Rise of the Warrior Cop (41 page)

Early Monday morning, the chief of detectives requests an urgent meeting with the police chief. At the meeting he tells the police chief that the department’s op narc, Detective Eveready, has gathered intelligence indicating that “Mad Dog Brown,” one of the city’s more well-known drug dealers, has obtained a large shipment of rock cocaine. Mad Dog, who is credited by police with killing a number of rival dealers after giving them a mad dog look, has said he will never be taken alive. The intelligence indicates that Mad Dog has obtained enough rock cocaine to supply the city’s drug users for a month. He is reportedly held up in a fortified apartment on the third floor of a public housing project and surrounded by colleagues armed with military-type assault rifles.

That was the scenario Joseph McNamara set up to kick off the afternoon panel he was moderating for a groundbreaking drug policy conference in 1997 at the Hoover Institution. McNamara was a fellow at Hoover, the conservative think tank affiliated with Stanford University. More than one hundred police chiefs, judges, prosecutors, civil rights and civil liberties leaders, drug treatment professionals, and academics had gathered for the event, which was covered by C-SPAN. It was likely the first event of its kind—and if not, it was certainly the most high-profile. McNamara—who had thirty-five years’ experience in law enforcement—himself had become a critic of the drug war and police militarization. But the Hoover name gave the event some credibility with conservatives and law enforcement officials. Speakers included Milton Friedman, former secretary of State George Schultz, Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke, Baltimore police commissioner Thomas Frazier, Ed Meese, California judge James Gray, and San Jose, California, mayor Susan Hammer.

McNamara himself started his career as a patrol officer in Harlem in the 1960s, where he walked one of the highest-crime beats in the country. He worked his way up through the NYPD, achieving the rank of lieutenant before accepting a criminal justice fellowship at Harvard. Under the fellowship, he studied the operations of a methadone clinic back in Harlem, which spurred his interest in drug policy. McNamara went on to earn a doctorate in public administration. His dissertation was an examination of how law enforcement handled drug use in America before and after the 1913 Harrison Narcotics Act. After completing his doctorate, he returned to the NYPD as a deputy inspector in charge of crime analysis.

In 1973, McNamara was appointed police chief in Kansas City. Three years later, he was appointed police chief for San Jose, California. He headed that department for fifteen years. McNamara resisted the aggressive, militaristic trends brought on by the drug war in the 1980s. He embraced community policing, and showed little tolerance
for police misconduct and excessive force. By the time he retired in 1991, San Jose had surpassed San Francisco to become the most populous city in northern California. Among cities with a population of 400,000 or more, San Jose also had the lowest crime rate in the country for the last three years of McNamara’s tenure. The city’s crime rate in 1990 was 60 percent of San Diego’s, half that of San Francisco, and one-quarter of the rate in Los Angeles. McNamara pulled this off with one of the smallest per capita police departments in America.

That record (and his own conservative politics) won McNamara clout with the right, despite his vocal criticism of the war on drugs, police abuse, and police militarization. It also helped him land his post–law enforcement position with Hoover shortly after retirement. In 1995, McNamara won funding to conduct four drug policy conferences at Hoover. The first was in 1995. The panel he was moderating in 1997 was the second.

McNamara’s co-panelists for the militarization session were Los Angeles police chief Bernard Parks, US district judge Robert Sweet, San Jose mayor Hammer, defense attorney Ron Rose, San Francisco district attorney Terence Hallinan, ACLU executive director Ira Glasser, former Santa Clara, California, NAACP director Tommy Fulcher, and Robert Garner of the Drug Abuse Services Bureau in Santa Clara.

After laying out the hypothetical above, McNamara turned to Chief Parks. What was his next move? Parks responded that he’d attempt to verify the tip. If it checked out, he’d send in the SWAT team. McNamara asked about the sort of ammunition the SWAT team used. Weren’t their bullets capable of going through walls? “They’ll go through a car engine two blocks away,” Parks answered. McNamara then changed the hypothetical. What if it wasn’t crack, but marijuana? Would he still send in an armed-to-the-teeth SWAT team? Parks said he would. What if it was a shipment of bootlegged Valium? Still with the SWAT team. Black market booze? SWAT team.

Mayor Hammer was up next. What was her role in overseeing the police department? Would she be comfortable with her own police department conducting a heavy-handed SWAT raid in a crowded
housing complex over illegal Valium? Hammer replied that her job was “to support the chief,” not to question him. If the raid had gone over poorly with the public, she might go on TV to reassure the city. She added that she doubted whether such raids did anything at all to reduce the drug supply, but that the raid needed to be carried out anyway. “I don’t know how you don’t do the raid and have any credibility with the community.”

McNamara then turned to DA Hallinan. He too said it wasn’t his job to question police tactics. Even if he thought the raid was too dangerous or an unnecessary use of force, he’d keep his opinions to himself. It just wasn’t his job to tell the police chief whether or not he thought a raid was appropriate.

McNamara also asked Sweet, the federal judge, if he’d sign a warrant to make the raid a “no-knock” in each of the various hypotheticals. Since Nixon first pushed the no-knock policy, politicians and police officials had stated over and over again that the tactic would be monitored and patrolled by the judges who must sign off on the search warrants. Sweet said that while he worried about the drug war’s erosion of the Fourth Amendment, he and most judges typically didn’t second-guess or provide much scrutiny to affidavits requesting no-knock search warrants. After the fact, they might hear a defendant’s argument that contraband seized in the raid should be suppressed because the raid was unreasonable, but in his experience, judges rarely gave any consideration to whether the use of a SWAT team and paramilitary, “volatile entry” tactics were an appropriate use of force for the crime under investigation.

It went on like that. Even Glasser and Fulcher, the civil liberties activists, said they’d become involved only if they received complaints from residents of the housing complex about police misconduct after the raid. They likely wouldn’t devote any resources to criticizing the tactics themselves. Garner, the panelist who had an extensive public health background and who ran Santa Clara’s public addiction clinic, added that police in his community had never in his career consulted him about the extent of the drug problem in Santa Clara, be it about which drugs were most prevalent, which
drugs presented more of a public health threat than others, or what sorts of policies would best minimize the harm caused by addiction.

Finally, McNamara asked the panel: if the drug raid was a complete and total success, resulting in a confiscation of Mad Dog’s entire stash, with no casualties to police, suspects, or citizens, would it have any impact on drug abuse in your city? All but Chief Parks said no.

The police chief of the second-largest city in America had just told the audience that he was willing to use extraordinary force to confiscate a supply of illegal drugs. It was a level of force that could well result death or injury to innocents—and indeed by that point already had, countless times. What’s more, he added that what drug he was pursuing and how much actual harm that particular drug caused
had no relevance
on the amount of force he elected to use. Every public official on the panel who had the power to check that decision then told the same audience that they had no interest in second-guessing him. During a question-and-answer session after the panel, the public officials in the audience basically reaffirmed what the panelists had already said.

“It really showed the extent of the problem,” McNamara says. “You get this robot mentality with these officials. The mayor said she knew nothing about these raids and didn’t want to know anything about them until they were over. The judge wasn’t interested in scrutinizing the raid until it was over—when any damage would already be done. Everyone else said it wasn’t their job to worry about it. And so you end up with this dangerous decision that gets made by people of lower rank with little training, with little incentive to care much about constitutional rights, with no oversight—no checks or balances. Collateral damage is just part of the game.”

In a paper on the conference that McNamara later submitted to the International Congress on Alcohol and Drug Dependence, he concluded:

The session revealed that public officials, judges, mayors, district attorneys, police chiefs, public health directors, and community leaders rarely, if ever, meet as a group to discuss urban drug control goals and problems. And they never meet to discuss police drug raids unless something goes awry. . . . Each of the panelists indicated a sensitivity to problems of drug control, appropriate police conduct, and public safety but felt that his or her role was basically compartmentalized.

Another troubling theme to emerge from the 1997 conference is that police, judges, and prosecutors—the people most closely connected with the drug war other than drug offenders themselves—were afraid to speak openly and honestly, even in an academic setting. One police chief cornered McNamara to voice his displeasure with McNamara inviting media to cover the conference. He said the presence of reporters made him and other drug war critics reluctant to talk candidly. In responses to a questionnaire about overall impressions of the conference, one police chief wrote, “The conference reinforced my feelings that we need to change.” A prosecutor wrote that the event “confirmed my views that the war on drugs cannot be justified logically or economically. New approaches are needed and soon.” Another police chief wrote, “The conference gave me a strong sense of the need for changing drug policies,” and still another wrote, “It is risky for us to even attend a conference which could lead to an accusation of being soft on drugs.” A judge wrote that the conference “challenged many of my views.” But all of them requested anonymity.
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T
HERE’S A STRONG ARGUMENT THAT
L
ARRY
P
HILLIPS
J
R. AND
Emil Mătăsăreanu did more to advance the militarization of American police forces than anyone short of Daryl Gates. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu, a Romanian immigrant, met at a Gold’s Gym in the late ’80s, struck up a friendship, and embarked on a decade-long crime spree together. By the time they were preparing a heist of a Bank of America in North Hollywood, California, in early 1997, they had robbed two armored cars and two other branches of Bank of America. On the morning of February 28, the two suited up in
body armor and loaded a Chevrolet Celebrity with six guns and over 3,000 rounds of ammunition. The robbery went down with no casualties, though the two were disappointed to make out with only a little over $300,000, less than half of what they were expecting. But as they left the bank at around 9:30 AM, several LAPD patrol cars had already showed up and formed an embankment, the officers taking cover behind their squad cars. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu fired off several rounds at one of the cars. The police fired back. The shootout was on.

The officers hit the two men several times, but the patrol officers’ weapons—including one shotgun—couldn’t penetrate the body armor. About twenty minutes later, an LAPD SWAT team showed up. At around ten minutes before 10:00 AM, Phillips’s rifle jammed. He started firing with a pistol, then dropped that too after he was struck in the hand. He picked up the pistol and, about twenty minutes after the shoot-out began, shot himself in the head.

Mătăsăreanu tried to mount an escape in the Celebrity, but police had shot out the tires. He managed to move it a few blocks, where he attempted to commandeer a pickup truck. When he couldn’t get it started, he took cover behind it just as the SWAT team arrived. He exchanged fire with them for a few more minutes before surrendering. By then, he’d been shot at least twenty times—in his legs, and other parts of his body unprotected by armor. He died before the ambulance arrived. By the end of the shoot-out, more than 300 law enforcement personnel fired approximately 650 total rounds at each of the two men. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu fired 1,100 rounds between them. The shoot-out lasted forty-four minutes. Eleven police officers and seven citizens were wounded. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu were the only fatalities. Nearly all of the shoot-out was broadcast on live television by several local news helicopters.

If you wanted to create an incident to win sympathy for police militarization, you couldn’t do much better than the North Hollywood Shoot-out. A live, televised shoot-out between hundreds of cops and two career criminals, heavily armed and armored, and who refused to go down, was a tailor-made poster case for soldiering up
America’s police forces. The following September, the Pentagon sent six hundred M-16s to the Los Angeles Police Department for officers to put in their patrol cars. The department also authorized patrol officers to carry .45-caliber semiautomatic pistols. The incident moved other police departments across the country to upgrade patrol officer sidearms as well.
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