Today a federal appeals court rebuked
police in Orange County, Florida, for mounting a warrantless,
SWAT-style raid on a barbership under the pretense of assisting
state inspectors. “We have twice held, on facts disturbingly
similar to those presented here, that a criminal raid executed
under the guise of an administrative inspection is constitutionally
unreasonable,” says the decision
by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. “We hope that
the third time will be the charm.”
On August 19, 2010, two inspectors from the Florida Department
of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) visited the Strictly
Skillz Barbershop in Orlando and found everything in order: All of
the barbers working there were properly licensed, and all of the
work stations complied with state regulations. Two days later, even
though no violations had been discovered and even though the DBPR
is authorized to conduct such inspections only once every two
years, the inspectors called again, this time accompanied by
“between eight and ten officers, including narcotics agents,” who
“rushed into” the barbershop “like [a] SWAT team.” Some of them
wore masks and bulletproof vests and had their guns drawn.
Meanwhile, police cars blocked off the parking lot.
The officers ordered all the customers to leave, announcing that
the shop was “closed down indefinitely.” They handcuffed the owner,
Brian Berry, and two barbers who rented chairs from him, then
proceeded to search the work stations and a storage room. They
demanded the barbers’ driver’s licenses and checked for outstanding
warrants. One of the inspectors, Amanda Fields, asked for the
same paperwork she had seen two days earlier, going through the
motions of verifying that the barbers were not cutting hair without
a license (a second-degree misdemeanor). Finding no regulatory
violations or contraband, the officers released Berry and the
others after about an hour.
Although ostensibly justified as a regulatory inspection, the
raid on Strictly Skillz, like similar sweeps of other barbershops
that same day, was part of an operation hatched by Fields and Cpl.
Keith Vidler of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office (OCSO), who
hoped to find drugs, “gather intelligence,” and “interview
potential confidential informants.” The barbershops chosen for the
sweeps “were apparently selected because they or barbers within
them had on previous occasions failed to cooperate with DBPR
inspectors,” the court says. “All of the targeted barbershops were
businesses that serviced primarily African-American and Hispanic
clientele.”
The 11th Circuit concludes that the Strictly Skillz raid, as
described by Berry and the other plaintiffs, was “clearly
established to be illegal from its inception,” violating state
law as well as the Fourth Amendment. “The facts of this case—when
viewed in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs—adequately
establish that the ‘inspection’ of Strictly Skillz amounted to an
unconstitutional search and that the unconstitutionality of such a
search was clearly established at the time that the search was
executed.” Hence a federal judge was right to rule that
Vidler and Deputy Travis Leslie do not deserve qualified
immunity.
At this stage of the case, where Vidler and Leslie are trying to
get the lawsuit dismissed based on the qualified immunity enjoyed
by officers who do not blatantly disregard well-established
constitutional law, judges are supposed to assume that the
plaintiffs can prove the facts they allege. But there seems to be
little real dispute about what the cops did that day; the exact
number of officers involved, for example, is not going to be
crucial in judging whether the search was legal.
“The August 21 search was executed with a
tremendous and disproportionate show of force, and no evidence
exists that such force was justified,” the court says. “Despite the
fact that neither OCSO nor the DBPR had any reason to believe that
the inspection of Strictly Skillz posed a threat to officer safety,
the record indicates that several OCSO officers entered the
barbershop wearing masks and bulletproof vests, and with guns
drawn; surrounded the building and blocked all of the exits; forced
all of the children and other customers to leave; announced that
the business was ‘closed down indefinitely’; and handcuffed and
conducted pat-down searches of the employees while the officers
searched the premises. Such a search, which bears no resemblance to
a routine inspection for barbering licenses, is certainly not
reasonable in scope and execution.”
Radley Balko
noted the Florida barbershop raids, along with other examples
of criminal searches disguised as regulatory inspections, back in
2010.
[Thanks to John Kramer for the tip.]
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