Pubdate: Tue, 08 Mar 2016
Source: Register Citizen (CT)
Copyright: 2016 Register Citizen
Contact:  http://www.registercitizen.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/598
Authors: John Sullivan, Derek Hawkins and Pietro Lombardi, The Washington Post

WHEN THE INNOCENT ARE TREATED LIKE CRIMINALS

WASHINGTON - Sallie Taylor was sitting in her apartment in Northeast 
Washington one evening in January 2015 watching "Bible Talk" when her 
clock fell off the wall and broke. She turned and looked up. Nine 
District of Columbia police officers smashed through her door, 
pointed a shotgun at her face and ordered her to the floor.

"They came in like Rambo," said Taylor, a soft-spoken 63-year-old 
grandmother who was dressed in a white nightgown and said she has 
never had even a speeding ticket.

The heavily armed squad thought they were searching the residence of 
a woman arrested two miles away the previous night for carrying a 
half-ounce vial of PCP.

Taylor, who did not know the woman, was terrified. Trembling, she 
told police that the woman did not live there. Officers spent 30 
minutes searching the house anyway, going through her boxes and her 
underwear drawer. They found no drugs and left without making an arrest.

The search warrant executed at Taylor's apartment cited no evidence 
of criminal activity there. Instead, in an affidavit to a judge, 
police argued that they should be able to search for drugs there 
based on their "training and experience" investigating the drug 
trade. They relied on an address they found in a court-records system 
for the woman arrested with PCP.

A Washington Post review of 2,000 warrants served by D.C. police 
between January 2013 and January 2015 found that 284 - about 14 
percent - shared the characteristics of the one executed at Taylor's 
apartment. In every case, after arresting someone on the street for 
possession of drugs or a weapon, police invoked their training and 
experience to justify a search of a residence without observing 
criminal activity there. The language of the warrants gave officers 
broad leeway to search for drugs and guns in areas saturated by them 
and to seize phones, computers and personal records.

In about 60 percent of the 284 cases, police executing the warrants 
found illegal items, ranging from drug paraphernalia to guns, The 
Post found. The amounts of drugs recovered were usually small, 
ranging from residue to marijuana cigarettes to rocks of cocaine. 
About 40 percent of the time - in 115 cases - police left empty-handed.

In a dozen instances, The Post found, officers acted on incorrect or 
outdated address information, subjecting such people as Taylor to the 
fright of their lives

Almost all of the 284 raids occurred in black communities. In 276 
warrants in which The Post could determine a suspect's race, three 
originated with arrests of white suspects. The remaining 99 percent 
involved black suspects. In the District, 94 percent of people 
arrested in 2013 for gun or drug charges were black, according to FBI 
crime data.

The 284 warrants reviewed by The Post differ from the usual pattern 
of police warrants. D.C. police have said at public hearings that the 
typical raid happens only after undercover officers or confidential 
informants have purchased drugs or guns from inside a home or police 
have conducted surveillance there.

The searches are occurring at a time when public attention is highly 
focused on interactions between police and blacks nationwide, with 
the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and concern about the 
aftereffects of the drug war. In Maryland this month, lawmakers 
proposed legislation that would require police to reimburse residents 
for damage to their property when police execute a warrant and find 
nothing. In Philadelphia, police were criticized in October by the 
executive director of the city's citizen review board for harsh 
treatment of residents during raids.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects citizens from 
"unreasonable searches," generally requiring government agents to 
obtain a warrant from a judge by showing they have probable cause to 
think that they will find a specific item at a specific location. In 
recent decades, police have been given wide latitude by the courts to 
conduct searches aimed at removing drugs and guns from the streets.

Attorney Alec Karakatsanis, of the nonprofit group D.C.-based Equal 
Justice Under Law, said warrants that rely on training and experience 
as justification for a search subject the black community to abusive 
police intrusion based on flimsy investigative work. In the past two 
years, he has filed seven civil rights lawsuits in federal court 
challenging D.C. police's practice of seeking search warrants based 
solely on an officer's training and experience.

"They have turned any arrest anywhere in the city into an automatic 
search of a home, and that simply cannot be," said Karakatsanis, who 
spent three years studying the issue, starting when he worked at the 
Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. "It would work 
a fundamental change in the balance of power in our society between 
government agents and individual rights."

D.C. police, the U.S. Attorney's Office and the D.C. Attorney 
General's Office defend the use of warrants based on police training 
and experience.

In a written statement to The Post, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier 
did not distinguish between warrants based primarily on training and 
experience and those based on more-extensive investigation. She said 
that all of the warrants the department executed last year were 
constitutionally sound and that each warrant was reviewed by a police 
lieutenant as well as prosecutors and ultimately approved by a judge.

"In the vast majority of those warrants, contraband and evidence was 
recovered in furtherance of criminal prosecutions, and gave MPD [the 
Metropolitan Police Department] the ability to bring closure to 
multiple victims of crimes in our city," she said. "During that same 
time frame, MPD received very few complaints regarding the execution 
of those warrants."

Lanier said residents who are dissatisfied with police should speak 
with a supervisor at the department or the Office of Police 
Complaints. "We remain committed to unbiased constitutional 
policing," she said.

The U.S. Attorney's Office said in a written statement that its 
prosecutors carefully review thousands of warrants each year to 
determine whether they meet the standards for probable cause.

"Probable cause merely requires that the facts and circumstances 
available to the officer provide the basis for a reasonable person to 
conclude that evidence of a crime exists at a location," the 
statement said. "Although no system is perfect, the law and the 
multiple layers of review provide safeguards to minimize the 
potential for errors."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom