In a Salon essay published today,
Alecia Phonesavanh
recalls the night her 19-month-old son, Bounkham (a.k.a. Bou
Bou), was
horribly injured by a flash-bang grenade tossed into his crib
during a fruitless drug raid in Habersham County, Georgia.
“It’s been three weeks since the flashbang exploded next to
my sleeping baby,” she writes, “and he’s still covered in
burns. There’s still a hole in his chest that
exposes his ribs. At least that’s what I’ve been told; I’m afraid
to look.”
Phonesavanh argues that the SWAT team, which consisted of
Harbersham County sheriff’s deputies and Cornelia police officers,
should have known there were children in the house, where she and
her family were staying with relatives after a fire destroyed their
home in Wisconsin. “Some of my kids’ toys were in the front yard,”
she says, and on their way into the house, the officers passed a
minivan with child seats inside and stickers on the back window
representing “a dad, a mom, three young girls, and one baby boy.”
The family’s lawyer likewise has
noted that even rudimentary surveillance of the house should
have discovered evidence of children. Police, who were looking for
the Phonesavanhs’ 30-year-old nephew, Wanis Thonetheva, seem
to have relied on the assurances of an undercover agent who visited
only briefly and did not enter the house.
So that is one possible lesson to draw from this appalling
incident: Before tossing explosive, incendiary devices into the
homes they attack in the middle of the night, police should do more
to verify that no children are present. But Phonesavanh also
suggests that police too readily resort to paramilitary assaults
that put innocent people, adults as well as children, at risk:
Flashbang grenades were created for soldiers to use during
battle. When they explode, the noise is so loud and the flash is so
bright that anyone close by is temporarily blinded and
deafened….My husband’s nephew, the one they were looking for, wasn’t
there. He doesn’t even live in that house. After breaking down the
door, throwing my husband to the ground, and screaming at my
children, the officers—armed with M16s—filed through the house like
they were playing war. They searched for drugs and never found
any.
As a
new report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
documents, this sort of disproportionate response is common when
police serve drug warrants. SWAT teams, originally intended for
special situations involving hostages, active shooters, or riots,
today are routinely used to execute drug searches. Examining a
sample of more than 800 SWAT deployments by 20 law enforcement
agencies in 2011 and 2012, the ACLU found that 79 percent involved
searches, typically for drugs. Research by Eastern Kentucky
University criminologist Peter Kraska has yielded similar
numbers.
These operations are inherently dangerous, especially since
armed men breaking into a house while the occupants are sleeping
can easily be mistaken for burglars, with deadly consequences for
cops, occupants, or both. Even when no one dies or suffers serious
injuries, SWAT raids feature the destruction of property (starting
with broken doors and smashed windows), the manhandling and
detention of innocent people, and the
more-than-occasional killing of beloved
family pets. All things to be avoided, you might think, unless
absolutely necessary.
Police typically justify no-knock raids and heavy firepower by
claiming the target is apt to be armed. That is what they said
about Thonetheva, the Phonesavanhs’ nephew, who had no weapons
when he was arrested at a different location on the day of the raid
that sent Bou Bou to the hospital. In the ACLU’s sample that sort
of outcome was common: In at least one-third of cases where a
weapon was believed to be present, none was found. Police records
indicated recovery of a weapon in one out of three such cases. In
the rest, the records did not address that point.
The ACLU, like my former
Reason colleague
Radley Balko, argues that the militarization of American
policing has resulted from an excessively literal understanding of
the War on Drugs, training that encourages
cops to “adopt a ‘warrior’ mentality and think of
the people they are supposed to serve as
enemies,” and the Pentagon’s promiscuous sharing
of equipment with local police departments, which explains why no
town is too little or quiet for an
armored personnel carrier. The report recommends specific
local, state, and federal reforms aimed at reversing this trend,
including greater transparency, better record keeping, stricter
standards for SWAT deployments, statutes requiring the suppression
of evidence gathered in violation of the knock-and-announce rule,
and an end to the sharing of military equipment.
The ACLU mentions declining public support for the War on Drugs
as one reason to reconsider the ferocity with which it is waged.
But while de-escalation would be welcome, it does not address the
fundamental immorality of responding to peaceful transactions
with guns and handcuffs. Even if reforms like those recommended by
the ACLU encourage police to be more judicious in their use of
force, unjustifiable violence will always be a defining feature of
drug prohibition.
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