Rodney Balko at "The Agitator"
.................At this point, Atlanta police have no good options. They're screwed.
Attack the informant's credibility and you admit that you conducted a high-risk, forced-entry raid based entirely on a tip from an informant you now say is unreliable. You admit you did no corroborating investigation. You admit you didn't even send an officer to check to see if the informant was right about, for example, an external surveillance system. And all of this ineptitude led to the death of an innocent woman, not to mention to three officers getting wounded.
And that's if the guy's lying about the cover-up. If he's telling the truth? Now you're talking about a major-league shit storm. If this guy's telling the truth, not only did the officers originally investigating this case lie, but the officers investigating after the shooting then lied to cover it up. That means you not only have corruption problems with your narcotics officers, but you have problems with your internal affairs unit, the cops who are charged with investigating the other officers.
At risk of sounding like an arrogant bastard, at this point, every assumption I made about this case at the outset has proven correct. And then some. But I didn't predict there would be problems with the informant, that Johnston was innocent, and that the police would cover up their mistakes because I harbor particular resentment for police, or because I have some sort prognosticating superpower. I predicted these things because they fit the same pattern I've observed in researching hundreds of these raids gone wrong. The pattern extends from shortcuts in the pre-raid investigation to the post-raid ass-covering, to the bunkering down and lack of transparency, to the tendency of police officers to look after their own, even when fellow officers' mistakes led to the death of an innocent person. I will continue to offer my praise for Chief Pennington, who seems be cleaning up the mess his subordinates created in his absence. Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that unlike the officers who work under him, Pennington faces some genuine accountability when it comes to how he does his job.
We only know about Kathryn Johnston because she had the audacity to defend her home against intruders. If this had been a conventional "wrong door" raid, and she'd survived, I doubt we'd have read about it. Powerless people like Kathryn Johnston tend to be too embarrassed, frightened, or intimidated to come forward. We've seen this time and again after a botched raid captures the media attention -- dozens of people who'd been similarly victimized come forward to say the same thing happened to them. they were just too fearful or intimidated to say anything. It happened after the Spruill raid. It happened after the Accelyne Williams raid. It happened after the Ismael Mena raid.
By conservative estimates, there are about 110 of these types of raids per day in America. The vast majority are for drug crimes. Think this was the only one conducted after shoddy police work? Think this was the only one conducted based solely on the word of an informant? Think it's pure coincidence that in the one raid that made national attention last week, we now learn that something went severely wrong in the investigation that led to it?
Of course not. This is standard operating procedure. This the way it's done in a huge number of jurisdictions across the country. Not all. But far too many. I've had police officers tell me raids are never launched based solely on the word of an informant. But this one was. I've had police officers tell me there's always extensive corroborating investigation to verify the address, house, and suspect. But not this time. I've had police officers tell me paramilitary raids are only conducted with the suspect is extremely dangerous, and has a history of violent behavior. Not this time. I've had police officers tell me they only target big suppliers with these raids, not small-time dealers or users. Again -- that wasn't the case, here.
I find it hard to believe that the only time time these shortcuts have been used are in those raids we read about in the newspaper -- where an innocent person dies.
These assaults on people's homes are high-stakes and have an extremely thin margin for error. Couple that with the inherent shortcomings of relying on shady informants -- a critical tool in drug policing -- and you get a recipe for hundreds of innocent people wrongly terrorized, and dozens more who end up dead. By my count, Kathryn Johnston is number 41. Throw in nonviolent offenders and she's number 61 -- at least (I'm sure I haven't found all of those cases).
And all of this -- for what?
To stop people from getting high.
MORE: Pennington has also suspended seven narcotics officers and asked the FBI to investigate.
theagitator.com |
