Rise of the Warrior Cop

by Radley Balko

  Scott replied, with a bit of whimsy, “Well, that’s not really what we intended.”

  The room had a good chuckle. The next year the Democrats increased funding to the COPS program by $40 million. The following year, with Obama in the White House, the program’s budget increased 250 percent, to $1.55 billion.

  Early Monday morning, the chief of detectives requests an urgent meeting with the police chief. At the meeting he tells the police chief that the department’s op narc, Detective Eveready, has gathered intelligence indicating that “Mad Dog Brown,” one of the city’s more well-known drug dealers, has obtained a large shipment of rock cocaine. Mad Dog, who is credited by police with killing a number of rival dealers after giving them a mad dog look, has said he will never be taken alive. The intelligence indicates that Mad Dog has obtained enough rock cocaine to supply the city’s drug users for a month. He is reportedly held up in a fortified apartment on the third floor of a public housing project and surrounded by colleagues armed with military-type assault rifles.

  That was the scenario Joseph McNamara set up to kick off the afternoon panel he was moderating for a groundbreaking drug policy conference in 1997 at the Hoover Institution. McNamara was a fellow at Hoover, the conservative think tank affiliated with Stanford University. More than one hundred police chiefs, judges, prosecutors, civil rights and civil liberties leaders, drug treatment professionals, and academics had gathered for the event, which was covered by C-SPAN. It was likely the first event of its kind—and if not, it was certainly the most high-profile. McNamara—who had thirty-five years’ experience in law enforcement—himself had become a critic of the drug war and police militarization. But the Hoover name gave the event some credibility with conservatives and law enforcement officials. Speakers included Milton Friedman, former secretary of State George Schultz, Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke, Baltimore police commissioner Thomas Frazier, Ed Meese, California judge James Gray, and San Jose, California, mayor Susan Hammer.

  McNamara himself started his career as a patrol officer in Harlem in the 1960s, where he walked one of the highest-crime beats in the country. He worked his way up through the NYPD, achieving the rank of lieutenant before accepting a criminal justice fellowship at Harvard. Under the fellowship, he studied the operations of a methadone clinic back in Harlem, which spurred his interest in drug policy. McNamara went on to earn a doctorate in public administration. His dissertation was an examination of how law enforcement handled drug use in America before and after the 1913 Harrison Narcotics Act. After completing his doctorate, he returned to the NYPD as a deputy inspector in charge of crime analysis.

  In 1973, McNamara was appointed police chief in Kansas City. Three years later, he was appointed police chief for San Jose, California. He headed that department for fifteen years. McNamara resisted the aggressive, militaristic trends brought on by the drug war in the 1980s. He embraced community policing, and showed little tolerance for police misconduct and excessive force. By the time he retired in 1991, San Jose had surpassed San Francisco to become the most populous city in northern California. Among cities with a population of 400,000 or more, San Jose also had the lowest crime rate in the country for the last three years of McNamara’s tenure. The city’s crime rate in 1990 was 60 percent of San Diego’s, half that of San Francisco, and one-quarter of the rate in Los Angeles. McNamara pulled this off with one of the smallest per capita police departments in America.

  That record (and his own conservative politics) won McNamara clout with the right, despite his vocal criticism of the war on drugs, police abuse, and police militarization. It also helped him land his post–law enforcement position with Hoover shortly after retirement. In 1995, McNamara won funding to conduct four drug policy conferences at Hoover. The first was in 1995. The panel he was moderating in 1997 was the second.

  McNamara’s co-panelists for the militarization session were Los Angeles police chief Bernard Parks, US district judge Robert Sweet, San Jose mayor Hammer, defense attorney Ron Rose, San Francisco district attorney Terence Hallinan, ACLU executive director Ira Glasser, former Santa Clara, California, NAACP director Tommy Fulcher, and Robert Garner of the Drug Abuse Services Bureau in Santa Clara.

  After laying out the hypothetical above, McNamara turned to Chief Parks. What was his next move? Parks responded that he’d attempt to verify the tip. If it checked out, he’d send in the SWAT team. McNamara asked about the sort of ammunition the SWAT team used. Weren’t their bullets capable of going through walls? “They’ll go through a car engine two blocks away,” Parks answered. McNamara then changed the hypothetical. What if it wasn’t crack, but marijuana? Would he still send in an armed-to-the-teeth SWAT team? Parks said he would. What if it was a shipment of bootlegged Valium? Still with the SWAT team. Black market booze? SWAT team.

  Mayor Hammer was up next. What was her role in overseeing the police department? Would she be comfortable with her own police department conducting a heavy-handed SWAT raid in a crowded housing complex over illegal Valium? Hammer replied that her job was “to support the chief,” not to question him. If the raid had gone over poorly with the public, she might go on TV to reassure the city. She added that she doubted whether such raids did anything at all to reduce the drug supply, but that the raid needed to be carried out anyway. “I don’t know how you don’t do the raid and have any credibility with the community.”

  McNamara then turned to DA Hallinan. He too said it wasn’t his job to question police tactics. Even if he thought the raid was too dangerous or an unnecessary use of force, he’d keep his opinions to himself. It just wasn’t his job to tell the police chief whether or not he thought a raid was appropriate.

  McNamara also asked Sweet, the federal judge, if he’d sign a warrant to make the raid a “no-knock” in each of the various hypotheticals. Since Nixon first pushed the no-knock policy, politicians and police officials had stated over and over again that the tactic would be monitored and patrolled by the judges who must sign off on the search warrants. Sweet said that while he worried about the drug war’s erosion of the Fourth Amendment, he and most judges typically didn’t second-guess or provide much scrutiny to affidavits requesting no-knock search warrants. After the fact, they might hear a defendant’s argument that contraband seized in the raid should be suppressed because the raid was unreasonable, but in his experience, judges rarely gave any consideration to whether the use of a SWAT team and paramilitary, “volatile entry” tactics were an appropriate use of force for the crime under investigation.

  It went on like that. Even Glasser and Fulcher, the civil liberties activists, said they’d become involved only if they received complaints from residents of the housing complex about police misconduct after the raid. They likely wouldn’t devote any resources to criticizing the tactics themselves. Garner, the panelist who had an extensive public health background and who ran Santa Clara’s public addiction clinic, added that police in his community had never in his career consulted him about the extent of the drug problem in Santa Clara, be it about which drugs were most prevalent, which drugs presented more of a public health threat than others, or what sorts of policies would best minimize the harm caused by addiction.

  Finally, McNamara asked the panel: if the drug raid was a complete and total success, resulting in a confiscation of Mad Dog’s entire stash, with no casualties to police, suspects, or citizens, would it have any impact on drug abuse in your city? All but Chief Parks said no.

  The police chief of the second-largest city in America had just told the audience that he was willing to use extraordinary force to confiscate a supply of illegal drugs. It was a level of force that could well result death or injury to innocents—and indeed by that point already had, countless times. What’s more, he added that what drug he was pursuing and how much actual harm that particular drug caused had no relevance on the amount of force he elected to use. Every public official on the panel who had the power to check that decision then told the same audience that they had no
interest in second-guessing him. During a question-and-answer session after the panel, the public officials in the audience basically reaffirmed what the panelists had already said.

  “It really showed the extent of the problem,” McNamara says. “You get this robot mentality with these officials. The mayor said she knew nothing about these raids and didn’t want to know anything about them until they were over. The judge wasn’t interested in scrutinizing the raid until it was over—when any damage would already be done. Everyone else said it wasn’t their job to worry about it. And so you end up with this dangerous decision that gets made by people of lower rank with little training, with little incentive to care much about constitutional rights, with no oversight—no checks or balances. Collateral damage is just part of the game.”

  In a paper on the conference that McNamara later submitted to the International Congress on Alcohol and Drug Dependence, he concluded:

  The session revealed that public officials, judges, mayors, district attorneys, police chiefs, public health directors, and community leaders rarely, if ever, meet as a group to discuss urban drug control goals and problems. And they never meet to discuss police drug raids unless something goes awry. . . . Each of the panelists indicated a sensitivity to problems of drug control, appropriate police conduct, and public safety but felt that his or her role was basically compartmentalized.

  Another troubling theme to emerge from the 1997 conference is that police, judges, and prosecutors—the people most closely connected with the drug war other than drug offenders themselves—were afraid to speak openly and honestly, even in an academic setting. One police chief cornered McNamara to voice his displeasure with McNamara inviting media to cover the conference. He said the presence of reporters made him and other drug war critics reluctant to talk candidly. In responses to a questionnaire about overall impressions of the conference, one police chief wrote, “The conference reinforced my feelings that we need to change.” A prosecutor wrote that the event “confirmed my views that the war on drugs cannot be justified logically or economically. New approaches are needed and soon.” Another police chief wrote, “The conference gave me a strong sense of the need for changing drug policies,” and still another wrote, “It is risky for us to even attend a conference which could lead to an accusation of being soft on drugs.” A judge wrote that the conference “challenged many of my views.” But all of them requested anonymity.62

  THERE’S A STRONG ARGUMENT THAT LARRY PHILLIPS JR. AND Emil Mătăsăreanu did more to advance the militarization of American police forces than anyone short of Daryl Gates. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu, a Romanian immigrant, met at a Gold’s Gym in the late ’80s, struck up a friendship, and embarked on a decade-long crime spree together. By the time they were preparing a heist of a Bank of America in North Hollywood, California, in early 1997, they had robbed two armored cars and two other branches of Bank of America. On the morning of February 28, the two suited up in body armor and loaded a Chevrolet Celebrity with six guns and over 3,000 rounds of ammunition. The robbery went down with no casualties, though the two were disappointed to make out with only a little over $300,000, less than half of what they were expecting. But as they left the bank at around 9:30 AM, several LAPD patrol cars had already showed up and formed an embankment, the officers taking cover behind their squad cars. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu fired off several rounds at one of the cars. The police fired back. The shootout was on.

  The officers hit the two men several times, but the patrol officers’ weapons—including one shotgun—couldn’t penetrate the body armor. About twenty minutes later, an LAPD SWAT team showed up. At around ten minutes before 10:00 AM, Phillips’s rifle jammed. He started firing with a pistol, then dropped that too after he was struck in the hand. He picked up the pistol and, about twenty minutes after the shoot-out began, shot himself in the head.

  Mătăsăreanu tried to mount an escape in the Celebrity, but police had shot out the tires. He managed to move it a few blocks, where he attempted to commandeer a pickup truck. When he couldn’t get it started, he took cover behind it just as the SWAT team arrived. He exchanged fire with them for a few more minutes before surrendering. By then, he’d been shot at least twenty times—in his legs, and other parts of his body unprotected by armor. He died before the ambulance arrived. By the end of the shoot-out, more than 300 law enforcement personnel fired approximately 650 total rounds at each of the two men. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu fired 1,100 rounds between them. The shoot-out lasted forty-four minutes. Eleven police officers and seven citizens were wounded. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu were the only fatalities. Nearly all of the shoot-out was broadcast on live television by several local news helicopters.

  If you wanted to create an incident to win sympathy for police militarization, you couldn’t do much better than the North Hollywood Shoot-out. A live, televised shoot-out between hundreds of cops and two career criminals, heavily armed and armored, and who refused to go down, was a tailor-made poster case for soldiering up America’s police forces. The following September, the Pentagon sent six hundred M-16s to the Los Angeles Police Department for officers to put in their patrol cars. The department also authorized patrol officers to carry .45-caliber semiautomatic pistols. The incident moved other police departments across the country to upgrade patrol officer sidearms as well.63

  In the fifteen years since it happened, the North Hollywood Shoot-out has become the go-to incident for proponents of police militarization. For years now it has been regularly cited as the prime example of why cops need bigger guns, and why police departments need SWAT teams. There’s some merit to these arguments. A strong argument could be made, for example, for allowing patrol officers to store powerful weapons in the trunks of their squad cars in the event that they’re the first on the scene of such an incident—and the SWAT team is still ten or twenty minutes away. But the incident isn’t an argument for the proliferation of SWAT teams to small towns, for more militarized uniforms, or for using increasingly militarized tactics for increasingly petty crimes.

  Given that the only two fatalities at North Hollywood were the criminals themselves and that the incident happened fifteen years ago, the incident’s staying power as an anecdote is in some ways puzzling. But in other ways, perhaps it isn’t. That the best anecdote defenders of police militarization can come up with is fifteen years old may attest to the rarity of such incidents. In any case, even most critics of the SWAT phenomenon acknowledge that there are some situations where a paramilitary police response is appropriate—and a heavily armed bank robbery would be right at the top of that list. The criticism of SWAT proliferation is that the overwhelming majority of SWAT deployments today are to break into private residences to serve search warrants for nonviolent crimes. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu committed armed robberies, crimes for which violence is a prerequisite.

  The other major incident from the late 1990s that proponents of militarization often cite in justifying SWAT teams is the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. But if the justification for SWAT teams is to have a team of brave, highly trained, highly professional, well-armed, and well-protected cops to intervene in such tragedies, Columbine is a particularly unfortunate example. Though there were eventually eight hundred police officers and eight SWAT teams on the Columbine campus, the SWAT teams held off from going inside to stop shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris because they deemed the situation too dangerous. A spokesman for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department justified the SWAT team’s actions after the shooting. “A dead police officer would not be able to help anyone.” Added SWAT team leader Donn Kraemer, “If we went in and tried to take them and got shot, we would be part of the problem.” David Kopel of the Independence Institute in Colorado explained how that panned out for the victims:

  While one murder after another was being perpetrated, a dozen police officers were stationed near [the] exit. These officers made no attempt to enter the building, walk 15 steps, and confron
t the murderers. (According to police speaking on condition of anonymity, one Denver SWAT officer did begin to enter but was immediately “ordered down” by commanders.)

  Twenty minutes after the rampage began, three SWAT officers were finally sent into the building—on the first floor, on the side of the building furthest from the library, where killings were in progress. Finding students rushing out of the building, they decided to escort students out, rather than track down the killers. This began a police program to “contain the perimeter.”

  Instead of confronting the killers, then, the SWAT team frisked the victims. They then passed on another chance to confront Harris and Klebold.

  The two murderers eventually tired of the library killings, and went downstairs to the cafeteria. More students were hiding in a room nearby, with the door locked. The two murderers attempted to shoot off the lock, and enter that room.

  Students in the room had called 911 and the line was open, so again the killers’ location was known. Many officers were massed near the cafeteria door. They knew where the murderers were. They knew that the murderers were attempting to get into a room to kill more people. The police stood idle.

  Harris and Klebold killed themselves in the library. Not knowing that, and still considering it too dangerous to enter the portions of the building where there had been known gunfire, it took more than three hours for the SWAT team to finally reach the victims. In the meantime, science teacher David Sanders bled to death on the second floor. He might have survived had he received reasonably prompt medical attention—he was still alive when police finally reached him, three hours after he’d been shot. He died during the additional forty-five minutes it took paramedics to reach him. Students in his classroom had put up a sign in the window to alert the police to his condition. It read: “1 bleeding to death.”