Rise of the Warrior Cop (37 page)

In the 1999 case
United States v. Ramirez
, the Court did what it stopped short of doing in
Wilson
—it formally ruled that the “destruction of evidence” exception, the “threat to a police officer” exception, and the “useless gesture” exception all permitted police
to break into a home without first knocking and announcing.
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The Court also ruled that those exceptions apply to the section of the US Criminal Code on forced entry for federal officers, even though the law itself makes no mention of such exceptions. This was a curious undertaking by the Court’s conservatives. They were adding exceptions to a law that it seems likely would have been included in the original language had its authors and the Congress at the time actually intended the exceptions to be included. And the Court was doing so by putting more value on the common law than on the plain language of the statute—and even
this
was based on a flawed understanding of the common law. The Court’s conservative wing has always believed in original intent—except when it hasn’t.

By the end of the 1990s, the Court seemed to have all but sunk the Castle Doctrine. Yet in the following decade, the justices would find yet more ways to give police yet more discretion to bring more violence into Americans’ living rooms and bedrooms.

“NOW, IF THE BUREAU OF ALCOHOL, TOBACCO AND FIREARMS comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they’re going to be wearing bulletproof vests. . . . They’ve got a big target on there, ATF. Don’t shoot at that, because they’ve got a vest on underneath that. Head shots, head shots. . . . Kill the sons of bitches.”
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That was G. Gordon Liddy, giving his listeners home defense advice on his syndicated radio show in August 1994. It was some remarkable language to be coming from the guy who helped create ODALE, the Nixon-era office that sent narcotics task forces barreling into homes to make headline-grabbing drug busts. And Giddy was still suffering from cognitive dissonance. In the same interview, he lamented that it wasn’t a federal felony to possess a personal use amount of illicit drugs.
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And of course narcotics cops hit the wrong house many, many more times than ATF agents did. Liddy wasn’t offended by the tactics as much as he was by the mission (gun control)
and the people who were calling the shots at the time (Bill Clinton and Janet Reno).

Still, this was part of something new. Outside of Liddy, other figures on the right were also starting to speak out against the lurch toward militarism among federal law enforcement agencies. A few high-profile incidents seemed to instigate the concern on the right, including the gunfights in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992; the raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993; and the raid to seize Cuban refugee Elián González from his Miami relatives in 2000.

The Ruby Ridge fiasco began in 1989 when Randy Weaver sold an ATF informant two sawed-off shotguns that had been cut shorter than was allowed under federal law.
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Weaver was no doubt an odd duck. He and his wife Vicki had moved their family to rural Idaho in 1983 to escape what they believed to be the coming Armageddon. He associated with white supremacists and in fact met the ATF informant at a meeting of the Aryan Nations. The informant’s handler at the ATF didn’t think Weaver was much of a threat, so rather than charge Weaver, the ATF attempted to leverage the gun charges to get him to work as an informant. When Weaver refused, the agent filed federal gun charges.

On August 21, 1992, a team of US marshals dressed in camouflage and carrying M-16s went to Weaver’s home on a reconnaissance mission to determine an appropriate place and manner to capture him. Once there, one of the marshals threw rocks at the Weaver cabin to see how the family’s dogs would react. The dogs went nuts. Hearing them, Weaver’s fourteen-year-old son Sammy went out with family friend Kevin Harris to see what the commotion was about. Accounts of the incident differ here, but at some point one of the agents shot and killed one of the Weavers’ dogs. Sammy Weaver responded by firing his own gun at the source of the gunfire, then fled toward the house. One of the marshals then shot him in the back as he ran. Sammy Weaver was dead. Harris then exchanged fire with the marshals, killing one of them.

A twelve-day siege ensued, featuring hundreds of cops, agents, and troops from the ATF, the FBI, the US Marshals, the Idaho State Police, the local sheriff’s department, the Idaho National Guard, and—for some reason—the US Border Patrol. On day two of the siege, FBI sniper teams were told that their rules of engagement were, basically, to shoot on sight, instructions usually reserved for the battlefield and virtually unheard of in civil law enforcement. When Randy Weaver left the house to visit the body of his son, which they had put in a guest cabin, an FBI sniper shot him in the chest. As Weaver, Harris, and one of Weaver’s daughters fled back into the house, the agent fired again at the front door. That bullet went through the door, then through Vicki Weaver’s head, killing her instantly. She was holding her ten-month-old daughter at the time. The baby fell to the floor. Weaver and Harris were eventually tried in federal court for murder, attempted murder, and other felonies. They were acquitted on all of the serious charges. The federal government eventually settled with the Weaver family for over $3 million, and with Weaver for $380,000.

The raid in Waco the next year involved many of the same agencies—indeed, many of the same agents.
³⁷
The ATF was investigating the Branch Davidians and their leader, David Koresh, for weapons violations. Koresh went jogging every day and could conceivably have been picked up peacefully. Instead, the agency drew up plans for a heavily armed raid on the Branch Davidian compound, even knowing that there were women and children inside. In fact, ATF officials learned ahead of time from an agent who had infiltrated the compound that Koresh and his followers knew the raid was coming. Their plan depended on the element of surprise. They went through with it anyway.

The raid began on February 28, 1993, as cattle trailers of federal agents pulled up to the compound. The raid planners hadn’t bothered to instruct any individual agent announce their presence or purpose, nor had they made any plans for even the possibility of serving their warrants peacefully. The initial confrontation ended
with two hours of gunfire, four dead federal agents, and six dead Branch Davidians, but no resolution. Both sides claimed the other started shooting first.

The subsequent siege went on for six weeks. Finally, on April 19, Attorney General Janet Reno gave orders to flush the Branch Davidians out of the compound. Federal agents used tanks to smash holes in the building, into which they then injected tear-gas canisters. They next used grenade launchers to shoot 350 “ferret rounds” of gas through windows and doors. A fire broke out, which eventually consumed the building and nearly everyone inside. In all, seventy-six Davidians died, including twenty-six children.

Waco and Ruby Ridge made militarization a political issue. Perhaps counterintuitively, the laws the agents were enforcing—federal gun control laws—put conservatives in the unprecedented role of criticizing federal cops for overkill, and liberals in the position of defending the aggressive tactics. (One fact about Waco that conservative ATF critics often overlook: the military presence at the compound was only made possible by the drug war. The ATF told the leaders of Joint Task Force 6—one of the many military-civilian police antidrug task forces set up during the Reagan and Bush administrations—that David Koresh was running a methamphetamine operation. The evidence for this was suspect at best.)

As for the ATF itself, the agency appeared to be suffering from the same afflictions that a decade of “warring” on drugs and crime had brought out in other federal police agencies. Back in 1991, for example, sixty agents from the ATF, the DEA, the US Forest Service, and the National Guard—the latter wearing face paint and camouflage—raided three homes in New Mexico based on an unsubstantiated tip from a confidential informant that they would find drugs and weapons. The ATF led the investigation because of federal laws prohibiting the use of guns by drug offenders. They found nothing. Later the same year, sixty ATF agents invited television crews to film them while they raided the Oklahoma home of John Lawmaster. They had received a tip that Lawmaster had illegally converted one of his semiautomatic weapons to an automatic. They ripped Lawmaster’s
home to shreds, but found no evidence that he’d broken any law. Lawmaster wasn’t home at the time. When he returned, he found his doors open, his house in ruins, and a note from the federal agency that read, “Nothing found.” And just three weeks before the raid in Waco, ATF agents raided a woman’s home in Portland. They held her at gunpoint for several hours and wouldn’t let her call her attorney. They finally admitted that they had raided the wrong home.

These were just a few examples of the agency’s excesses.
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The ATF abuses that came to light in the 1990s were a good indication that the warriorlike, us-against-them mentality wasn’t limited to drug policing. Those police actions also gave some momentum to a new militia movement—or at least caused the media to take notice of them. The militia movement was vast and fairly diverse, but most groups had views about government, guns, and property that were well to the right of the rest of the country. Very few espoused violence, but the new attention on the few that did, along with anger from the National Rifle Association (NRA), Gun Owners of America, and the rants of right-wing personalities like Liddy, inspired more reactionary opposition from the left. Then, on April 19, 1994, Timothy McVeigh set off a fertilizer bomb outside the Arthur Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 164 people. McVeigh claimed that he bombed the building in retaliation for the events at Waco.

McVeigh’s act gave fresh fuel to the ATF’s defenders—not so much to defend the agency, but to attack its critics. Four days after the bombing, President Bill Clinton laid part of the blame at the feet of right-wing critics of federal law enforcement officials. “We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other,” Clinton said. “They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable.”

Of course, just as it was possible to think David Koresh was a madman
and
be appalled by the federal government’s siege at Waco, it was also possible to believe the ATF deserved sharp criticism for its
handling of both Ruby Ridge and Waco
and
be appalled at Timothy McVeigh’s retaliatory murder of 164 innocent people. But McVeigh’s actions seemed to cement partisian battle lines for years to come, at least when it came to ATF abuses.

The final event to nudge the right to question the militarization of police—at least at the federal level—was the raid to wrest five-year-old Cuban refugee Elián González from the home of his relatives in Miami.
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In November 1999, González had fled to Florida on a boat with his mother and her boyfriend. His mother drowned when the boat sank, but González was picked up by a Florida fisherman, then handed over to Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials, who initially placed him with the Miami relatives. When word of his rescue made it back to Cuba, González’s father said that his mother had taken the boy without his permission, and he immediately began agitating for his son’s return. A legal battle ensued, culminating with a decision by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals on April 19 that González was to be returned to Cuba. When informed of the decision by a Justice Department official, Elián’s cousin Marisleysis González allegedly responded, “You think we just have cameras in the house? If people try to come in, they could be hurt.” The Justice Department cited that statement and other threats from the family’s supporters as the reason for its decision to send a 130-member INS team to take custody of the boy, headed by a heavily armed, eight-member INS SWAT team. The resulting raid produced an iconic, Pulitzer Prize–winning photo by Associated Press photographer Alan Diaz in which an INS agent points a semi-automatic weapon at the crying, terrified boy while he’s being held by Donato Dalrymple, one of the fishermen who found him.

Once again, reactions to the raid and the photo broke down along partisan lines. Conservatives lined up behind the Miami relatives, who were part of the city’s large community of generally conservative, anti-Castro, anti-Communist Cuban immigrants. Liberals tended to line up behind Bill Clinton, Janet Reno, and the Justice Department, who were trying to enforce the Eleventh Circuit ruling.

Then-presidential candidate George W. Bush declared that “the chilling picture of a little boy being removed from his home at gunpoint defies the values of America.” Bush would go on to win the presidency, a position from which he would order heavily armed SWAT teams to raid AIDS and cancer patients who used medical marijuana in states that had legalized the drug for medicinal purposes. The conservative
Washington Times
compared the INS agents to the Nazi brownshirts in the movie
Schindler’s List
. And conservative bomb-thrower (and drug war cheerleader) Ann Coulter deplored “the predawn raid with masked, machine-gun-toting federal agents” breaking into a private home.