Rise of the Warrior Cop

by Radley Balko

  According to subsequent reports, the police knocked and announced themselves, then forced entry when an officer claimed to have seen DuBose run to the back of the house. Once they made their way inside, DuBose threw a glass of wine into the face of Officer Andy Rios. Police say the two men then engaged in a struggle over Rios’s gun. Officer Carlos Garcia then opened fire, shooting DuBose five times, four times in the back. DuBose died in his home.

  “I wasn’t personally involved, but these were my guys,” Stamper says. “They called me in. I showed up shortly afterward, and I saw this man lying dead in his own living room. He was just watching TV. He had no criminal record. All he knew was that some armed men were breaking into his house.”

  The incident hit Stamper hard. “Just overwhelming heartsickness. I mean, this man wasn’t armed, he was not named in the warrant. He spoke out against drug use because he saw what it had done to his kid. And you know, God knows how many other times we scared the bejesus out of innocent people. You hit the wrong house. Or you hit the right house, but there are wives, girlfriends, kids inside completely unaware of what’s going on. They could be completely ignorant of any drug-related criminal activity, but a girlfriend’s home or apartment might have a stash that their male partner has secreted away. And so they’d get raided too. When one of these raids would just scare the hell out of women, children, family pets, it just made me wonder what in the world we were doing, and why the hell we were doing it.”

  Tommie DuBose’s wife, brother-in-law, and twenty-five-year-old son Brett were all in the house at the time of the raid. None of them heard either the knock or the announcement. One neighbor who saw the entire raid estimated that only about fifteen seconds expired from the time the police pulled up until he heard gunshots. Others said that they never heard any announcement. Brett DuBose said that he first saw the police pull up from the window in another room, but that they were in the house before he had time to say anything.

  The San Diego County District Attorney’s Office eventually cleared the raiding officers of any wrongdoing, but the report did question their tactics. It found that the yellow jackets they wore during raids didn’t make it clear enough to citizens that they were police. And in the DuBose raid specifically, the DA found that the officers didn’t properly announce themselves and didn’t wait long enough after the announcement before entering.

  The San Diego Police Department eventually acknowledged that DuBose was an innocent victim. Assistant Chief Bob Burgreen even acknowledged that the police had made some mistakes. “The officers did not allow enough time or enough notice,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “They did not give the DuBose family enough time to answer the door adequately before they went into the house. The entry that quickly was not justified.” But Burgreen added that because their mistakes were made in good faith, none of the officers would be disciplined. And the officers involved would continue to serve high-risk drug warrants.

  The problem was that this wouldn’t be the only mistake. On March 2, 1988, San Diego police conducted a 2:20 AM raid on the home of John Taylor, his brother George, and George’s wife. Forty-four-year-old George Taylor was thrown to the floor with a gun to his head. An officer then stepped on his neck to keep him in place while they searched the house. He’d had spinal surgery a year earlier. The police apologized when they realized they had intended to raid the house next door. But a week later the Taylors were again awoken by San Diego police. The cops were again raiding the house next door. This time one officer mistakenly smashed out the windows to the Taylors’ home, then pushed the barrel of his gun inside.19

  Eighteen months after the DuBose raid, San Diego police stormed the home of Adelita Pina and her three daughters. They expected to find a major drug operation, including “kilos” of marijuana, firearms, and ammunition. They found nothing. Lt. Dan Berglund, head of the city’s narcotics team, refused to admit that they had made a mistake, and retreated to the now-familiar excuse that though Pina may have been innocent, someone else must have been selling drugs from her house. Of course, that excuse completely missed the point—and showed how the drug war could blind police to the rights and well-being of the people they were supposed to be serving. Berglund’s defense of the raid was that his officers had correctly raided the house where undercover cops had bought drugs from a man named “Pete.” That Pete didn’t actually live at the house, or that three young girls, their aunt, and their uncle were subjected to a terrifying raid that turned up nothing, was all beside the point. Technically, Berglund’s cops were probably right. That was all that mattered. Therefore the raid was justified.20

  Five months later, another mistaken raid. Police said that they knocked on Ken Fortner’s door, then decided to break it down when they heard noises inside indicating that someone was destroying evidence. But as Commander Larry Gore told the Los Angeles Times, during the pre-raid briefing someone “inadvertently wrote down the wrong number.” Fortner was thrown face-first into a flight of stairs. His friend Kelly McAloon was tossed onto a concrete patio and suffered injuries to his ribs that required a trip to the emergency room for X-rays. Like Berglund, Gore’s justification once again glossed over the harm done. “They went to this location with the best of intentions,” he said. “They were armed with all the correct information, and they had a legitimate reason to do what they did. They just had the wrong address.”21

  But unlike other parts of the country, things did improve in San Diego. In response to the mistaken raids and a number of questionable police shootings, Stamper spearheaded a series of reforms to move the department to a more community-oriented style of policing. By the early 1990s, San Diego police officials and city leaders were in regular contact with civil rights and minority leaders. The city set up a hotline to report police abuse, and persuaded a local TV station to host a telethon in which viewers could call in to have on-air conversations with city leaders.

  In 1993 the Los Angeles Times credited those efforts with saving the city from the riots that hit Los Angeles after the verdict in the Rodney King beating case in 1992.22 City and police officials in San Diego were quick to denounce the acquittal of the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King, but more importantly, they had direct lines to the city’s minority communities when the verdict was announced. They could build a strategy around empathy, not antagonism. Consequently, city officials knew that angry people would want to vent. So rather than suppress demonstrations, they allowed them—and in fact encouraged them.

  They then sent police officers out into the city’s minority neighborhoods. City officials later acknowledged that this was to prevent the protests from getting out of hand and turning violent. But because of the city’s embrace of true community policing, dispatching cops to their beats en masse looked more like a show of support than a show of force. The cops knew the neighborhoods they were sent out to keep calm—not just the street grids and landmarks but the pastors, the school principals, and the community leaders. One local activist told the Times, “One of the reasons we survived is that people from the mayor to the City Council to the arts organizations got out into the streets immediately and sided with the people, not against them.”23

  While paramilitary police raids—and botched raids—continued to soar in large cities around the country throughout the 1990s and 2000s, in my own research I’ve found only one mistaken raid by San Diego police since the 1990 raid at the home of Ken Fortner. Interestingly, since the late 1980s, San Diego has also boasted one of the lowest crime rates in the country. It consistently ranks among the five safest big cities in America.24 Crime in the city has been falling for the last two decades, just as it has in the rest of the country. San Diego’s crime rate peaked in 1989, however, just as the new policies were taking hold in the city.25 The national crime rate peaked in 1991.26 As we’ll see, there were a few other places that for at least a time bucked the trend toward more militarized police. As with San Diego in the 1990s—and even Washington, DC, in the early 1970s—not only were none of
them overrun by drug dealers and gangs as a result, but there’s good evidence that their lower crime rates outperformed comparable cities and the country at large.

  GEORGE H. W. BUSH TROUNCED THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, in the 1988 presidential election, when he did it with a campaign that exploited the fear of crime like none since Nixon in 1968. The most notorious example was the racially loaded television commercial about Willie Horton, a black convict who raped and stabbed a white woman while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison. Bush and campaign manager Lee Atwater relentlessly attacked Dukakis as soft on crime, hitting him with Horton, his opposition to the death penalty, and his ties to the ACLU. Three years later, Atwater—then fighting an inoperable brain tumor—would apologize to Dukakis.27 But Bush’s victory was a green light for a whole new slate of tough-on-crime initiatives.

  One of his first moves was to appoint William Bennett to be his drug czar. Bennett had practically begged for the job, calling Bush and Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, several times after the election to ask for the position. Bennett had headed up the National Endowment for the Humanities and then the Department of Education under Reagan. He had run both agencies as a proud moral scold. Which isn’t to say he was a prude. Bennett was an obese man, a chain-smoker, and, the country would learn years later, he had a pretty serious jones for video poker. But those weren’t culture war issues. Bennett was also a fierce drug warrior and a favorite of Christian Coalition types. After leaving office, he’d basically appoint himself the country’s guardian of virtue.

  Bennett’s main contribution to the drug war was to infuse it with morality. “The simple fact is that drug use is wrong,” he wrote in a 1990 essay for Reader’s Digest. “And in the end, the moral argument is the most compelling argument.”28 That was the lingering irony of Bennett’s reign in the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). The man who often struggled to control his own indulgences was ready to unleash a full federal arsenal of force on people whose indulgences he personally found immoral. Of course, Bennett’s indulgences were legal. But when pressed on the morality question—Why is marijuana immoral, but alcohol and nicotine aren’t?—the best he and his surrogates could do was point to the fact that pot was illegal. When confronted with the legalization question, Bennett would return to the argument that pot was immoral. The transparently circular bit of argumentation—it’s immoral because it’s illegal, and it’s illegal because it’s immoral—would have been amusing if not for the fact that it had some very real consequences, up to and including ruining and ending lives.

  For all the war rhetoric to have come from politicians’ mouths over the previous twenty years of drug prohibition, Bennett’s somehow managed to reach new heights of bellicosity. Embedded in his morality approach to drug prohibition was a new effort at dehumanizing drug users. Bennett demanded that drug warriors in the administration stop talking about addicts as “sick” and stop referring to addiction as a health problem. Going forward, the federal government would simply view them as bad people. Fundamentally bad people aren’t cured or mended. The only real question is how best to remove them from the good people.29

  On his first day in office, Bennett took a page from Nixon and designed a plan for the nation’s capital. He wanted “a massive wave of arrests” of drug offenders, and proposed converting abandoned buildings into temporary prisons to house the arrestees until he could get more money to build more prisons. He didn’t mince words about his intent. “I’m not a person who says that the first purpose of punishment is rehabilitation,” Bennett said. “The first purpose is moral, to exact a price for transgressing the rights of others.” It’s a line Bennett and other drug warriors would use over and over again for the next decade.30 Of course, Bennett was advocating mass punishment for consensual crimes, which by definition don’t violate the rights of others. But Bennett was never one for consistency—just force. Bennett and some members of Congress briefly even considered declaring martial law in DC and bringing in the National Guard to enforce it. He did impose an 11:00 PM curfew, which was later overturned by a federal judge. In 1990 Bennett floated the idea of suspending habeas corpus for drug offenders. “It’s a funny war when the ‘enemy’ is entitled to due process of law and a fair trial,” he told Fortune. Lest that seem too extreme, he hedged a bit. “By the way, I’m in favor of due process. But that kind of slows things down.”31 Later he told Larry King that he’d be up for beheading drug dealers. He conceded that doing so might be “legally difficult,” but said that, “morally, I have no problem with it.”32

  Bennett even urged children to turn in their friends who used drugs to police. Doing so, he said, was “an act of true friendship.”33 The country seemed to agree. One poll found that 83 percent of respondents would call the police on a drug-using relative.34 Urging families to turn one another in to the government for victimless crimes was once an idea we associated with Iron Curtain regimes. But the drug war encouraged it. Back in 1983, Daryl Gates had started the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, which sent cops into Los Angeles schools to talk to students about drugs. The program swept the country, and by the mid-1990s there were numerous reports of children who had turned in their parents for small amounts of drugs after attending DARE lectures. DARE officials denied that the program encouraged such behavior, but in most cases the children were commended by police and DARE for “doing the right thing” after watching their parents marched into squad cars and taken to jail for what were usually possession charges.35

  Despite consistent data showing that drug use and addiction were abating, Bennett’s Drug Strategy report of 1989 declared drugs to be a “deepening crisis” that presented “the gravest threat to our national well-being.” Bennett’s appointment and subsequent hard line instigated a new round of drug war hysteria from other public officials. Sen. Phil Gram, Republican of Texas, and Republican Georgia representative Newt Gingrich introduced a bill to convert unused army centers into mass detention centers for drug offenders. Republican representative Richard Ray of Georgia proposed that drug offenders be exiled to Midway and Wake Islands. With no distractions, Ray argued, it would be easier for them to rehabilitate. Ray’s proposal even passed the House Armed Services Committee. He said that when he proposed the idea to a conference of sheriffs and police chiefs, he received a standing ovation. FBI director William Sessions declared that the country would need to “strike a new balance between order and individual liberties.” Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. William Crowe went further, stating that with the new antidrug offensive, “you’re probably going to have to infringe on some human rights.” In testimony before Congress, Darryl Gates proclaimed that casual drug use was “treason,” then recommended that users be “taken out and shot.” It was an especially odd comment given that Gates’s own son had a history of problems with drug abuse.36 On several occasions in the 1980s, the House and Senate also flirted with extending the death penalty to convicted drug dealers.

  In terms of actual policy, Bush and Bennett proposed huge increases in funding to build new prisons. Their plan proposed three times more funding for law enforcement than for treatment, and shifted much of the enforcement emphasis from smugglers and dealers to casual users. The plan nudged states to raise penalties on users, to seize their cars, and to send them to military-like “boot camps” for rehabilitation, regardless of whether or not they were actually addicted.

  As part of the 1988 crime bill, Congress also created a new set of federal grants called “Byrne grants” through the Justice Department’s Justice Assistants Grants (JAG) program.37 Over the next twenty-five years, Byrne grants would send billions of federal dollars to police departments across the country to fight crime in what amounted to a larger, better-funded, more ingeniously planned, and thus more successful attempt at what Nixon tried to do with the LEAA.

  The Byrne grant program gave the White House another way to impose its crime policy on local law enforcement. As loca
l police departments were infused with federal cash, members of Congress got press release fodder for bringing federal money back to the police departments in their districts. No one gave much thought to the potential unintended consequences of such a program because there was no reason to—for everyone who mattered, the program was a winner. The program’s losers would become apparent in the 1990s.

  The careless mixing of cops and soldiers continued too. In 1989 President Bush created yet more regional “joint task forces” to further coordinate between the military and law enforcement agencies across the country—but again, only for drug policing. One of the few voices of sanity in the Reagan years was Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who spoke out against his own boss’s attempt to enlist the military in drug policing. Bush’s secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, had no such reservations. He’d write in a DoD publication a few years later, “The detection and countering of the production, trafficking, and use of illegal drugs is a high priority national security mission at the Department of Defense.”38

  Democrats in Congress savaged Bennett and Bush’s drug plan—for not going far enough. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Joe Biden told the Associated Press that, “quite frankly,” the Bush-Bennett plan “is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand.”39 Representative Larry Smith of Florida lamented the lack of more funding to hire more drug warriors. “This is a war that is being fought without very many troops,” he said.40 The most pointed criticism came from Representative Charlie Rangel of New York. A March 1989 profile of Rangel in Ebony magazine ran under the headline, “Charles Rangel: The Front-Line General in the War on Drugs.” Rangel told the magazine: “All these people are talking about protecting the world against communism and the Soviets. . . . How dare they let this happen to our children and not scream with indignation!” It isn’t clear just whom Rangel was criticizing. Just about everyone running for office had been screaming with indignation for ten years. Yet Rangel called the federal drug war “lackadaisical” and “indifferent” and said that it suffered from “a lack of commitment.” He damned methadone treatment as “a crime” and snapped that anyone who even mentioned legalization was committing “moral suicide.”41