No Wrongdoing in the Calvo Raid?
Last year the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Department SWAT Team raided the home of Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo. Police officers on the case knew that dealers were sending packages to random addresses so that accomplices in delivery companies could pick them up. The officers didn’t take the drugs out of circulation at the warehouse when they intercepted them. They simply sent them to the bogus address and raided it. The investigating officers did this without checking with local law enforcement officials, who probably would have told them that the mayor wasn’t a drug dealer and that they were barking up the wrong tree. The SWAT team shot and killed Mayor Calvo’s two dogs and caused significant property damage to his home before they got around to figuring out his (nonexistent) role in narcotics trafficking.
The Sheriff’s Office just cleared its deputies of any wrongdoing.
Radley Balko has a post up at Reason. His Cato study, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, shows that this is not an isolated incident. Check out the raidmap for more detail.
Mayor Calvo spoke at a Cato event in the wake of the raid, “Should No-Knock Police Raids be Rare-or Routine?” He tells his story below:
Cops Gone Wild
Terrific editorial over at the Washington Times.
Excerpt:
The bad behavior of these police officers exposes a double standard. As one Nationals fan, who is a lawyer, told us: “There’s no way those cops could pass a street sobriety test right now. Just imagine how we’d get treated if they pulled us over having consumed half of what they’ve drunk tonight – and they’re packing heat.”
We don’t begrudge police officers having a little fun, but they need to abide by the same laws they enforce on the rest of us. When they go out for a few beers, they might want to leave their uniforms and guns at home.
The idea of a National Peace Officers Memorial Week is a fine idea but it is regrettable that the memorial and event is in Washington, D.C. Just reinforces the wrongheaded notion that the federal government must be involved in everything.
Gun Free School Zone Follies
As I have noted before, “gun free” zones are an exercise in fantasy. To some, a place without guns sounds like a great place to live. Unfortunately, others think they sound like a great place to plunder.
Some recent developments highlight the ability of armed citizens to defend themselves and how localized gun bans near schools or on universities make victims of law-abiding citizens.
A group of Georgia college students at a birthday party owe their lives to the fact that one of them had a gun. (H/T Of Arms & the Law) Two gunmen burst in to the apartment and separated males and females into different rooms. The gunmen began discussing whether they had enough bullets to kill everyone at the party. One of the students pulled a gun from his backpack and shot at the home invader holding the men, chasing the gunman out of the apartment. The armed student went to the next room, where the other gunman was preparing to rape his girlfriend. The student shot the second gunman, killing him.
If the birthday party had been in a dorm, the student probably would have left his gun at home because of the Georgia statute that bans guns on campus. The students would likely be dead as a result.
A second story comes from Wisconsin, one of the two states with no provision allowing for concealed carry. A man on a bicycle was hit and thrown to the ground by four young men. The bicyclist was carrying a handgun openly, a practice approved by the Wisconsin Attorney General. The bicyclist drew his revolver, pointed it in the air and yelled, “gun!” The four assailants fled. The bicyclist flagged down a police officer to report the incident.
The positive outcome to this story is countered by the fact that the bicyclist was accosted within 1,000 feet of a school. His possession of a gun is criminalized by both Wisconsin and federal statutes.
Although the local district attorney said that the bicyclist will not be prosecuted, the Milwaukee police chief and other Wisconsin law enforcement officials have promised to focus additional scrutiny on persons who openly carry a firearm.
All of this highlights the folly of “gun free” school zones. Using the law to target citizens who will not be protected by the police is a perverse policy. It gives thugs every incentive to focus their criminal activities in the areas around the schools the legislation intends to protect.
Libertarian Wisdom
From Will Saletan at Slate:
the tricky thing about official intervention is that once the state gets its foot in the door, you don’t necessarily get to dictate what it can and can’t do.
He’s talking about how “For the usual incoherent combination of lefty reasons—not enough private discrimination in working conditions, too much private discrimination in family values–” he ”felt the urge to support regulation of the [surrogate motherhood] industry,” but then he read about Chinese police kicking in doors and forcing surrogate mothers to abort their babies, and realized that wasn’t “the kind of policing liberals have in mind when they call for tighter regulation of the fertility industry.”
But the lesson is broader, of course. It applies to health care, education, energy, faith-based organizations, and just about any enterprise you let the state take a role in.
What Is a “Fifth Column” Anyway?
@RadleyBalko points to a Washington Examiner column in which Jim Kouri, Vice President and Public Information Officer of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, says that Obama administration policy changes with regard to the “global war on terrorism” allow “suspected Fifth Column-type groups . . . to make symbolic demands on agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.” He says the Council on American-Islamic Relations has called on the FBI to confirm or deny that a number of Long Island mosques are under law enforcement surveillance.
It’s hard to find the answer to the first question this raises: “So what?” Kouri does not make the case he implies: that something sinister lurks because this group, having a suspicion of something they see as wrongdoing, asks the agency in question whether it’s happening or not.
But the piece raised another question for me: “What’s a ‘Fifth Column,’ anyway?” The expression has been around forever, but what does it really mean?
Ahead of the Siege of Madrid in the Spanish Civil War, a general under Francisco Franco claimed that he would take the city with the four columns of troops under his command and a “fifth column” of nationalist sympathizers inside the city.
The city never fell to the nationalists, but fear of this “fifth column” caused the Republican government under Francisco Caballero to abandon Madrid for Valencia and it led to a massacre of nationalist prisoners in Madrid during the ensuing battle.
So a “fifth column” is not so much an insidious group of spies or traitors as it is the threat of such a group which causes the incumbent power to miscalculate and overreact. That doesn’t clear up what Kouri is trying to get across, but it does have the air of unintended confession.
Put Surveillance Cameras on Police Guns, Not Street Corners
Mayor Daley of Chicago is planning to put a surveillance camera on every corner to aid first responders and deter terrorism. As I’ve said before, cameras don’t deter terrorism, but they do satisfy the need to “do something” without really improving security. Police officers prevent attacks with traditional investigation and intelligence gathering; cameras are only useful in picking up the pieces after the attack is done. My colleague Jim Harper is cited in this piece that addresses their utility in more detail. Cameras didn’t stop the 7/7 bombings in London, but they took lots of pictures of the attack (creepy Big Brother shots here). The London police doubled down on mass surveillance, but reported that the cameras have not reduced crime. Worse yet, the British have effectively outlawed taking photos of police officers, prompting photo protests.
Chicago isn’t the first major American city to take this route. New York did so, as did the District of Columbia. The cameras in D.C. have not prevented crime, and this piece makes the case that they are a waste of resources – no one can point to a prosecution that used the camera footage to obtain a conviction, and several murders have been committed within a block of a surveillance camera.
Surveillance cameras can and should play a prominent role in law enforcement – mounted on officers’ firearms. A company is now producing a camera that attaches to the tactical rail found on modern pistols and rifles. A New York county has invested in the technology for its officers, and their experience looks promising. Putting a camera on the guns of SWAT officers will keep them honest and prevent falsification of evidence after the fact to cover up a mistaken address or unlawful use of lethal force.
Mayor Cheye Calvo can attest to these horrors, as detailed in a recent Washington Post Sunday Magazine cover story, this Cato Policy Report, and this Cato Policy Forum, “Should No-Knock Police Raids be Rare-or Routine?” Click here for video – Mayor Calvo calmly captures the raw shock of having your life turn into a tactical problem for a SWAT team to solve, and he is now advocating for a Maryland state statute to mandate tracking the deployment of tactical law enforcement teams. As Radley Balko would tell you, this is long overdue.
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