by Iain Overton
‘Alternate breach!’ they screamed and then rushed outside to knock down the door of the other flat, high on the excitement and the drama.
Iyanna Davis, a twenty-two-year-old, had been woken sharply in the early hours of that May day. Confused, she had hidden in her closet, the violent commotion in the downstairs unit terrifying her. She did not know the intruders were police officers and assumed her home was under attack by thugs. She certainly did not see two of New York State’s finest, Michael Capobianco and Carl Campbell, enter her home dressed like soldiers of death – in heavy black boots, thick black combat trousers and black helmets. They were carrying semi-automatics.
The police were later to tell conflicting tales of what happened next. The first story was that Iyanna had leaped from the closet, causing them to open fire. The second was that Iyanna had held the closet door shut against their attempts to open it, causing officer Capobianco to fall down and his rifle to go off. Either way, Iyanna was shot – a single bullet that hit her in the breast and ricocheted through her body, piercing her abdomen and both thighs.
She was to say to her lawyer: ‘I told them I was afraid and do not shoot me, and one officer screamed at me to put my hands above my head. That’s when I heard the shot.’17
Iyanna had nothing to do with the alleged offence and posed no threat to the policemen, yet she was almost killed by one of them. Despite this, Nassau County Police Department cleared its officers of any wrongdoing. They agreed to pay Iyanna $650,000, but as part of the settlement the internal investigation was officially sealed. According to Iyanna’s lawyers, this was to stop lies told by police officers from coming to light.18 The policeman who shot her, Sergeant Michael Capobianco, was on a pay packet of over $143,000.19 He was not publicly reprimanded.
This was not the first time Nassau County police had been involved in the inappropriate use of deadly force. In recent years one of them had shot an unarmed man in the back. Another officer – after a night out drinking – had shot a defenceless cab driver. One more killed a hostage while trying to shoot her armed attacker.
In each case, department investigators reviewed the use of deadly force and, within a day, concluded that the officer’s actions were justified. Since 2006, Nassau’s investigators have decided that every single one of their officers involved in shooting and killing someone was justified in so doing, this despite the fact that Nassau County Police have been involved in thirty-six shooting incidents in the past four years – a 260 per cent rise from the four years before that.20 Scrutinising Nassau County Police shootings, though, is hard. They lie behind what’s been called a ‘thick blue curtain’ – the Police Department’s refusal to release court documents on deadly incidents.
It is not just Nassau County. US police forces nationwide have been criticised for their overuse of force, for evolving into what’s been described as ‘warrior cops’. And the most visible element of this is the rapid rise in SWAT teams employed by US police forces.
SWAT teams are, frankly, ubiquitous in the US. There are 56 SWAT teams in the FBI alone.21 The University of North Carolina at Charlotte has its own SWAT team, armed with MP-15 rifles, M&P .40 calibre pistols and shotguns.22 And this is just the tip of an iceberg: 13 per cent of US towns between 25,000 and 50,000 people had a SWAT team in 1983. By 2005, 80 per cent of them had one.23
Tactics once used in situations like hostage-takings or bank raids are now increasingly being used in everyday police work. Like when in 2010 in New Haven, Connecticut, a SWAT team was sent into a bar because it was suspected of serving under-age drinkers.24 Or when in Atlanta a SWAT team raided a gay bar where police suspected people were having sex openly – only for a federal investigation to later conclude that the police had lied about such allegations.25 Armed units were even used to raid barbershops in Orlando, Florida; thirty-seven people were arrested for ‘barbering without a license’.26
Some of these raids, naturally, had terrible consequences. You don’t send in armed men again and again without expecting screw-ups. Radley Balko, author of the Rise of the Warrior Cop, has listed over fifty cases of innocent people who have died as a result of botched police raids. There are horror stories of seven-year-olds being shot in the head after police entered the wrong home;27 of a grandmother shot when her attempt to protect her grandchild was mistaken for something else;28 of concussion grenades being accidentally thrown into children’s playpens.29
It also endangers the police. Like when in 2008, after an informant told Virginia police that Ryan Frederick was growing dope at his home, a SWAT team was dispatched to a no-knock raid. Frederick fired his pistol at what he thought was an intruder and killed Detective Jarrod Shivers. It turned out Frederick was a keen Japanese gardener and was growing oriental maple trees, not marijuana. If the police had entered with a warrant, the misunderstanding would have been resolved peacefully, an officer would not have died, and Frederick would not be now serving ten years for manslaughter. But they did not.
The lessons learned from this, for me, came in the form of a hard fact. More police officers were shot and killed in the US in 2014 than were shot and killed in the last fifty years in Great Britain.30 This suggested to me that police officers, with their ready use of guns, may well be escalating situations and, in so doing, putting themselves in avoidable danger.
But little seems to be being done to address this overuse of force. The problem is that, in a post-9/11 world, the US police have become what Balko calls ‘a protected class’. One few politicians want to oppose, so the police are rarely held to account, and no one restricts their powers. Instead America just keeps on arming its law enforcement officers with military-grade equipment.
From an outsiders’ perspective it seems a certain madness has descended on American law enforcement. Between 9/11 and 2013 the Department of Homeland Security handed out $34 billion in ‘terrorism grants’ to local polices forces to fund counter-terrorism efforts.31 This, alongside rules on civil-asset forfeiture allowing the police to seize anything they reasonably consider the proceeds of crime, means that, despite American’s failing economy, there is still a huge amount of money available for the police and other agencies to spend on things like guns.32 And spend they do.
In 2010, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives awarded two contracts worth $80 million to Glock and Smith & Wesson for the supply of .40 calibre service sidearms. In 2013, the Department of Homeland Security put out a tender to buy 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition over the following five years.33
Such wilful and expansive spending is best summed up by discrete examples of security exuberance. In Augusta, Maine, a sleepy place of less than 20,000 souls where no officer has been shot and killed in the line of duty since the Statue of Liberty was erected, police bought eight tactical vests for $12,000. Des Moines in Iowa bought two bomb-disposal robots at the cost of some $360,000. Richland County, South Carolina, purchased a ‘Peacemaker’ – an M113A1 armoured personnel carrier that has a belt-fed, turret machine-gun that fires .50 calibre rounds, big enough to shoot through concrete walls. And throughout the US the old police six-shot revolver has been largely, and expensively, traded in for semi-automatic pistols that carry up to eighteen rounds. This mass purchase of handguns has been done in the face of evidence that in most shootings involving the police no more than three shots are fired.
Of course, many would say the American police are entirely justified in arming themselves to the teeth – look at what they have to contend with. ShotSpotter, a company that specialises in gunfire detection through urban listening monitors, looked at the data from forty-eight American cities over 2013. The company found that fewer than one in five gunfire incidents were reported to the police. In some neighbourhoods less than 10 per cent of gunfire was reported.34
Even with so many illegal shootings, the hyper-militarisation of America’s police force is still of concern. In 2012, according to FBI data, 410 Americans were ‘justifiably’ killed by police – 409 with guns.35 T
here is the very real issue of a police-criminal arms race: that criminals will acquire similar powerful weapons to combat the police.36 It ignores the National Institute for Justice review which concluded that assault weapons were ‘rarely used in gun crimes’ and that high-powered weaponry was hardly ever used in the killing of police officers.37 It also ignores the fact that the majority of raids conducted by SWAT teams turn up no weapons at all.38
This weaponised and hostile face of American law enforcement, moreover, results in a hardening of stances, where community policing is lost to heavy-handed brutalism. It is a sort of ‘crush them’ approach to criminals that is reflected in the fact the US has the most prisoners of any nation in the world – over 2.2 million men and women behind bars, almost one in every 100 adult Americans – and a philosophical approach to order that results in situations such as kids being charged with a felony for throwing peanuts at a bus driver,39 or schools handcuffing children for petty things as trivial as not wearing a belt.40 Such logic has meant that the US today is a nation where there are more security guards than teachers.41
For me, though, the most compelling reason to be wary of not properly scrutinising each and every SWAT team deployment and every bullet fired is the danger that it gives rise to police impunity. And this impunity can often rapidly lead to an ugly reality: that of extra-judicial murder.
It was the death of an activist that had brought me to the southern Philippines in the early summer of 2008. I was reporting for ITN, covering a story about a rise in police brutality throughout this South-east Asian island nation. This man’s tombstone was the heavy cross upon which we could hang the story of countless other sad deaths.
The broad white coffin was large for such a slight man, and as it was lowered into the ground, the anguished lamentations of the mourners drowned out the sound of the tropical downpour beyond.
The person being buried was Celso Pojas. He had been a political leader, the secretary general of the Farmer’s Union in Mindanao, and it had been a bullet from a paramilitary death squad that had placed him in the sodden ground.
A few days before, forty-five-year-old Celso had been savouring a coffee in his office in Davao City, when he got up. ‘I have to get a few cigarette sticks,’ he said and walked outside. These were his last words. Moments later his colleagues heard the staccato drum of gunfire and rushed out to see their friend face down, dying. He had been getting death threats for months, the latest delivered on the evening before a series of transport strikes he had set up. The message was unequivocal – don’t meddle in politics.
Celso’s death followed a pattern. The killers had arrived on a motorcycle that did not have a licence plate. They wore baseball caps and buttoned-up shirts, their firearms tucked into their waistbands. They favoured .45-calibre handguns, weapons commonly used by the police and prohibitively expensive for criminals. They shot without warning. And as quickly as they arrived, they left.
No one knew who had killed Celso, but the general consensus was that there had been police involvement. Government officials and members of the police here in Davao had been implicated in twenty-eight killings, mainly between 2007 and 2008.42 A further 298 killings had been carried out since January 2007 by the Tagum City Death Squad.43 Such murders had caused the charity Human Rights Watch to conclude that the government had ‘largely turned a blind eye to the killing spree in Davao City and elsewhere. The Philippine National Police have not sought to confront the problem.’ These might seem strong words, but words far stronger came from the mayor of Davao City, Rodrigo Duterte, when he said: ‘If you are doing an illegal activity in my city, if you are a criminal or part of a syndicate that preys on the innocent people of the city, for as long as I am the mayor, you are a legitimate target of assassination.’44 Time Magazine was to call Duterte ‘the Punisher’.45
Of course, some saw Duterte’s firm tactics as justifiable, claiming that he had brought a level of security to this violent, sweltering city that it had not seen for years. But what happens – I wanted to know – if, in searching for peace, you created desolation?
Celso’s mourners had this question in mind when they met before the funeral at Davao’s Freedom Park. Muscular farmers who had travelled 160 kilometres from Compostela Valley, plantation workers in thin cotton shirts bussed in 270 kilometres from Davao Oriental. They lined the streets of Araullo, Quirino and Ponciano and filed in solemn anger past his open coffin. What good, their faces said, is a peaceful city if you live in fear of those you entrust with keeping such peace?
‘These death squads,’ I was told by an activist who refused to be named for fear of retribution, ‘were run by police officers. They give them weapons, ammo, bikes. They pay $1,000 for each killing, if that.’
Police killings like this one are among the ugliest faces of gun violence I have seen. And when I was later to sit and interview Celso’s family after the service, the impunity, the helplessness of it all made the room mute with anger. The women sat to one side, dissolving in tears. The men stood silently in their loose tops and flip-flops, resting up against the moist walls of Celso’s modest home. Someone handed me a glass of warm fizzy orange and a chocolate snack, and I wondered if Celso had bought this bottle of pop or this sweet to give himself a treat.
‘Why?’ the father said, ‘Why my son? He was so good, he helped us all.’
As a journalist, there is not much more you can do but write up such things. In cases like this, where corruption sinks so deep you can’t see its end, you can hardly hope for an arrest or a review. Or even an interview. But everyone in that close room was affected and not just by the loss of their loved one. They had seen a destruction of trust, something that can never be truly regained. And it was an abuse of power that was certainly not confined to the Philippines.
Every year, Brazilian police are reported to be responsible for at least 2,000 deaths nationwide – an average of five people a day.46 The victims are often recorded as having been ‘killed while resisting arrest’. And then you read that one policeman killed sixty-two people and registered each of their deaths as such, and it all becomes a black joke, not even an excuse.47
Elsewhere it is just as bad. In India, reported incidents of police firing on civilians have almost doubled in the last decade.48 Many are called ‘encounter killings’, confrontations used to justify extra-judicial murders – implicitly seen as an acceptable response to crime or terrorism.
In Jamaica it is said that one of every two police officers who spends twenty-five years on active duty will kill in the line of duty.49
The worrying thing is that such brutal police tactics are often seen as the only way to clean up the streets. The idea of a noble cop taking the law into his own hands is the stuff of countless Hollywood movies. But the abuse of power, the arbitrary use of capital punishment, the absence of a fair trial and the risk the police might accidentally kill an innocent – all of these mean that the moment a cop purposefully takes a life he ceases to be a policeman and becomes a killer. And when your police are killers, there’s really not much room for hope.
8. THE MILITARY
The tragedies of war – Iraq – travelling to the bloody circus in 2004 – visiting the Tree of Knowledge – getting shot at – madness and violence unfurling – Israel’s violent past reflected in guns – tea with an unusual sniper – a visit to a Jewish anti-terror training camp – Palestine’s tragedy – a wounded boy, a grieving father – Liberia’s past visited – child soldiers and adult tales
Militaries and guns are synonymous; an army that is not armed cannot really be called as such. It’s no surprise there are 200 million guns in the hands of armed forces around the world: about one in five of all guns. So you can’t write a book about firearms without understanding the gun’s role in war and its military use – for good or bad – in defending a nation’s sovereignty. After all, there are only fifteen countries in the world that do not have a military, and six countries that have militaries but no standing army.1
In the remaining countries, the 200 million weapons are unevenly distributed: the armies of just two states, China and Russia, have almost 25 per cent of them. And they are certainly not all in use. Around 76 million guns in the hands of armed forces lie idle; they are deemed ‘surplus’ – stockpiles make up about 38 per cent of all military small arms.2
But when war does break out, it is clear that there are enough guns out there to cause untold carnage. Since the end of the Second World War there have been over 2,100 conflicts in more than 150 locations.3 In 1998 a charity called Project Ploughshares said that in over ‘three dozen current wars, probably 90 per cent of killings are by small arms . . . in the past decade alone they have caused more than 3 million deaths’.4 This is a bold statement and one that led some to say that about 300,000 people were dying from guns fired in conflicts every year.
But charities have reasons to sound the death knell a little too loudly, and you can’t believe every fact you are told, not least because, in this case, the Geneva Declaration, a diplomatic initiative endorsed by 100 countries, has a much lower figure for those killed by all weapons of violence – bombs and guns included. It estimates that, of over half a million people killed globally by armed violence every year, only 10 per cent of violent deaths, about 55,000, happen in conflict or a terrorist attack. An even lower number, then, would have been killed specifically by guns.5
Of course, these statistics don’t include the numbers of those injured by guns in wars. This should concern us because, as I had seen in South Africa, it is clear that there have been marked improvements in trauma surgery. So the death toll today in some wars might be lower than it would have been years ago, but this does not mean that wars are getting less violent. We are just better at fixing people.