Rise of the Warrior Cop

by Radley Balko

  This was nonsense. Nixonians themselves had been using the term since his campaign kicked into gear in 1967. More to the point, tough-sounding, no-mercy rhetoric had always been part of their anticrime strategy. They had wanted the media, civil libertarians, and liberals to characterize Nixon’s crime policies in the most draconian terms possible.

  The most likely reason Mitchell abandoned that strategy was that the White House sensed that no-knock wasn’t playing well with Nixon’s “ignored” Americans. Until then, tough-on-crime, law-and-order rhetoric had been a winner. Most “ignored” Americans didn’t think of themselves as criminals, and so could never picture themselves in need of a Miranda warning, an empathetic judge, or the advantages of preparing a defense from outside of a jail cell. But the “ignored” Americans had homes. Many were gun owners. And as a demographic group, they were likely to revere the Castle Doctrine. No polling data on no-knock existed at the time, but it seems at least possible that the increased media coverage of the issue caused even staunch crime fighters to see the possible negative consequences to allowing drug cops to go crashing into homes.

  Whatever Mitchell may have wanted to accomplish for no-knock by changing its name, for all practical purposes the political debate over no-knock raids in DC was over. Mitchell and Nixon had won. When Tydings made no effort to cut or water down the provision while the bill was in conference committee, it was irrevocably attached to the DC crime bill. Since the House and Senate had to vote on the conference committee bill as a whole—no changes or amendments are permitted in conference committee bills; otherwise, the legislative process would drag on forever—the only way Ervin and his allies could defeat no-knock was to defeat the entire DC crime bill. Circumstances at the time made that an impossible task. Because Mitchell was sitting on the DC crime figures, there was still the perception that crime was rising in the city. The midterm elections were also just a few months away. Even senators who strongly agreed with Ervin about no-knock or preventive detention weren’t ready to sacrifice the entire bill to prevent those policies from passing. Members of the House and Senate who needed to look tough on crime had an incentive to stay and record a vote in favor of the bill. Those who didn’t went home to campaign—or just to take a vacation.

  The long odds didn’t faze Ervin. He’d lost on no-knock the first time because too few of the supporters he’d lined up on the Judiciary Committee bothered to show up to vote against it. He’d lost the second time because of a slick parliamentary maneuver. And he’d lose this time because it wasn’t possible to vote against the no-knock measure without also voting against the entire crime bill. But he’d sure as hell put up a fight.

  On July 17, 1970, Ervin took the floor and spoke extemporaneously against the bill for four and a half hours. Over the course of an impassioned diatribe on the floor of the Senate, he protested, “Mr. President, the supreme value of civilization is the freedom of the individual, which is simply the right of the individual to be free from government tyranny.” He pleaded with his fellow senators not to enact a bill that contained provisions that were so hostile to the traditions that had prevailed in the United States ever since it became a republic. Once gone, he cautioned, the liberties that the bill threatened would be gone forever.24

  There was some poignant symbolism in Ervin’s sustained philippic. This was a man who over the course of his career had signed “The Southern Manifesto,” railed against Brown v. Board of Education, excoriated the Warren Court, and publicly lamented the criminal-coddling ways of the Johnson administration. Here was a law that at root was part of a mass backlash against the Warren Court, that tapped into public anger over the government being too soft on criminals, and that would primarily and overwhelmingly be utilized against black residents of the District of Columbia. And here was Sam Ervin, standing on the floor of the Senate, passionately orating against it, using notes quickly scribbled on the backs of envelopes to sling obloquy and reproach at the bill’s supporters. Liberals like Dodd and Tydings had sold out DC to get reelected. For black folks in the District of Columbia, the biggest, loudest, most potent force keeping the cops from crashing through their doors was Sam Ervin, the country lawyer, folksy Bible-thumper, and only recently reformed segregationist.

  But the bill passed easily. Nixon signed the DC crime bill into law on July 29.25 A few months later, Ervin put up yet another fight when the no-knock raid omnibus drug bill for the entire country came before the Senate in October. He lost that one too, 42–20. More than a third of the Senate didn’t stick around to vote. In his autobiography, Ervin writes that he warned his colleagues that the no-knock measures “would be grossly abused by complaisant magistrates and over-zealous officers, and that in consequence, both householders and officers would suffer death, and humble, law-abiding people would be unnecessarily harassed by no-knock raids upon their homes.”26

  The next four years would prove him right. And after a brief period of sanity, so would the next thirty.

  “I STARTED TO BECOME MORE AND MORE CONCERNED about potential abuses with the no-knock raid,” says Don Santarelli. By 1971, he had been appointed director of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the federal agency that doled out grants and gear to police agencies. But it was more than just the no-knock raids. Some of the police chiefs he worked with, he noticed, had an increasingly gung-ho mentality. Under the 1970 federal crime bill, the annual budget for Santarelli’s agency jumped from $75 million to $500 million. It seemed like every police department in the country wanted a piece. That wasn’t so unusual. But it was what they wanted that Santarelli found concerning. “They didn’t value education or training. They valued hardware,” he says. The city of Birmingham asked him for an armored personnel carrier (APC). Other chiefs wanted tanks. Los Angeles asked him for a submarine. “Anything the police chiefs could dream up to make themselves look more fearsome, they wanted,” Santarelli says.27

  They were also requesting the gear and military training to start their own tactical teams, like the one quickly becoming famous in Los Angeles. “I was always hesitant about that. There were certain supervised, tightly controlled circumstances where that kind of force was appropriate. But law enforcement has never been good at self-discipline. Once they had that sort of capability, it would be difficult to limit it to those circumstances,” Santarelli says.

  In Detroit, for example, a new police commissioner took over in 1971 and began implementing a more Nixonian approach to illicit drugs. Chief John Nichols doubled up the personnel on his narcotics unit and started arresting and imprisoning heroin dealers instead of merely chasing them off, as the city had done in the past. The result was an impressive stat sheet on the enforcement side: 1,600 arrests. But cracking down on dealers opened the city up to turf wars. In one ten-day stretch in June, Detroit logged forty murders.28 It was one of the first examples of the sort of self-perpetuating, self-escalating feedback loop created by the modern drug war. Crackdowns upset the established black markets. That created lucrative new opportunities for rising dealers and those who weren’t caught in the crackdowns. They’d then wage war to claim the new markets, with most of the victims being low-level pawns and the occasional bystander. The resulting bloodshed would spur outrage and anger, giving law enforcement and political officials more reason to order more crackdowns and to ask for more authority to use more force. The pattern would repeat itself for decades in US cities, in Latin America, and on a tragically large scale in Mexico in the 2000s.

  But in DC, Nixon’s model city, events unfolded differently, and the results were intriguing.

  WHEN RICHARD NIXON APPOINTED JERRY WILSON TO HEAD the District of Columbia’s Metro Police Department (MPD) in 1969, it didn’t sit well with the city’s black population. Civil rights leaders and black militants wanted a black chief. Wilson was a white Southerner. But Wilson would surprise them and just about everyone else—even himself.

  Wilson initially joined the MPD in 1949 after stints in the Marines and the US Navy, where h
e had enlisted at the age of fifteen. His communication skills got him a job analyzing and reporting on crime statistics in the city, a position he held while getting a bachelor’s degree in the administration of justice from American University. His last position before he was appointed chief was field operations commander, a post from which he directed the police response to the 1968 riots after Martin Luther King was assassinated. That assignment didn’t win him much favor from blacks in DC either. But he had been appointed to that position by the Johnson administration, where his intellect and openness to innovative approaches to crime had won him supporters.

  Wilson’s first priority upon taking office in August 1969 was to improve the department’s relationship with the people it served. Already, this was a marked departure from the more aggressive style of his predecessors. “We are working for the people,” Wilson explained in a 1971 interview with the Washington Afro-American. “We have to have the confidence of the citizens.”29 Previously, the MPD had primarily recruited outside the city—even outside the region. While seven in ten DC residents were black, three out of four DC patrolmen were white. Wilson focused his recruitment efforts on getting blacks who lived in the District to join the department. His first class of recruits was half black. Marion Barry, who just a year earlier had encouraged DC residents to take up arms against any cops who broke into their homes, told the paper that there was “a growing sense among blacks that the police department really is working with the people.”30 After the New York Times, just a year earlier, had compared black residents’ lack of cooperation with DC police to the relationship between native Vietnamese and American soldiers, the city’s leading black advocacy newspaper was now reporting that DC cops were once again getting tips and cooperation from black residents.31

  Instead of setting up roadblocks, employing stop-and-frisks, and implementing similarly confrontational policies in high-crime areas, Wilson instituted high-profile patrols in those neighborhoods. He adopted what at the time was an innovative use of computer software and radio communication to increase response times to citizen complaints, one of the more proven ways of both deterring crime and improving relations between police and citizens. Police departments in other cities were reluctant to take on college graduates as recruits. Wilson embraced them. He set a goal of putting fifty Ivy League grads on MPD patrols by the end of his first full year on the force.

  During the often heated antiwar protests of the early 1970s, Wilson believed that an intimidating police presence didn’t prevent confrontation, it invited it. That didn’t mean he didn’t prepare, but he put his riot control teams in buses, then parked the buses close by, but out of sight of protesters. Appearances were important. In general, instead of the usual brute force and reactionary policing that tended to pit cops against citizens—both criminal and otherwise—Wilson believed that cops were more effective when they were welcomed and respected in the neighborhoods they patrolled. “The use of violence,” he told Time in 1970, “is not the job of police officers.”32

  At the same time, when it was time to use force, Wilson put himself on the front lines. He made a point of being the first cop to confront protesters and, if it was necessary, to lob the first canister of tear gas. This won him respect from rank-and-file DC cops, even if they weren’t wild about the close supervision. As Time reported, when Wilson publicly criticized his own officers for their aggressive response to protest a couple months after he took office, the police union passed a resolution criticizing Wilson for not backing his men. His response: “I don’t stand behind my men, I stand in front of them.”33

  That approach to policing carried over to Wilson’s use of no-knock raids—or more accurately, his refusal to use them. As soon as the federal government gave him permission to use the tactic more freely, Wilson concluded that he didn’t need it. “I never really bought into the idea that police were getting gunned down while serving warrants,” Wilson says. “Drug pushers sold drugs to make money. They might run. But there weren’t many drug dealers who were in the business to get into shootouts with narcotics officers.” Wilson didn’t find the destruction of evidence exception convincing either. “We called that the ‘no-flush rule.’ Again, I just didn’t think that warranted breaking down a door. There were better ways to do it,” he says, referring to serving drug warrants. “You couldn’t flush much pot down a toilet anyway. Cocaine or heroin, you could flush a good amount. But then it was gone—off the street. They [no-knock proponents] wanted to make sure the evidence was preserved to get a conviction. But a drug conviction just wasn’t worth the risk of a no-knock raid.”34 By the one-year anniversary of the DC crime bill, Wilson had removed the no-knock raid from the MPD manual. The department made spare use of the preventive detention measure as well.

  Wilson’s tenure as MPD chief ran nearly concurrently with Nixon’s tenure as president. (Wilson took office five months after Nixon and left a month after Nixon resigned.) Under Jerry Wilson, violent crime in DC dropped 25 percent and property crime dropped 28 percent. Under Nixon, violent crime in the country as a whole went up 40 percent and property crime rose 24 percent.35 There are obviously countless variables at work in that sort of comparison. And even under Nixon, crime was still primarily a local issue. But while Nixon may not have had a direct effect on local crime policy, he did set the tone. State legislatures across the country passed get-tough-on-crime bills that gave cops more power, more authority, and more heavy-duty equipment. The country as a whole moved toward Nixon’s get-tough policies, and crime continued to soar. Washington, DC, moved away from the aggressive approach over the same period, and its crime rate dropped.

  At the time, Wilson credited the DC crime drop to the one thousand additional police officers Nixon had given him funding to hire, the methadone program, and seemingly mundane changes like improved street lighting. Others credited some of the less controversial parts of the DC crime bill pushed by Don Santarelli, like reorganizing the city’s courts. But much of the credit undoubtedly belonged to Wilson himself and his less confrontational, community-oriented approach to policing.

  Hard-line Nixon officials didn’t know quite what to make of the fact that their model city had passed on the two most controversial, high-profile provisions in the DC crime bill, and crime had gone down anyway. So they spun. Mitchell said that Wilson’s work in DC was proof that the press had overhyped the dangers of preventive detention and the no-knock raid.

  Wilson’s reluctance to utilize either law didn’t hurt his reputation with the administration in the least. “They didn’t really pressure us to use the no-knock raid at all,” Wilson says. “We told them we didn’t need it, and from what I can remember, they never brought it up again.”36 Nixon and Mitchell were more than happy to tout and take credit for the results in DC. However, they wouldn’t go out of their way to publicize just which parts of the crime bill were being used and which ones weren’t.37

  IN 1971 TWO POSITIONS OPENED ON THE US SUPREME COURT with the retirements of Justice Hugo Black and Justice John Harlan. Nixon now had an opportunity to move the Court significantly to the right, especially with respect to how it would handle the law-and-order issues he’d run on. He had already made some progress with his first two nominations, replacing the much-loathed Earl Warren with “strict constructionist” Warren Burger in 1969, and nominating Harry Blackmun after Lyndon Johnson’s crony Abe Fortas stepped down. Now he had two more picks—a historic opportunity to remake the Court and, perhaps more importantly in Nixon’s world, to “stick it to the left,” as White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman would put it in his diary.38

  Nixon had run into problems, however, with his last appointment. His first nomination to replace Fortas, Clement Haynsworth, became the first Supreme Court nominee to be rejected by the Senate in nearly forty years. The Senate rejected his next nominee too—G. Harrold Carswell—before finally confirming Blackmun.

  This time the White House circulated a preliminary list of names, which met with derision in
the media and parts of the Senate. Nixon then had to withdraw the first two nominees he announced after they were deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association. Nixon finally turned to Louis Powell, a Virginia lawyer who had previously served as president of the ABA. Powell was quickly confirmed.

  Nixon’s nomination for the other position was something of a surprise. William Rehnquist was head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), where his job was to write legal opinions when the administration requested them. (A critic might argue that the office exists to give the executive branch a legal argument justifying it to do just about anything it wants.) Nixon often mistakenly called him “Renchberg.”

  From his position in the OLC, Rehnquist signed off on all of the controversial provisions in Nixon’s various crime bills, including preventive detention, expansive wiretapping powers, and the no-knock raid.39 He was as hawkish on crime as anyone in the administration. John Mitchell once said that Rehnquist was the “only lawyer I know who would willingly defend the Sheriff of Nottingham.”

  Rehnquist had a bumpier road to confirmation than Powell. But after some often contentious hearings and debate—including some aggressive questioning from Sen. Sam Ervin about Rehnquist’s time at the OLC—he was confirmed in December 1971 by a vote of 68–26.40

  The man who had written the legal justifications for Nixon’s crime policy now had a seat on the US Supreme Court.

  BY THE SUMMER OF 1971, NINETEEN STATES HAD ADOPTED Nixon’s model antidrug legislation.41 His brute force approach to attacking the drug supply had begun to filter down to local police agencies. But Nixon was stewing over the fact that despite their success in making crime an issue and pushing through some of the toughest crime bills the country had ever seen, they’d yet to reap much political benefit from the effort. The evidence lay in the modest results of the 1970 midterms. “We still haven’t gotten through the strong position on law and order despite our leadership in this field, all of the public relations devices we use to get it across, and my hitting it hard on the campaign,” Nixon wrote in a December 1, 1970, memo to his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman.42 An internal poll taken a few months later confirmed his analysis—the public feared crime but was still largely unaware of anything Nixon was doing about it.43