Rise of the Warrior Cop

by Radley Balko

  “THERE’S ALWAYS A GOOD TIME TO USE A TASER.”

  So said Andrea, an attractive single mom and one of the four stars of the TLC reality show The Police Women of Broward County, which debuted in 2009. In the trailer that included the Taser quip, the video then cut to the show’s stars tackling suspects, slamming knees into kidneys, pointing guns, and generally kicking ass. Judging from other clips on the TLC website, some of which featured shots of the female officers in bikinis, it seemed that the network couldn’t make up its mind whether these women were sexpots with handcuffs or girl cops who were just as rough and tough as the boys. A poster ad campaign for the show only reinforced the identity crisis. One read: “Taser Time.” Another: “Cavity Search, Anyone?”

  Pop culture has always had a big influence on police culture, sometimes reflecting prevailing sentiment and sometimes driving it. In his chronicle of the 1970s How We Got Here, conservative pundit David Frum argues that the decade’s parade of renegade cops who skirt the law but still abide by a familiar moral code (think Dirty Harry) reflected the prevailing opinion at the time that bad court decisions and criminal-coddling procedures were preventing well-meaning cops from getting the bad guys.102 Ed Burns, the former narcotics cop and co-creator of HBO’s The Wire, thinks the influence might have been the other way around. In a 2008 interview, Burns said that the Gene Hackman movie The French Connection had a big influence on the culture of drug cops. “In The French Connection, [detective] Popeye Doyle had this very cynical, harsh, rough, law-breaking type of drug style that sort of set the tone in how street narcotics guys work. Very flippant. What the movie didn’t pick up, and what you didn’t see, is all the intense surveillance and hard work that would go into a drug bust back then. But they put out the idea of this guy who cracks heads, especially in that scene they went and they shook the bar down. That became iconic. And that is the way the cops were afterward. I mean, you’d see white cops in black neighborhoods looking like Serpico, and they’re not undercover. It was just this mind-set that took over of how you’re supposed to dress and act and the way you’re supposed to be.”103

  The French Connection, it’s worth noting, came out in 1971. The series of botched ODALE raids in Collinsville and elsewhere began in 1973.

  In the 1980s, the TV show Miami Vice nurtured the belief that south Florida was teeming with drug lords armed with more guns than most Third World armies, while Hill Street Blues offered the grittiest, most realistic portrayal of a big city police department yet aired on television. The show cast most of its cops in a sympathetic light, but, also took on issues like racism, corruption, and brutality.

  For the better part of a generation, the Fox hit Cops was the only reality police show on TV. For twenty years, America watched as patient patrol officers broke up domestic disputes, arrested sunburned wife beaters, and chased petty drug offenders down darkened allies. Though the departments depicted in the show always had veto power over the footage that made it on the air, Cops generally did well to depict the monotonies of police work, be it walking a beat, calmly talking down a jealous husband, or driving a long, all-night neighborhood patrol in a squad car.

  It was really the expansion of cable TV in the 1990s and 2000s that blew out the cop reality genre with shows that tended to emphasize confrontation and celebrate a culture of police militarism. A&E broke in first with Dallas SWAT, which sent a camera crew with the city’s elite paramilitary police unit to document drug raids and standoffs. The show’s success spawned Detroit SWAT and Kansas City SWAT. Court TV then jumped in with Texas SWAT and SWAT U.S.A.

  Testosterone-infused Spike TV joined the mix in 2008 with DEA. Produced by jolly weatherman–cum–drug warrior Al Roker, the first season followed a group of federal agents, also in Detroit (the city’s crumbling badlands provide great backdrop for reality shows), as they planned and carried out drug raids. (It also produced an unintentionally hilarious moment when self-proclaimed pot smoker and legalization advocate Joe Rogan was forced to conduct a reverent, promotional interview with one of the show’s drug-agent stars while hosting one of Spike’s mixed martial arts events.)

  The obvious criticism of such shows is their exploitation and general tackiness. Not that anyone expects much dignity from most of the cable networks, but you’d think, for example, that the Broward County Sheriff’s Department might object to the sexualization of its female officers, or to a national ad campaign insinuating that they’re sporting itchy Taser fingers.

  But these shows may have a more sinister effect. In emphasizing the more aggressive, confrontational aspect of police work over community service—hurting people instead of helping people—they may be shifting the profile of the typical young person attracted to police work. Browse the dozens of police recruitment videos on YouTube, for example, and you’ll find that many of them feature images of cops tackling suspects, rappelling out of helicopters, shooting guns, kicking down doors, and siccing dogs on people. The images are often set to blaring guitars or heavy metal music. These are the videos that police departments send to high schools and colleges to attract new recruits. At the very first step in the process of staffing their departments, then, these agencies are deliberately appealing to people who are likely to be lured by the thrill-seeking, adrenaline-producing, butt-kicking aspects of law enforcement. Build an entire police force of people who fit that description and you have a force of cops who seek confrontation instead of avoiding it and who look to escalate volatile situations instead of resolving them peacefully. These are the sort of cops who volunteer for the SWAT team for the very reasons they should be excluded from it—cops like the two Maricopa County SWAT officers who talked to CBS News reporter Jim Stewart in 1997. The best part of being on the SWAT team, one of the officers said, was that “you get to play with a lot of guns. That’s what’s fun. You know, everybody on this team is—you know, loves guns.” The second cop then chimed in. “Hey, the bottom line is it’s friggin’ fun, man. That’s the deal. Nobody wants to take burglary reports.”104

  Even the wrong-door raid has become well established in pop culture. The first depiction of one I could find on network television was in a 1990 episode of the NBC drama LA Law. But it’s become more common in the last decade or so. In one episode of The Simpsons, Chief Wiggum mistakenly raids the home of Reverend Lovejoy in search of a cattle rustler. The shot then pans down the street to show loose cattle grazing in the front yard of Springfield’s well-known career criminal. One particularly pointed skit on Comedy Central’s Chapelle’s Show depicted the discrepancy between police raids on white people suspected of white-collar crimes and black people suspected of drug crimes. In the skit, a white CEO is subjected to a drug raid in which the cops set off a flash grenade, shoot the man’s dog, sexually assault his wife, and beat him as they yell at him to “stop resisting.” Coming full circle, in 2009 a viral video posing as an ad for a search engine parodied the SWAT reality shows by following “Fresno SWAT” as they mistakenly raid a day care center, a family eating dinner, and an elderly couple. It ends with the statement: “Imagine if dispatch gave out as much bad information as search engines do.”

  And so here we are. The wrong-door raid has now been normalized to the point where it can be parodied in a viral Internet commercial for a search engine.

  The Numbers

  Number of drug raids in New York City in 1994: 1,447

  . . . in 1997: 2,977

  . . . in 2002: 5,117

  Approximate number of raids each year by the Toledo, Ohio, SWAT team, as of 2008: 400

  Percentage of towns between 25,000 and 50,000 people with a SWAT team in 1984: 25.6 percent

  . . . in 1990: 52.1 percent

  . . . in 2005: 80 percent

  Approximate number of SWAT raids in the United States in 1995: 30,000

  . . . in 2001: 45,000

  . . . in 2005: 50,000–60,000

  Total number of federal agencies employing law enforcement personnel in 1996: 53

  . . . in 200
8: 73

  Total number of federal law enforcement officers as of 1996: 74,500 (28 per 100,000 citizens)

  . . . in 2008: 120,000 (40 per 100,000 citizens)

  Number of SWAT teams in the FBI alone in 2013: 56

  Unlikely federal agencies with SWAT teams: US Fish and Wildlife Service, Consumer Product Safety Commission, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, US National Park Service, Food and Drug Administration

  Value of surplus military gear received by Johnston, Rhode Island, from the Pentagon in 2010–2011: $4.1 million

  Population of Johnston, Rhode Island, in 2010: 28,769

  Partial list of equipment given to the Johnston police department: 30 M-16 rifles, 599 M-16 magazines containing about 18,000 rounds, a “sniper targeting calculator,” 44 bayonets, 12 Humvees, and 23 snow blowers105

  CHAPTER 9

  REFORM

  There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.

  —CHARLES DE MONTESQUIEU

  Cheye Calvo only intended to be home long enough to grab a bite to eat and walk his dogs.1 Calvo worked full-time at an educational foundation in Washington, DC, but he also had an unusual part-time job: he was mayor of the small town of Berwyn Heights, Maryland. In 2004, at age thirty-three, he was the youngest elected mayor in the history of Prince George’s County, Maryland. Now thirty-seven, he lived with his wife, Trinity Tomsic, her mother, Georgia Porter, and their two black labradors, Payton and Chase. Calvo was due back in town later that night for a community meeting.

  As Calvo took the dogs out for a walk the evening of July 29, 2008, his mother-in-law told him that a package had been delivered a few minutes earlier. He figured it was something he had ordered for his garden. “On the walk, I noticed a few black SUVs in the neighborhood, but thought little of it except to wave to the drivers,” he would later recall. When Calvo and the dogs returned, he picked up the package, brought it inside, then went upstairs to change for his meeting.

  The next thing Calvo remembers is the sound of his mother-in-law screaming. He ran to the window and saw heavily armed men clad in black rushing his front door. Next came the explosion. He’d later learn that this was when the police blew open his front door. Then there was gunfire. Then boots stomping the floor. Then more gunfire. Calvo, still in his boxers, screamed, “I’m upstairs, please don’t shoot!” He was instructed to walk downstairs with his hands in the air, the muzzles of two guns pointed directly at him. He still didn’t know it was the police. He described what happened next at a Cato Institute forum six weeks later. “At the bottom of the stairs, they bound my hands, pulled me across the living room, and forced me to kneel on the floor in front of my broken door. I thought it was a home invasion. I was fearful that I was about to be executed.” I later asked Calvo what might have happened if he’d had a gun in his home for self-defense. His answer: “I’d be dead.” In another interview, he would add, “The worst thing I could have done was defend my home.”

  Calvo’s mother-in-law was face-down on the kitchen floor, the tomato-artichoke sauce she was preparing still sitting on the stove. Her first scream came when one of the SWAT officers pointed his gun at her from the other side of the window. The police department would later argue that her scream gave them the authority to enter the home without knocking, announcing themselves, and waiting for someone to let them in.

  Rather than obeying the SWAT team demands to “get down” as they rushed in, Georgia Porter simply froze with fear. They pried the spoon from her hand, put a gun to her head, and shoved her to the floor. They asked, “Where are they? Where are they?” She had no idea what they were talking about. She told them to look in the basement. She would later tell the Washington Post, “If somebody puts a gun to your head and asks you a question, you better come up with an answer. Then I shut my eyes. Oh, God, I thought they were going to shoot me next.”

  Calvo’s dogs Payton and Chase were dead by the time Calvo was escorted to the kitchen. Payton had been shot in the face almost as soon as the police entered the home. One bullet went all the way through him and lodged in a radiator, missing Porter by only a couple of feet. Chase ran. The cops shot him once, from the back, then chased him into the living room and shot him again.

  Calvo was turned around and put on his knees in front of the door the police had just smashed to pieces. He heard them rummaging through his house, tossing drawers, emptying cabinets.

  Calvo and Porter were held for four hours. Calvo asked to see a search warrant. He was told it was “en route.” The police continued to search the house. At one point, a detective got excited when she found an envelope stuffed with cash. According to Porter, the detective was deflated when she found only $68 inside and noticed that the front of the envelope read: “Yard Sale.” At one point, Porter overheard a detective call to ask a relative to schedule a veterinary appointment. The sight of the dogs’ bodies apparently reminded her that she need to make an appointment for her own pet.

  Even after they realized they had just mistakenly raided the mayor’s house, the officers didn’t apologize to Calvo or Porter. Instead, they told Calvo that they were both “parties of interest” and that they should consider themselves lucky they weren’t arrested. Calvo in particular, they said, was still under suspicion because when armed men blew open his door, killed his dogs, and pointed their guns at him and his-mother-in-law, he hadn’t responded “in a typical manner.”

  Trinity Tomsic came home about an hour later to find a blur of flashing police lights and a crowd gathering on her front lawn. She was told that her husband and mother were fine. Then she was told that her dogs were dead. She broke down in tears. When she was finally able to enter her home, she found her dogs’ blood all over her house. The police had walked through the two large pools of blood that collected under Payton and Chase, then tracked it all over the home. Even once the police realized they had made a mistake, they never offered to clean up the blood, to put the house back together, or to fix the front door.

  As Calvo and Porter were being interrogated, one of Calvo’s own police officers saw the lights and stopped to see what was going on. Berwyn Heights officer Amir Johnson knew this was his mayor’s house, but had no idea what the commotion was about because the Prince George’s County Police Department hadn’t bothered to contact the Berwyn Heights police chief, as they were required to do under a memorandum of understanding between the two agencies. Johnson told the Washington Post that an officer at the scene told him, “The guy in there is crazy. He says he is the mayor of Berwyn Heights.”

  Johnson replied, “That is the mayor of Berwyn Heights.”

  Johnson then called Berwyn Heights police chief Patrick Murphy. Eventually, Murphy was put in touch with the supervising officer, Det. Sgt. David Martini. Murphy recounted the conversation to the Post: “Martini tells me that when the SWAT team came to the door, the mayor met them at the door, opened it partially, saw who it was, and then tried to slam the door on them,” Murphy recalled. “And that at that point, Martini claimed, they had to force entry, the dogs took aggressive stances, and they were shot.”

  If that indeed was what Martini told Murphy, he was either lying or repeating a lie told to him by one of his subordinates. There was never any further mention of Calvo shutting the door on the SWAT team—because it never happened. Calvo later had his dogs autopsied—the trajectories the bullets took through the dogs’ bodies weren’t consistent with the SWAT team’s story.

  But the lies, obfuscations, and stonewalling were only beginning.

  The police department would first claim that they had obtained a no-knock warrant for the raid. They then backtracked and blamed Calvo’s mother-in-law, arguing that when her scream blew their cover, they were no longer obligated to knock and announce themselves. (This was an interesting theory, given that the knock-and-announce requirement, by definition, would have required them to blow
their own cover. That’s the point of the requirement.) Maj. Mark Magaw, commander of the Prince George’s County narcotics enforcement division, claimed that the SWAT team couldn’t have obtained a no-knock warrant if they had wanted to, because the state of Maryland doesn’t allow them. This too was false. The state had passed a bill allowing for no-knock warrants in 2005.2 It’s the sort of law that one would think would have a day-to-day impact on the drug unit of a police department that conducts several raids each week. Yet the head narcotics unit in Prince George’s County was completely ignorant of it.3 Three years later, Magaw would be promoted to Prince George’s County police chief.4

  The affidavit for the search warrant was prepared by Det. Shawn Scarlata. It is incredibly thin. In a few paragraphs, Scarlata relates that he intercepted a FedEx package containing thirty-two pounds of marijuana at one of the company’s warehouses. The package was addressed to Trinity Tomsic at her home address. A police officer disguised as a delivery man then took the package to Calvo’s house, where it was accepted by Georgia Porter. There was also a one-paragraph description of Calvo’s home. That’s the only information in the warrant specific to Calvo and his family. The remainder of the six-page affidavit is a cut-and-paste recitation of Scarlata’s training, qualifications, and assumptions he felt he could make based on his experience as a narcotics officer. As Calvo described the warrant in an online chat, “It talks about all the stuff a drug trafficker should have in his or her home and then says something like, ‘Although we know that the police have no evidence of these things, they can be inferred from the very nature of the charge.’ It is circular reasoning that says because we are suspicious of you, there must be evidence of your guilt.”