Pubdate: Sun, 06 Mar 2016
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2016 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Authors: John Sullivan, Derek Hawkins and Pietro Lombardi
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/raids.htm (Drug Raids)

WHEN THE INNOCENT ARE TREATED LIKE CRIMINALS

Pursuing Drugs and Guns on Scant Evidence, D.C. Police Sometimes Raid 
Wrong Homes - Terrifying Residents

Sallie Taylor was sitting in her apartment in Northeast Washington 
one evening in January 2015 watching "Bible Talk" when her clock fell 
off the wall and broke. She turned and looked up as nine D.C. police 
officers smashed through her door. A shotgun was pointed at her face, 
and she was ordered to the floor.

"They came in like Rambo," said Taylor, a soft-spoken 63-year-old 
grandmother who was dressed in a white nightgown and said she has 
never had even a speeding ticket.

The heavily armed squad thought they were searching the residence of 
a woman arrested two miles away the previous night for carrying a 
half-ounce vial of PCP.

Taylor, who did not know the woman, was terrified. Trembling, she 
told police that the woman did not live there. Officers spent 30 
minutes searching the house anyway, going through her boxes and her 
underwear drawer. They found no drugs and left without making an arrest.

The search warrant executed at Taylor's apartment cited no evidence 
of criminal activity there. Instead, in an affidavit to a judge, 
police argued that they should be able to search for drugs there 
based on their "training and experience" investigating the drug 
trade. They relied on an address they found in a court-records system 
for the woman arrested with PCP.

A Washington Post review of 2,000 warrants served by D.C. police 
between January 2013 and January 2015 found that 284 - about 14 
percent - shared the characteristics of the one executed at Taylor's 
apartment. In every case, after arresting someone on the street for 
possession of drugs or a weapon, police invoked their training and 
experience to justify a search of a residence without observing 
criminal activity there. The language of the warrants gave officers 
broad leeway to search for drugs and guns in areas saturated by them 
and to seize phones, computers and personal records.

In about 60 percent of the 284 cases, police executing the warrants 
found illegal items, ranging from drug paraphernalia to guns, The 
Post found. The amounts of drugs recovered were usually small, 
ranging from residue to marijuana cigarettes to rocks of cocaine. 
About 40 percent of the time - in 115 cases - police left empty-handed.

In a dozen instances, The Post found, officers acted on incorrect or 
outdated address information, subjecting such people as Taylor to the 
fright of their lives.

Almost all of the 284 raids occurred in black communities. In 276 
warrants in which The Post could determine a suspect's race, three 
originated with arrests of white suspects. The remaining 99 percent 
involved black suspects. In the District, 94 percent of people 
arrested in 2013 for gun or drug charges were black, according to FBI 
crime data.

The 284 warrants reviewed by The Post differ from the usual pattern 
of police warrants. D.C. police have said at public hearings that the 
typical raid happens only after undercover officers or confidential 
informants have purchased drugs or guns from inside a home or police 
have conducted surveillance there.

The searches are occurring at a time when public attention is highly 
focused on interactions between police and blacks nationwide, with 
the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and concern about the 
aftereffects of the drug war. In Maryland this month, lawmakers 
proposed legislation that would require police to reimburse residents 
for damage to their property when police execute a warrant and find 
nothing. In Philadelphia, police were criticized in October by the 
executive director of the city's citizen review board for harsh 
treatment of residents during raids.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects citizens from 
"unreasonable searches," generally requiring government agents to 
obtain a warrant from a judge by showing they have probable cause to 
think that they will find a specific item at a specific location. In 
recent decades, police have been given wide latitude by the courts to 
conduct searches aimed at removing drugs and guns from the streets.

Attorney Alec Karakatsanis, of the nonprofit group D.C.-based Equal 
Justice Under Law, said warrants that rely on training and experience 
as justification for a search subject the black community to abusive 
police intrusion based on flimsy investigative work. In the past two 
years, he has filed seven civil rights lawsuits in federal court 
challenging D.C. police's practice of seeking search warrants based 
solely on an officer's training and experience.

"They have turned any arrest anywhere in the city into an automatic 
search of a home, and that simply cannot be," said Karakatsanis, who 
spent three years studying the issue, starting when he worked at the 
Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. "It would work 
a fundamental change in the balance of power in our society between 
government agents and individual rights."

D.C. police, the U.S. Attorney's Office and the D.C. Attorney 
General's Office defend the use of warrants based on police training 
and experience.

In a written statement to The Post, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier 
did not distinguish between warrants based primarily on training and 
experience and those based on more-extensive investigation. She said 
that all of the warrants the department executed last year were 
constitutionally sound and that each warrant was reviewed by a police 
lieutenant as well as prosecutors and ultimately approved by a judge.

"In the vast majority of those warrants, contraband and evidence was 
recovered in furtherance of criminal prosecutions, and gave MPD [the 
Metropolitan Police Department] the ability to bring closure to 
multiple victims of crimes in our city," she said. "During that same 
time frame, MPD received very few complaints regarding the execution 
of those warrants."

Lanier said residents who are dissatisfied with police should speak 
with a supervisor at the department or the Office of Police 
Complaints. "We remain committed to unbiased constitutional 
policing," she said.

The U.S. Attorney's Office said in a written statement that its 
prosecutors carefully review thousands of warrants each year to 
determine whether they meet the standards for probable cause.

"Probable cause merely requires that the facts and circumstances 
available to the officer provide the basis for a reasonable person to 
conclude that evidence of a crime exists at a location," the 
statement said. "Although no system is perfect, the law and the 
multiple layers of review provide safeguards to minimize the 
potential for errors."

Lee F. Satterfield, chief judge of the D.C. Superior Court, declined 
to comment, citing pending cases.

Karakatsanis studied a year of warrants in which police searched for 
drugs based on training and experience and found that they recovered 
drugs one third of the time. In response to Karakatsanis, then-D.C. 
Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan argued in 2014, "While Plaintiffs 
treat this success rate with contempt, finding drugs in one third of 
similar police searches is strong evidence of probable cause."

Nathan also pointed out that the Supreme Court has held that probable 
cause cannot be reduced to a "precise definition or quantification."

In January, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg allowed the first of 
Karakatsanis's cases to go forward, saying that "a talismanic 
invocation" of "training and experience" does not automatically 
satisfy constitutional requirements.

The raids for which police do more investigative work appear to bring 
better results, The Post found. In February 2015, police searched a 
house in Southeast and seized an AK-47 assault rifle, two 
semiautomatic handguns and 100 grams of marijuana. In April 2014, 
police in Northwest found 25 grams of heroin, 330 grams of marijuana, 
a revolver and an assortment of ammunition. They also found $60,000 in cash.

Perhaps the most successful raid among the 284 identified by The Post 
occurred after police made a traffic stop and found a revolver and 
four hollow-point bullets in the glove box. A search of the suspect's 
house turned up two shotguns, a semiautomatic handgun and an 
assortment of ammunition. The suspect received a 10-month suspended 
sentence for firearm charges and served no time in jail.

Most of the time, police find much less.

Police told a judge that their training and experience investigating 
drug cases led them to think that they would find evidence of a 
PCP-trafficking operation when they raided the house of Margaret 
Brown in April 2014.

Brown's son had overdosed on PCP at a building across the street from 
her apartment in Northwest Washington. A vial containing a small 
amount of the drug, an eighth of an ounce, was found in his clothes. 
Police arrested him for possession of PCP, a felony, and he was later 
sentenced to four months in jail.

The evening after his arrest, police in body armor burst through 
Brown's front door.

"They slammed me to the ground," said Brown, 47, who had just 
returned home from her job in billing at a hospital and has never 
been convicted of a crime. "They were fully armed - guns pointed in 
my face like there was a major drug deal going down."

Brown said she sat handcuffed while police went through her 
belongings, knocking over furniture and even opening an urn 
containing her mother's cremated remains.

The search turned up a partially burnt marijuana cigarette. Brown 
told police that it belonged to her son, who she said has a marijuana 
card allowing him to legally possess the drug for medical reasons.

They arrested her for misdemeanor possession, and she spent five hours in jail.

Eight weeks later, prosecutors dropped the charge against her.

Relying on others' word

The warrants The Post identified began with arrests made during 
traffic stops or street encounters where officers observed suspicious 
behavior. In all of those cases, suspects were caught with illegal 
guns or amounts of drugs sufficient for charges of possession with 
intent to distribute - usually an ounce or more of marijuana or 
several grams of cocaine.

During the arrests, police obtained suspects' addresses by relying on 
the person's word, a driver's license or databases from law 
enforcement, schools, utilities or courts. After receiving the ap of 
the U.S. Attorney's Office, usually within a day, police then secured 
warrants by going to a Superior Court judge with a sworn affidavit 
making their case that they had probable cause to think they would 
find drugs, guns or other criminal evidence at the residences.

The warrant gives police 10 days to conduct the search and details 
when and how the raid is to be carried out.

The responsible judge - the duty rotates among Superior Court judges 
- - must decide whether the information would allow a person of 
"reasonable caution" to conclude that police are more likely than not 
to find evidence of a crime during the search.

"Police are going to push the limit," said Eugene O'Donnell, a 
professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York 
City who is also a former NYPD officer and prosecutor and has worked 
as a police academy instructor. "But police are not civil 
libertarians, and these types of warrants are counter to what the 
Fourth Amendment is all about."

Such warrants, O'Donnell said, can easily be abused.

"It's a mass-produced, search-and-recovery operation. It's an 
assembly line. It's not a progressive policy, and it imperils police 
and people alike," he said.

Academic experts said the weight of such warrants falls 
disproportionately on minority communities. Andrew Crespo, a law 
professor at Harvard, recently studied D.C. warrants and found them 
almost exclusively executed in black communities.

One of Karakatsanis's clients is Shandalyn-Harrison.

On April 5, 2013, police pulled her ex-boyfriend over for having an 
obstructed license plate and found five ounces of marijuana, a 
misdemeanor. He had two prior misdemeanor convictions for selling 
marijuana. Police got an address for him in Northwest from his 
suspended D.C. driver's license and a utility listing from December 
2012, according to the affidavit.

But the house was rented to Harrison, and she said she had previously 
told police that he had never lived there.

Shortly after 10 p.m. on April 18, as Harrison watched a rerun of 
"Grey's Anatomy" with two of her daughters, she glanced up from the 
television to see a line of 20 police officers assembled on the porch 
of her house. She opened the door.

"Everyone was running in. No one told me what was going on," 
Harrison, 35, later told The Post.

Harrison's 11-year-old daughter was taking a shower when an officer 
pushed aside the curtain and pointed a gun at her, according to the 
mother and daughter. Police also held Harrison's 21-year-old younger 
brother, Sterling, at gunpoint, Harrison and Sterling said.

"What they did was not right," Harrison said. "I work hard to take 
care of my daughters and to protect them and raise them right, but 
they treated us like we committed a crime."

Harrison said it took the family days to clean up after the raid. At 
one point, an officer told the children that their father "did not 
care about them" and said the search was happening only because he 
was a "bad man," according to the lawsuit.

In November 2013, the ex-boyfriend pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor 
charge of possession with intent to distribute marijuana. He was 
sentenced to serve 20 days in jail and paid a $50 fine.

In August 2014, Harrison filed a federal lawsuit against D.C. police.

Attorneys for the District say the case should be dismissed because a 
judge approved the warrant.

The wrong address

Patrice Sulton, a lawyer who chairs the legislation committee for the 
D.C. Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said that addresses in 
the D.C. court system can be unreliable. In a report in April, the 
department's Police Complaints Board expressed concern "about the 
lack of verification of address information in warrants executed by 
MPD officers."

Failure to properly verify an address led police to the home of 
Patricia Dandridge on Jan. 27, 2015. She returned from work to find 
her apartment in Southeast ransacked. The door was beaten in and her 
bed frame was broken, she said. Clothes and personal papers were 
strewn across the floor.

"I thought I'd been robbed, but my neighbor told me it was the 
police," said Dandridge, 45.

On the kitchen counter, she found a copy of a D.C. police search 
warrant. Three officers had forced their way in to look for firearms. 
They left empty-handed.

The warrant was based on a drug complaint at a housing complex in 
Southeast more than five miles from Dandridge's apartment, according 
to the affidavit police used to justify the search.

Police called to the complex had arrested a man, who fled when they 
arrived. After a brief struggle with the suspect, Christopher Palmer, 
police found a handgun nearby on the ground.

Officers told a judge that they needed to search Palmer's apartment 
for evidence proving that the gun was his. Palmer gave his address as 
Apartment 102 in a building in Anacostia, according to the police 
affidavit. Police said they confirmed the address with a probation 
supervisor, Warren Leggett, who said Community Supervision Officer 
Melissa Shelton had visited the apartment earlier in the month.

Shelton declined to comment, referring a reporter to the 
generalcounsel of the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, 
who said that the agency is prohibited from releasing information to 
the public about people on probation.

Palmer-lived down the hall with his parents in Apartment 103. 
Dandridge lives in 102. "103 does not look like 102," Dandridge said. 
The apartments are on opposite ends of the building.

After the raid, Dandridge was furious. She said she contacted Sgt. 
Jaron Hickman, one of the officers who conducted the search. He told 
her that they had arrested a man they thought was her son and 
received a warrant to search for guns and ammunition, she said.

Dandridge told him that it couldn't have been her son. "My son is 
deceased," she said. Hickman declined a request for an interview.

Dandridge said that for weeks, she pressed police for compensation 
for the damage. She said they owed her at least $1,200.

She submitted a claim to the city's Office of Risk Management. She 
said she ultimately received a check for $260.

D.C. prosecutors indicted Palmer on firearm charges and two counts of 
assault on a police officer. In December, a jury acquitted him of the 
firearm charges but found him guilty of the assault charges. He 
received a 180-day suspended sentence.

The price some pay

Among the few who succeeded in getting police to pay for damage done 
during an errant raid are David Cranor, a satellite engineer, and his 
attorney wife.

Cranor wrote about the 2009 raid of his home on Kentucky Avenue in 
Southeast on his blog on the Greater Greater Washington website. He 
said police spent 45 minutes disassembling steel bars on his back 
door while trying to execute the search.

The warrant was based on a traffic stop of two suspects: a female 
driver and her son. The young man was charged with possession of an 
illegal firearm, according to the warrant, and told police that he 
lived at the Kentucky Avenue address. Police said his mother verified 
the address, which was also checked in a pretrial-services database 
intended to monitor court appearances.

The young man had been arrested in 2004, when his family lived at the 
house. Cranor and his wife bought the house in 2007.

The city initially refused to pay for the damage to Cranor's back 
door, which he said cost $3,140. In March 2010, the couple, then in 
their 30s, sued police. When it became evident that the case would go 
to trial, Cranor emailed Lanier seeking a resolution. The next 
morning, Lanier wrote to say she was getting involved, he said, and 
the city agreed the following day to pay for the repairs.

"A slow, mysterious bureaucratic process is not a productive way to 
handle these kinds of situations," he wrote in his blog in 2011.

Marietta Robinson said that police relied on outdated information 
about her grandson to obtain a warrant in 2010 to search her house in 
Northwest. Police stopped her grandson after hearing him curse loudly 
while he was standing in the courtyard of a building down the street 
from her home. They arrested him for disorderly conduct, a 
misdemeanor, and found 18 grams of marijuana in his pocket, a little 
more than half an ounce. He was charged with possession with intent 
to distribute.

Police said that he gave them Robinson's address, which appeared as 
the grandson's address in several other databases.

But Robinson, 62 at the time, said her grandson, then in his late 
20s, had not lived with her since 1987.

When police arrived, Robinson put her 13-year-old shepherd-pit bull 
mix, Wrinkles, in a bathroom and allowed officers to conduct their 
search. She said that a police officer opened the bathroom door and 
shot the dog, and as the animal ran into the living room, several 
more officers opened fire, hitting the dog 13 times, according to a 
lawsuit she filed. Blood splattered across her artwork and 
photographs. Robinson said the officers threw bedsheets and clothing 
on the floor to soak it up. Robinson said she was forced to wait 
outside for four hours during the officers' search.

Police did not find drugs or other contraband. Paperwork documenting 
the results of the search list only "drug paraphernalia (empty ziploc 
with residue)."

Last March, a federal judge dismissed Robinson's lawsuit against 
police, saying that the officers used reasonable force in killing an 
aggressive dog.

Robinson has appealed the ruling.

Outdated information also figured in the case of Rameka Waters, 24, 
who passed drug testing and a background check for her job as a 
licensed home-health aide. But a close friend has a long history of 
mostly misdemeanor arrests for drugs, dating back to the 1990s. 
Several years ago, he used her address in Northeast to receive mail 
from the courts.

In April 2014, police pulled over a car, in which the friend was a 
passenger, on a seat-belt violation. Officers said they smelled 
marijuana and found an ounce of the drug in a plastic bag. The man 
admitted that he intended to sell the drugs, and he gave his address 
as Waters's apartment in Northeast, the warrant states.

After he was arrested, Waters saw police sitting outside her 
four-unit apartment building, where she lived in a unit on the second 
floor. She said she told detectives that he had used her address in 
the past but that he did not live there anymore.

A few days later, as she was leaving to take her daughter to school, 
she opened the front door to her apartment building and was met by a 
dozen police officers. Waters said she gave them her key to open her 
unit. They found nothing. "They told me I should be more careful 
about who I let use my address," she said.

Prosecutors eventually dropped the charges against her friend. A 
month after the search, police arrested him again on drug charges. 
They searched a home a block away from Waters's apartment and found 
29 grams of marijuana and five small plastic bags of crack cocaine. 
He pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor drug charges in that case and 
received a 60-day suspended sentence and six months of probation.

'Like they didn't have' rules

Sallie Taylor still can't understand how police got it wrong.

The search of Taylor's apartment in January 2015 on the second floor 
of a four-unit building on 36th Street in Northeast began with an 
arrest two miles away. Tia Jackson, 34, was charged with sexual 
solicitation. A search of her handbag turned up a half-ounce vial of 
PCP, according to the affidavit police filed to obtain the warrant.

Before the raid, police said they corroborated an address for Jackson 
at 36th Street in the pretrial services database and unspecified "law 
enforcement databases." In addition, Robert M. Van Dyke, the lead 
investigative officer in the case, stated that he had firsthand 
knowledge of the residence.

"Your affiant has been inside of 181 36th street, NE," Van Dyke said. 
"This area is known for prolific narcotics use, trafficking, and is 
responsible for habitual narcotics complaints from the community."

Van Dyke did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

The address had once belonged to Jackson's ex-boyfriend, court 
records show. In 2013, Jackson was charged with attacking the man 
there with a knife. He obtained a court order prohibiting her from 
coming to the residence after the assault. The charge against Jackson 
was later dismissed.

Jackson ended up pleading guilty to a misdemeanor drug charge in her 
2015 arrest.

Taylor had moved into the apartment in April 2014. Her sister 
remodeled it for Taylor, who was returning from taking care of her 
grandchildren in Colorado while her son was in the military. The 
apartment seemed perfect. Her daughter and grandchildren lived in a 
unit on the first floor.

After the raid, a repairman patched her door with a thin piece of 
plywood and drywall screws. Taylor and her daughters went to the 6th 
District police station, filed a complaint and requested that the 
door be repaired.

"It made me sad. I had respect for the police, but it was like they 
didn't have any rules," she said. "It's obvious they should have 
checked things out before they did this."

When a search based on erroneous information occurs, police rules 
require the department to provide an explanation and "repair the 
damage as soon as possible."

A year later, Sallie Taylor is still waiting to hear from them.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom