SWAT Raids Are Violating Our Civil Liberties

Cheye & Trinity with new dog Marshall

Cheye Calvo and his wife, Trinity Tomsic, live in the peaceful community of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, a few miles northeast of Washington, DC., with Trinity’s mother, Georgia Porter.  Cheye has been Mayor of this town of 3,000 people since 2004, and he enjoys working with his fellow townspeople to protect the town’s charm.

Unbeknownst to the Calvos (but not to the police), a drug smuggling ring was sending boxes of marijuana addressed to strangers, planning to grab the packages from the front doorstep before the addressee arrived home. When Cheye saw a box addressed to his wife, he carried it in and set it on the table. Moments later, a large SWAT team used a battering ram to burst into his house.

Washington Post Magazine’s April Witt details the terrifying ordeal that followed in her compelling article, Deadly Force.  Cheye’s two beloved black Labradors were shot within moments, and both he and his mother-in-law were forced to lie face down on the ground, hands bound behind them and guns to their heads, while men in black ransacked the house for four hours.  Read more about their terrifying experience…
 

How Could This Happen?

In the last few years, many local police forces have moved to using paramilitary SWAT teams for routine police actions such as delivering search warrants. Instead of holding a civilized discussion at someone’s front door, these teams terrorize their victims by kicking down the door, sending a dozen or more unidentified men with assault weapons into the house, forcing all family members to the floor with guns to their heads and shooting the family dogs.

While no one questions that this sort of approach may be necessary when confronting hardened criminals, many local forces are using SWAT teams to deliver search warrants to law-abiding citizens with no history of criminal activity. Innocent families are being brutalized, and their stories are heart-breaking.

In Maryland’s Prince George’s County, for example, SWAT teams are routinely used to deliver drug-related search warrants. And the Calvo’s case certainly isn’t the first time that a raid has gone seriously awry.  Nine months earlier, a SWAT team burst into an Accokeek couple’s home and, despite knowing almost immediately they were in the wrong house, killed their five-year-old boxer.

Nor is this a problem just in Prince George’s County:

• A very similar SWAT raid last month in Maryland’s Howard County also failed to turn up any evidence of criminal activity. Not only was Mike Hasenei’s Australian Cattle dog shot, but his 12-year-old daughter remains traumatized by the attack.  Read more…
• In June, 2007, police offers broke down the door of an Annapolis apartment, threw in a percussion grenade, hand-cuffed the 30-year-old wife and kicked the husband in the groin before realizing they were at the wrong address.
   

Using SWAT Teams Is Unnecessarily Dangerous In Many Situations

SWAT teams are trained to “search and destroy”; they’re not trained to deal with law-abiding citizens to keep the peace. Using them routinely to deliver search warrants to citizens with no record of criminal activity is completely inappropriate. Not only are such attacks extremely traumatizing to the citizens and lethal to beloved family pets, but they create unnecessarily dangerous situations.  SWAT teams often refuse to identify themselves, even when asked repeatedly by the people whose homes they’ve broken into, so families believe they’re dealing with terrorists or armed burglars. If someone in the house pulls a gun to protect their family, they will undoubtedly be shot immediately.

And even if someone in a family has been found to possess a small amount of narcotics, does this justify a SWAT raid of the family’s house?  In some localities, SWAT teams are raiding homes just because a family member was caught possessing or selling a very small quantity of marijuana:

• Shortly after her oldest son sold one gram (one gram!) of marijuana to an undercover police officer, a SWAT team burst into this Howard County mom’s house at 6:30 in the morning.   What happened next would terrify any parent. 
• A Carroll County family’s life was turned upside down after their 23-year-old son was stopped for a traffic violation and the police found two marijuana joints in his car.  During a 3:30 a.m. raid on their home, their 18-year-old son was thrown to the floor and all four family members (including a 12-year-old son) were handcuffed.  After 7 grams of pot were found in the basement, both the mother and the father were arrested and taken to police headquarters for 8 hours.  The family has been so traumatized by the incident that they haven’t had friends over for a year, the sons look for excuses to sleep elsewhere, and the family is seriously considering moving out of Carroll County. 
   

We Need More Oversight of SWAT Teams

This is not just a problem in Maryland.  The Cato Institute reports that the use of inappropriate SWAT and paramilitary raids has reached epidemic proportions in many states across the country.  View a map of botched paramilitary policing actions…

Unlike other police activities which are subject to regular reporting, there is little oversight of SWAT teams. Not only can the presence of such teams be kept secret, but there is no way for citizens or legislators to know how often SWAT teams are sent out, for what purpose they are used, and what the outcome of the raids were.

As a first step, Cheye is recommending passage of a bill currently before the Maryland Legislature that would require every community that employs SWAT officers to report monthly on its activities, including where and when a team was deployed, what arrests were made, what evidence was seized, and what injuries occurred. We believe this would be the first bill of its kind in any state, and want to help similar bills to be introduced in other states.

Once data is available on the number of SWAT raids and their results, we expect it will become clear that some counties and municipalities are using this terrifying procedure inappropriately.  Our hope is that the police departments and judges in these areas will develop thoughtful guidelines that limit the use of SWAT raids to situations where police officers would truly be putting themselves at risk by knocking on the front door with a search warrant.  If this doesn’t happen, however, it may become necessary to promote further regulation of paramilitary policing to better protect our civil liberties.
 

Want to Help Protect Our Liberties?

The violation of our civil liberties by the inappropriate use of SWAT teams is an issue that is critical to all of us. If you are outraged by what happened to these families and want to make sure it doesn’t happen to others,  please get involved in one or more of the following ways:

• Volunteer to spread the word, advocate for change or help with policy development.
• If you’d like to receive periodic updates about our progress, please sign up for Cheye Calvo’s newsletter.