Using SWAT officers to storm into homes to execute search warrants has led time and again to avoidable deaths, gruesome injuries and costly legal settlements.
Replay with audioIn 2013, Fort Worth officers served a no-knock warrant in search of cocaine. Jermaine Darden, 34, who was obese and had asthma, was handled roughly and stunned with a Taser. When medics arrived, he was unresponsive. The medical examiner ruled he died of cardiac-related natural causes.
CORNELIA, Ga. — This town on the edge of the Appalachians has fewer than 5,000 residents, but the SWAT team was outfitted for war.
At 2:15 a.m. on a moonless night in May 2014, 10 officers rolled up a driveway in an armored Humvee, three of them poised to leap off the running boards. They carried Colt submachine guns, light-mounted AR-15 rifles and Glock .40-caliber sidearms. Many wore green body armor and Kevlar helmets. They had a door-breaching shotgun, a battering ram, sledgehammers, Halligan bars for smashing windows, a ballistic shield and a potent flash-bang grenade.
The target was a single-story ranch-style house about 50 yards off Lakeview Heights Circle. Not even four hours earlier, three informants had bought $50 worth of methamphetamine in the front yard. That was enough to persuade the county’s chief magistrate to approve a no-knock search warrant authorizing the SWAT operators to storm the house without warning.
The point man on the entry team found the side door locked, and nodded to Deputy Jason Stribling, who took two swings with the metal battering ram. As the door splintered near the deadbolt, he yelled, “Sheriff’s department, search warrant!” Another deputy, Charles Long, had already pulled the pin on the flash-bang. He placed his left hand on Deputy Stribling’s back for stability, peered quickly into the dark and tossed the armed explosive about three feet inside the door.
It landed in a portable playpen.
As policing has militarized to fight a faltering war on drugs, few tactics have proved as dangerous as the use of forcible-entry raids to serve narcotics search warrants, which regularly introduce staggering levels of violence into missions that might be accomplished through patient stakeouts or simple knocks at the door.
Thousands of times a year, these “dynamic entry” raids exploit the element of surprise to effect seizures and arrests of neighborhood drug dealers. But they have also led time and again to avoidable deaths, gruesome injuries, demolished property, enduring trauma, blackened reputations and multimillion-dollar legal settlements at taxpayer expense, an investigation by The New York Times found.
For the most part, governments at all levels have chosen not to quantify the toll by requiring reporting on SWAT operations. But The Times’s investigation, which relied on dozens of open-record requests and thousands of pages from police and court files, found that at least 81 civilians and 13 law enforcement officers died in such raids from 2010 through 2016. Scores of others were maimed or wounded.
The casualties have occurred in the execution of no-knock warrants, which give the police prior judicial authority to force entry without notice, as well as warrants that require the police to knock and announce themselves before breaking down doors. Often, there is little difference.
Innocents have died in attacks on wrong addresses, including a 7-year-old girl in Detroit, and collaterally as the police pursued other residents, among them a 68-year-old grandfather in Framingham, Mass. Stray bullets have whizzed through neighboring homes, and in dozens of instances the victims of police gunfire have included the family dog. Search warrant raids account for a small share of the nearly 1,000 fatalities each year in officer-involved shootings. But what distinguishes them from other risky interactions between the police and citizens, like domestic disputes, hostage-takings and confrontations with mentally ill people, is that they are initiated by law enforcement. In a country where four in 10 adults have guns in their homes, the raids incite predictable collisions between forces that hurtle toward each other like speeding cars in a passing lane — officers with a license to invade private homes and residents convinced of their right to self-defense. After being awakened by the shattering of doors and the detonation of stun grenades, bleary suspects reach for nearby weapons — at times realizing it is the police, at others mistaking them for intruders — and the shooting begins. In some cases, victims like Todd Blair, a Utah man who grabbed a golf club on the way out of his bedroom, have been slain by officers who perceived a greater threat than existed.
Mr. Wood conducted his business out front with Mr. Thonetheva, a 30-year-old American-born son of Laotian immigrants, as the Frys waited in their red pickup. All three appeared shaken when they met up with their handlers in a church parking lot. They had spotted two men at the house whom they took to be guards for the drug operation, and a third who might have been a supplier. The agents sent the informants home, but about half an hour later Deputy Autry texted Ms. Fry with an afterthought. “Did y’all see any signs of kids at wanis’ house,” she asked. “Nothing except a mini van,” came the response. Thinking she was on to a big score, Deputy Autry, who was 28, did not wait for daylight or further investigation. She returned to the Sheriff’s Office, where she pulled Mr. Thonetheva’s criminal history and mug shot. With the approval of the sheriff, Joey Terrell, she alerted the county’s Special Response Team to prepare for a raid. She and her drug unit commander, Murray J. Kogod, began drafting the application for the no-knock warrant. The affidavit included inaccuracies and hyperbole. It asserted incorrectly that Mr. Fry — the only informant formally certified by the police — had bought the drugs, rather than Mr. Wood. Deputy Autry described Mr. Fry as “a true and reliable informant,” even though he had not made a buy before that night. Despite the lack of surveillance, she wrote that she had “confirmed that there is heavy traffic in and out of the residence.” Shortly after midnight, Deputy Autry and another agent awakened the county magistrate, James N. Butterworth, with a house call. He read the affidavit and placed her under oath. She told him that Mr. Thonetheva had been arrested several times for drug possession, that there might be armed lookouts at the house and that an assault involving an AK-47 had been reported there the previous year. The judge, who had never denied Deputy Autry a warrant, found no reason to dispute probable cause and signed at 12:15 a.m. “If you had drugs and you had weapons, that was constitutional purpose to go on in there, not to knock on the door,” he later testified. The Special Response Team, formed three years earlier, consisted of a dozen men plucked from the Sheriff’s Office and the Cornelia Police Department. They trained on their own time for four hours each Thursday. The Humvee had been procured through a Pentagon program that made surplus military equipment available to even the most rural departments. There had been few chances to quell riots and subdue active shooters in the hamlets of Habersham County, population 43,000. Instead, the unit had been used primarily to serve narcotics search warrants, 32 times in all. During their pre-raid briefing, team members circulated a photograph of Mr. Thonetheva, a Google Earth image of the brick house with dark shutters and a sketch of the three-bedroom interior. Deputy Autry mistakenly told the team’s commander that the drug deal had gone down near a side door to an enclosed garage, so he plotted his entry from there. She told him there were no signs of children or animals, failing to mention the minivan. When the flash-bang detonated with a concussive boom, a blinding white light filled the room. The entry team rumbled in, screaming for the occupants to get to the ground. Deputy Stribling peered into the playpen with a flashlight and found 19-month-old Bounkham Phonesavanh. Deputy Stribling waved off Deputy Long, who had lobbed the grenade. “Charlie, go away, you don’t need to see this,” he said. The child, known affectionately as Bou Bou, had a long laceration and burns across his chest, exposing his ribs, and another gash between his upper lip and nose. His round, cherubic face was bloodied and blistered, spackled with shrapnel and soot. The heat had singed away much of his pillow and dissolved the mesh side of the playpen. At first the child was silent. But as Deputy Stribling picked him up, rubbed his feet and shook his arms, he began to wail. Even the drug agents stationed outside the other end of the house could hear the screams. “You don’t think that baby got hurt, do you?” one asked another.
SWAT was pioneered in Los Angeles and other big cities in the late 1960s and early 1970s in response to civil unrest and raging firefights. Today, almost every police agency with at least 100 officers, and about a third of all smaller ones, either has its own full-time unit or participates in a part-time or multijurisdictional team, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Once the teams were formed, their existence had to be justified. Drug searches became the answer. Dr. Peter B. Kraska, a criminologist at Eastern Kentucky University, estimates that SWAT deployments increased roughly fifteenfold between 1980 and 2000 as the war on drugs escalated. There is no way to know the true number of forcible entries because there is no federal mandate that police agencies report on SWAT operations. Only two states have required it, and efforts by news and watchdog groups to compile national figures have been frustrated by police stonewalling. “This is kind of a secret world within a secret world,” said Dr. Tom Nolan, a criminologist at Merrimack College and a SWAT veteran of the Boston Police Department. “They don’t open up.” Utah is currently the only exception. In 2014, after a marijuana raid resulted in the death of one officer and the wounding of five (as well as of the suspect, who hanged himself in jail), the state enacted a law requiring annual disclosures about tactical raids. The initial results show that many departments use dynamic entry almost by default. SWAT units in Utah did so in 61 percent of 1,016 deployments reported in 2014 and 2015. About 40 percent of the warrants they served were no-knocks, usually for drugs, mostly at night. Maryland had a similar reporting requirement from 2010 to 2014, inspired by a botched raid that resulted in the shooting of two dogs at the home of the mayor of Berwyn Heights. More than 90 percent of 8,249 SWAT deployments during those years were to serve search warrants, and more than two-thirds involved forcible entry. Firearms were discharged in 99 operations, civilians were killed in nine and injured in 95, officers were injured in at least 30 and animals were killed in 14. C. Anthony Muse, a state senator who sponsored the measure, said he found the numbers “alarming.” He also found it disturbing that the General Assembly allowed the reporting requirement to sunset, amid heavy lobbying from law-enforcement groups. “They don’t want to be held accountable,” he said. Among the cities examined in the recent ACLU study was Little Rock, Ark., where the SWAT team broke down doors and detonated flash-bangs in more than 90 percent of 147 narcotics search warrant raids between January 2011 and March 2013, according to data shared with The Times. Deadly outcomes did not slow them down. In 2010, two team members were shot, neither fatally, and a suspect was killed, in a no-knock raid that uncovered half an ounce each of marijuana and crack. Less than two years later, a SWAT officer killed an armed 31-year-old man during an early morning raid that turned up three marijuana plants. The unit then conducted five more raids in the ensuing two weeks. The shootings prompted a new policy that the team must withdraw if it encounters an armed suspect, but they did not prompt broader reconsideration. “It’s not foolproof, not always going to happen just right,” said the SWAT commander, Lt. Tim Calhoun. “But it winds up being the most safe for us. These are dangerous people we’re dealing with.”
Summoning armed criminals outside, he said, is no less risky than startling them inside. Long stakeouts exhaust manpower and can lead to dangerous vehicle pursuits, street confrontations and traffic stops that do not yield as much contraband. It matters little, Lieutenant Calhoun said, that drug crimes may not always pose an immediate mortal threat. “If you have a dope house next door,” he said, “there’s probably nothing the police can do that would be overreacting.”
The mission creep for the heavily militarized teams has coincided with a stark shift toward law enforcement in the Supreme Court’s search for the proper balance between public safety and individual rights.