specially trained response team equipped with body-worn cameras and "clearly identifying insignia," Beshear's office said, noting that counties with a population of less than 90,000 can get a court-approved exemption. An EMT must be on site to provide medical assistance, and entry without notice can only occur between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. unless a court determines otherwise.

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Good for KY

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Another no-knock raid caused by the stupid drug war. Wrong residence again. And camera-shy cops.
 

Officers with Maryland's Montgomery County Police Department (MCPD) allegedly executed an illegal no-knock raid against the wrong residence, assaulting a man and terrorizing his family in their home, according to a new lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland.

The intended target was an alleged drug dealer.

Police instead raided the home of Hernan Palma, a Montgomery County firefighter who says he was awoken by "what sounded like an explosion" at 4:30 a.m. on September 13, 2019, as cops beat down his front door. He assumed they were burglars, as he has no recollection of the group announcing themselves as police officers.

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Police also failed to use their body cameras appropriately, shuttering the recording after a brief period without explanation.

I hope the Palma family wins their suit, but even nicer would be stopping the senseless war on weed and the abusive law enforcement practices it engenders.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Federal Militarization of Law Enforcement Must End

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The origins of 1033 lie in America’s “forever wars” on drugs, crime, and terror. In 1989, Congress gave the Pentagon temporary authority to give equipment that was no longer being used by the military to local police and sheriff’s departments. Armored vehicles, planes, rifles, scopes, grenades, bayonets — nearly everything was on the table, so long as the military “deemed [it] suitable … in counter-drug activities.”

In 1996, Congress made the Pentagon’s temporary authority to give weapons of war to local law enforcement agencies permanent and expanded its purview to “counterterrorism” as well, creating 1033 as we know it. The wars on drugs, crime, and terror are responsible for some of the most egregious violations of civil liberties, civil rights, and human rights of the past quarter century: mass incarceration, police killings, the forty-fifth president’s “Muslim ban,” in the U.S., as well as systematic torture, drone strikes, extraordinary renditions, and extralegal killings abroad. Local police forces armed with weapons of war — and still targeting Black and Brown Americans — is yet another inheritance.

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ACLU Inc wants the 1033 program gone.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

I don't see why the judge agreed that Mr. Delgado's possession of a registered gun and a concealed weapons permit met the "risk" threshold in the first place.

Those are not always causes for panic.

Fourth Amendment Forbids Handcuffing Driver Just Because He Has Gun + Gun Permit

...On this record, no reasonable officer could conclude that Plaintiff posed a meaningful threat of being "armed and dangerous" simply because he disclosed that he had a pistol and a license to possess it. Any contrary holding would make it practically impossible for the lawful owner of a firearm to maintain a Fourth Amendment right to privacy in his or her automobile.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Civilian Cops Don't Need Military Weapons

Congress disagrees.

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Last month, Congress had a chance to rein in this program. But the House of Representatives rejected, on a 198-231 vote, an amendment to a national defense authorization bill that would have limited these 1033 equipment transfers. It was a timely proposal given that the pullback in Afghanistan means that there's going to be more surplus equipment. Inexplicably, Joe Biden has opposed even modest restrictions on the 1033 program, which echoes the position of the former Trump administration.

The amendment was reasonable. It would have forbidden the transfer of "controlled firearms, ammunition, bayonets, grenade launchers, grenades (including stun and flash-bang) and explosives" as well as MRAPs, armored and weaponized drones and aircraft that "have no established commercial flight application." I'm still not sure why local police and sheriffs' departments need grenade launchers and weaponized drones, but call me old-fashioned.

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I think the President explained why police need those weapons. They're being outgunned by a citizenry equipped with battlefield .22's and other such weapons of war!

The amendment in question attracted mostly YEA votes from TeamD, with enough NAY votes to defeat it. On TeamR, only Massie and McClintock voted YEA. So good for them, at least.

 

[jocal505]

Civilian Cops Don't Need Military Weapons

Congress disagrees.

I think the President explained why police need those weapons. They're being outgunned by a citizenry equipped with battlefield .22's and other such weapons of war!

The amendment in question attracted mostly YEA votes from TeamD, with enough NAY votes to defeat it. On TeamR, only Massie and McClintock voted YEA. So good for them, at least.

Ah, gun escalation.

• The idiots supplied the imbalanced American humans with lots of battle guns,
  
• so more battle guns are needed,
  
• to protect and serve.
  
• This is battle violence normalized, this is battle violence unleashed and utilized...by the state
  
• which is um taking a page from fucking Wayne la Pierre.
  
•  Domestic tranquility and the security of a free State, this is not.
  
• This is more violence, to eliminate violence.
  

In Japan, the SWAT teams pack a long, thin, mattresses, and they wrap up the violent perps, just like burritos, every dang time.

Hi Dogballs. You need to expose yourself to Martin Luther King's observations. He was influenced by Hindu thought.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Would the libertarians be stoked about a new military force in Florida?

Hah! Of course not, as anyone with a passing familiarity would know.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

In no-knock raid news,

Questionable SWAT Raid Leaves a Toddler Injured and His Father Facing Attempted Murder Charges
 

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At approximately 5 a.m. on February 3, a Pensacola Police Department SWAT team executed a search warrant on Marioneaux's house. According to the department, police were searching for evidence related to a January shooting that injured two people. (The police would later tell local news outlet WEAR-TV Channel 3, which has reported extensively on the case, that Marioneaux was not a suspect in that shooting. His family said the search warrant was for electronics.)

The arrest report filed in the case says officers knocked and announced that they had a search warrant for approximately 10 seconds before breaking through Marioneaux's door with a battering ram. 

As the lead officer entered the doorway, Marioneaux fired a single shot at him with a handgun. The round ricocheted off a shield the detective was holding. If the detective "had not been equipped with the ballistic shield he would have been struck in the face/head," the report said.

The officer returned fire at Marioneaux, but didn't hit him. Marioneaux dropped his gun and surrendered.

"While being taken into custody, Marioneaux made spontaneous statements in the presence of Detective Skipper (#185) that he was sorry," the report said. "Marioneaux also made spontaneous statement in front of Sgt. Stockpile #63 that he was sorry for shooting at officers."

What happened after Marioneaux's arrest, though, has also outraged his family and friends. As he was taken into custody, his 1-year-old and 3-year-old children were put in the back of a police cruiser until their mother could arrive to pick them up.

Moiya Dixon, the mother, told local news outlets that she was woken up by a phone call that morning telling her what had happened. When she arrived at the scene, she found her 1-year-old son had scrapes, scratches, and bumps on his face and head. The child allegedly fell out of the backseat police car and onto the pavement when an investigator opened the door.

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Not a suspect and they're looking for electronics? At least it's not directly related to the stupid drug war this time, but why the need for this dangerous kind of raid?

I doubt the investigator intended to dump the baby on the pavement, but it could have been avoided just by serving a regular warrant.

The other one is, as is more usual, related to the stupid drug war:

Brett Hankison Is Not the Only Cop Who Acted Recklessly the Night Breonna Taylor Was Killed
 

The trial of the one Louisville police officer who faced criminal charges after the March 2020 raid that killed Breonna Taylor began yesterday. Former detective Brett Hankison is charged not with killing Taylor, an unarmed 25-year-old EMT who died in a hail of bullets after cops broke into her apartment in the middle of the night, but with endangering her neighbors by firing blindly into the building.

Hankison "is the one that fired the shots that are the subject of this case," defense attorney Stew Matthews told the jury. "That's not the issue. The issue is: What was the reasoning behind his firing those shots?" Reasoning is probably too strong a word for what was going on inside Hankison's brain that night. But Matthews suggested that the detective's actions were understandable in the circumstances. "You are going to discover that this scene was total chaos," he said.

While Hankison undoubtedly contributed to the chaos, he was by no means mainly responsible for it. The people who were have escaped criminal liability, vividly illustrating how the war on drugs transforms murder into self-defense.

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The "chaos" that Hankison thinks justified his blind gunfire was the culmination of several egregious failures.

Jaynes failed to tell the truth when he applied for a search warrant. Jefferson County Circuit Judge Mary Shaw, who approved that warrant and four others related to the case against Glover within 12 minutes, failed to question the thin evidence that Jaynes presented to establish probable cause and the complete lack of information to support dispensing with the knock-and-announce requirement.

The cops who served the warrant failed to plan the operation carefully, failed to consult with SWAT officers, and failed to consider the potential for deadly confusion. Cosgrove and Mattingly, who placed themselves in a "fatal funnel" that exposed them to the danger they cited to justify their use of deadly force, failed to anticipate that the 22 bullets they fired in the dark might strike someone other than the person who had shot at them. Yet somehow Hankison is the only officer accused of showing "extreme indifference to the value of human life."

But for those failures, Taylor would still be alive. Most fundamentally, none of this would have happened if politicians had not authorized violence as a response to the consumption of psychoactive substances they have arbitrarily proscribed.

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The "need" for a no-knock raid was, once again, to avoid destruction of prohibited drugs in those packages. In this case, the cops actually knew they were clothes from Amazon, but we're going to have some lying cops and some judges who don't look too carefully at warrants.

But even if they were telling the truth and actually knew that some packages had contained contraband drugs, no-knocks value the evidence over the lives of the people doing the raid and those being raided.

 

[Pertinacious Tom]

Civilian Cops Don't Need Military Weapons

Congress disagrees.


I think the President explained why police need those weapons. They're being outgunned by a citizenry equipped with battlefield .22's and other such weapons of war!

Here is the old but first google response to "are police outgunned?" Link.

February 26, 2011-Referring to increasing seizures of semiautomatic assault weapons that are trafficked in from outside states, Brockton (Massachusetts) Police Department Captain Emanuel Gomes says, “We’re literally outgunned. You’re talking about the kind of firepower that can go through vehicles, through vests, and that can literally go through a house.”

I doubt things have improved since 2011.

True enough, still lots of battlefield .22's and other suitable militia weapons in the hands of The People. Been that way my whole life.

I don't think it's really an expanding crisis, but then I also disagreed with Massachusetts on whether the Bill of Rights applies to technology invented since 1789.

 

[Marty Gingras]

I don't think it's really an expanding crisis, but then I also disagreed with Massachusetts on whether the Bill of Rights applies to technology invented since 1789.