Black History is Every Month: White Supremacy is the Virus; Police are the Vector; Unearthing the Silenced Voices of the Tulsa Massacre; If you’re surprised by how the police are acting, you don’t understand US history; A COLONY IN A NATION; Black pe
philip panaritis
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But beyond the fiscal argument is an ethical one: policing in America cannot be reformed because it is designed for violence. The oppression is a feature, not a bug.
That seems like a radical sentiment only because policing is so normalized in American culture, with depictions in popular media ranging from hapless, donut-chugging dopes to tough, crime-fighting heroes. We even have a baseball team named after a police organization – the Texas Rangers.
But it’s time to look beyond the romanticization of American police and get real. Just as America glorifies the military and Wall Street, and some Americans whitewash the confederate flag and plantation homes, the history of policing is steeped in blood. In fact, the Texas Rangers are named after a group of white men of the same name who slaughtered Comanche Indians in 1841 to steal indigenous territory and expand the frontier westward. The Rangers are considered the first state police organization."
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"A white classmate from college recently sent an email. She recalled that decades ago, I talked to her about racism when we were both students.
We walked across campus as I talked. Perhaps I was trying to explain institutional racism, or racism and Western Civilization, or racism and literature. She told me she didn’t believe me then but that the conversation stayed with her.
I have no recollection of this conversation. It sounds like my younger self — the self not yet exhausted explaining racism to white people.
I'm not sure how to respond. ...
I think of my kid, standing 6-foot-2 — a math nerd who got an engineering degree while maintaining a full scholarship. When he was working as an intern in an engineering company in Washington state, a white man chased my baby boy through town. The man screamed at him, “You don't belong here.” My kid ran into an Italian restaurant for safety.
He told me this story a few weeks later when I visited him. I swear my heart skipped a beat. I tried to be calm. He asked me what he should have done."
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"Just after midnight on March 13, police in Louisville on a drug raid forced their way into the home of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black woman who worked as an emergency room technician. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, a licensed gun owner, woke up and grabbed his gun. According to the police, Walker then fired at them, and the police returned with a storm of at least 20 bullets, striking Taylor at least eight times, killing her. (One police officer was shot in the leg and is expected to make a full recovery.)
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Walker was arrested and charged with attempted murder of a police officer. Those charges have since been dismissed. He says the police beat on the door for 30 to 45 seconds without identifying themselves. He thought he and Taylor were being attacked by criminals. According to Taylor’s attorneys, these were plainclothes officers, not a trained SWAT team.
In the affidavit for the no-knock warrant for Taylor’s home, a detective claimed to have consulted with a postal inspector, who confirmed that Glover had been “receiving packages” at Taylor’s address. But the Louisville postal inspector has since said that he was never consulted by the officers and that there was nothing suspicious about the packages. A source with knowledge of the case has since told me that the packages contained clothes and shoes.
Much of this has been previously reported. Here is what has yet to be reported: The no-knock warrant for Breonna Taylor's home was illegal.
In the 1995 case Wilson v. Arkansas, the court recognized for the first time that the “Castle Doctrine” and the “knock and announce” rule are embedded in the Fourth Amendment. The Castle Doctrine, which dates back centuries to English common law, states that the home should be a place of peace and sanctuary. Accordingly, except for the most extreme circumstances, the police must knock, announce themselves and give time for the occupants of a home to answer the door peacefully and avoid the potential violence and destruction of a forced entry.
The Wilson ruling did allow for some exceptions, though: Most notably, if the police can show that knocking and announcing would allow a particular suspect to dispose of evidence, flee or assault the officers serving the warrant, the police can enter without knocking. After Wilson, many police departments exploited that “exigent circumstance” exception by simply declaring in search warrant affidavits that all drug dealers are a threat to dispose of evidence, flee or assault the officers at the door. So in 1997, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Richards v. Wisconsin that this sort of blanket exception to the rule is unconstitutional. Here’s the relevant excerpt from the court’s opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens:
If a per se exception were allowed for each category of criminal investigation that included a considerable — albeit hypothetical — risk of danger to officers or destruction of evidence, the knock-and-announce element of the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement would be meaningless.Thus, the fact that felony drug investigations may frequently present circumstances warranting a no-knock entry cannot remove from the neutral scrutiny of a reviewing court the reasonableness of the police decision not to knock and announce in a particular case. Instead, in each case, it is the duty of a court confronted with the question to determine whether the facts and circumstances of the particular entry justified dispensing with the knock-and-announce requirement.In order to justify a “no-knock” entry, the police must have a reasonable suspicion that knocking and announcing their presence, under the particular circumstances, would be dangerous or futile, or that it would inhibit the effective investigation of the crime by, for example, allowing the destruction of evidence.
In other words, the police must show why each individual suspect may be a threat to dispose of evidence, flee or attack the police. They can’t simply state that all drug suspects present such a threat. As Stevens points out, the burden for the police here isn’t high. They just have to provide something.
In a 2015 study, criminologist Brian Schaefer accompanied police on 73 raids in a city he called “Bourbonville.” Sam Aguiar, an attorney for Taylor’s family, has since confirmed that the city in the study is Louisville. “Of the 73 search warrant entries observed, every entry involved using a ram to break the door down,” Schaefer writes. “Further, the detectives announce their presence and purpose in conjunction with the first hit on the door. [Emphasis added.] A detective explained, ‘As long as we announce our presence, we are good. We don’t want to give them anytime to destroy evidence or grab a weapon, so we go fast and get through the door quick.’” Schaefer adds that in the raids he observed, the difference between how police served a no-knock warrant and a knock-and-announce warrant was “minimal in practice.”
Ironically (or perhaps not), the exception to the pattern was when the police were raiding someone they actually knew to be dangerous. Schaefer quotes a detective telling his raid team in one such case, “We need to actually announce our presence this time.”
Louisville’s police department isn’t the only one violating the Richards ruling. In 2018, I reviewed more than 105 no-knock warrants served by the police department in Little Rock. In 97 of those warrants, the police provided no specific evidence about why the suspect met one of the exigent circumstances needed to dispense with the knock-and-announce requirement. Yet judges signed those warrants anyway."
