Rise of the Warrior Cop (39 page)

Choosiness isn’t a luxury at smaller police agencies. “Right now, I’m preparing to testify in a lawsuit stemming from a wrongheaded raid by a SWAT team in a twenty-eight-man police department,” Downing says. “How do you even begin to select from twenty-eight people?” Several officers interviewed for this book made the intuitive point that the officers who want to be on the SWAT team are the last officers who should be selected for it. “And how do they find time to train? At LAPD, the SWAT team will spend at least half their on-duty time in training. In these smaller towns, the SWAT team is something these guys do on the side. They’re patrol officers. And so what happens is that they train by practicing on the people.”
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In the September 2011 issue of
Tactical Edge
magazine, Ed Sanow, a SWAT leader in Benton County, Indiana, and a well-published author and consultant on police tactics, suggests doing exactly that—practicing SWAT raids on low-level offenders. “Team commanders must raise the profile of their teams,” Sanow writes. “Stay active. Yes, I mean do warrant service and drug raids even if you have to poach the work. First, your team needs the training time under true callout conditions. If all your team does is train, but seldom deploy, you will end up training just to train. You need to train to fight. . . . Make deploying SWAT something that is routine, not something only done after much hand-wringing.”
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As had been happening throughout the drug war, this mass militarization brought with it a new wave of dehumanization. In one follow-up interview to his survey, a SWAT commander told Kraska, referring to the use of his team for routine patrols, “When the soldiers ride in, you should see those blacks scatter.” Former San Jose police chief Joseph McNamara told
National Journal
in 2000 that at a recent SWAT conference he had attended, “officers . . . were wearing these very disturbing shirts. On the front, there were pictures of SWAT officers dressed in dark uniforms, wearing helmets, and holding submachine guns. Below was written: ‘We don’t do drive-by shootings.’ On the back, there was a picture of a demolished house. Below was written: ‘We stop.’”
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Kraska found more evidence of the mind-set problem in a separate ethnography study he conducted. As part of the study, he had been invited to sit in on an informal (and probably illegal) training session for police officers. The session was taught by two members of an elite military unit with whom he had become friendly and who worked with several police departments that were developing or in the process of developing SWAT-like units. The actual “training” turned out to be little more than a group of cops and soldiers gathering in a remote area to shoot big guns. But before the police officers arrived, Kraska talked to the trainers about the proliferation of SWAT teams. “This shit is going on all over,” one of them said. “Why serve an arrest warrant to some crack dealer with a .38? With full armor, the right shit, and training, you can kick ass and have fun.” The other trainer jumped in. “Most of these guys just like to play war; they get a rush out of search-and-destroy missions instead of the bullshit they do normally.”

When the “trainees” arrived—all active-duty cops either on a SWAT team or soon to be—Kraska described what he saw:

Several had lightweight retractable combat knives strapped to their belts; three wore authentic army fatigue pants with T-shirts; one wore a T-shirt that carried a picture of a burning city with gunship helicopters flying overhead and the caption “Operation Ghetto Storm”; another wore a tight, black T-shirt with the initials “NTOA” (for National Tactical Officers Association). A few of the younger officers wore Oakley wraparound sunglasses on heads that sported either flattops or military-style crew cuts.

The Oakleys and crew cuts were part of a muscle-bound, mechanistic look popular with younger police officers. The look was usually accessorized with sensory-enhancement gear like night-vision goggles to achieve what Kraska calls a “techno-warrior” image. He notes that one purveyor of SWAT gear and clothing calls its line “Cyborg 21st.”

Later, Kraska wrote, a guy who had served as a sniper both in the military and on a SWAT team put on a demonstration for the group. The rest of the officers sat in awe as he popped off “head-sized” jugs of water sitting behind plates of glass. The sniper, Kraska observed, was held in especially high esteem in the paramilitary subculture because he embodied “the skill, discipline, endurance, and mind-set necessary to execute people from long distances in a variety of situations.”

Most interesting are Kraska’s observations about his own state of mind during the training session. There’s a point in his narrative where one of the trainers asks him if he wants to take a turn with an MP5. Kraska is reluctant, but after some prodding, gives the weapon a try. “I fired at a body-sized target, and, just as this officer surely anticipated, I made all the mistakes of someone who had never fired an automatic.” He took some ribbing, and then was surprised to hear himself defending his masculinity to the group of virtual strangers by pointing out that he had grown up hunting with shotguns. Presented with a shotgun, he then redeemed himself with what he calls “a personally satisfying demonstration.” Kraska found himself working hard to fit in and win the approval of the officers, even though he was there as an observer and likely would never see them again. He also felt a rush of power.

I had an intense sense of operating on the boundary of legitimate and illegitimate behavior. Clearly much of the activity itself was illegal, although reporting it would never have resulted in it being defined as “criminal.” . . . I felt at ease and in some ways defiant. I’ve had this experience in the past when field-researching police officers, and I realize that in a sense I am basking in the security of my temporary status as a beneficiary of state-sanctioned use of force. This is likely the same intoxicating feeling of autonomy from the law that is experienced by an abusive police officer. . . .

On a personal level, what disturbed me most was how I, as a person who had so thoroughly thought out militarism, could have so easily enjoyed experiencing it. This study illustrates the expansive and seductive powers . . . of a deeply embedded ideology of violence.
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The officers with SWAT and dynamic-entry experience interviewed for this book say raids are orders of magnitude more intoxicating than anything else in police work. Ironically, many cops describe them with language usually used to describe the drugs the raids are conducted to confiscate. “Oh, it’s a huge rush,” Franklin says. “Those times when you do have to kick down a door, it’s just a big shot of adrenaline.” Downing agrees. “It’s a rush. And you have to be careful, because the raids themselves can be habit-forming.” Jamie Haase, a former special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement who went on multiple narcotics, money laundering, and human trafficking raids, says the thrill of the raid may factor into why narcotics cops just don’t consider less volatile means of serving search warrants. “The thing is, it’s so much safer to wait the suspect out,” he says. “Waiting people out is just so much better. You’ve done your investigation, so you know their routine. So you wait until the guy leaves, and you do a routine traffic stop and you arrest him. That’s the safest way to do it. But you have to understand that a lot of these cops are meatheads. They think this stuff is cool. And they get hooked on that jolt of energy they get during a raid.”
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T
HE
1996
ELECTION MAY HAVE REPRESENTED A TURNING
point in public opinion about marijuana. Despite heavy campaigning by the office of Clinton’s drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, and the federal government in general, California voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana for medical purposes. Arizona voters passed an even more permissive law, but the state legislature effectively repealed it the following year. Over the next sixteen years, seventeen more states and the District of Columbia would pass medical marijuana laws—eleven of them through ballot initiatives. And all of this led to the historic 2012 election results, in which voters in Washington State and Colorado legalized the drug outright.

But the federal government wasn’t about to let sick people just start smoking pot without a fight. After the 1996 election, McCaffrey called a press conference to denounce California voters. “Nothing has changed,” McCaffrey said. “This is not a medical proposition. This is the legalization of drugs that we’re concerned about. . . . This is not medicine. This is a Cheech and Chong show. And now what we are committed to doing is to look in a scientific way at any proposition that would bring a new medicine to the assistance of the American medical establishment.”
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Naturally, there was no such medicine in the offing.

Months later the Clinton administration announced that doctors who recommended pot to their patients would not only lose their DEA licenses, but could also face criminal charges. In 2000 a federal judge chastised the Clinton administration for threatening doctors who even mentioned the medical benefits of marijuana to their AIDS and cancer patients.

The medical marijuana fight also began what would become a new and especially disturbing chapter in the story of police militarization in America—the use of heavy-handed paramilitary raids to send a political message. When the DEA began raiding marijuana suppliers in California, and then also in the states that subsequently legalized the drug, they generally raided suspects who were either well-known supporters of pot or people who they believed had enormous supplies of the drug. The latter were people running
businesses, operating openly under state law. Many of them had obtained business licenses and permits, as well as permission from local law enforcement. These were not dangerous people. The use of tactical teams and frightening raids to shut down medical marijuana suppliers in California was about sending a clear, unambiguous message to other pot suppliers around the state: openly defy the federal government, and you can expect the blunt force of federal power to be brought down upon you.

One of those early raids was on a medical marijuana farm run by Todd McCormick and Peter McWilliams in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air. Both men had become advocates of the drug after using it to treat symptoms of their own serious illnesses. McCormick smoked pot to treat the pain associated with a cancer treatment that had fused two of his vertebrae. McWilliams had both AIDS and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma brought on by AIDS. Smoking marijuana relieved his nausea, which helped him keep down the medication he took both to manage his AIDS and during his chemotherapy for the cancer. McWilliams was also a self-help author, and had become an outspoken civil liberties activist. With respect to pot, he made no attempt to hide the fact that while it was saving his life, it also made him feel good. The pot helped him keep down his medicine, dulled the pain associated with his conditions, and took his mind off the fact that he was suffering from them.

None of that was enough to get McCormick and McWilliams out from under the boot of the federal government. McWilliams describes the first moments of the raid:

A hard pounding on the door accompanied by shouts of “Police! Open up!” broke the silence, broke my reverie, and nearly broke down the door. I opened the door wearing standard writer’s attire, a bathrobe, and was immediately handcuffed. I was taken outside while Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents ran through my house, guns drawn, commando-style. They were looking, I suppose, for the notorious, well-armed, highly trained Medical Marijuana Militia. To the DEA, I am the Godfather of the Medicine Cartel. Finding nothing, they took me back into my home, informed me I was not under arrest, and ordered me—still in handcuffs—to sit down. I was merely being “restrained,” I was told, so the DEA could “enforce the search warrant.”
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The two men were unquestionably growing marijuana—the police found some four thousand plants. The entire operation was legal under California law, but because they were brought up on federal charges and tried in federal court, a jury wouldn’t be allowed to hear anything about California law. McWilliams was also barred from telling the jury that, according to his doctors, marijuana was keeping him alive.

Because all of that information would be kept from any potential jury, McWilliams really had no choice but to plead guilty and hope for leniency. After his arrest, McWilliams’s mother put her house up as collateral to help post his bail. One of the conditions of McWilliams’s bail was that he refrain from smoking marijuana. Federal prosecutors told McWilliams’s mother that if he failed a drug test or was caught with even a trace of pot in his possession, they’d take her house. So to protect his mother, McWilliams refrained from using the drug.