Buzzing across the blawgosphere is the outcome of the Minneapolis swat team’s raid on the Khang family. Windypundit, Mark Bennett, Radley Balko and Jonathon Turley have posted their takes on this stroke of genius. It was bad enough that they came into the wrong house shooting, but the error was elevated to the surreal when the cops got medals for their screw up.
The official police position is that they did everything right. It was the informant that fed them the wrong house.
Minneapolis police spokesman Sgt. William Palmer said Tuesday the department has acknowledged the raid was a mistake and has apologized to the family. But he said the officers “performed very bravely under gunfire and made smart decisions.”
By smart decisions, I assume that means that their shots missed the Khang children. It’s unclear how bad aim is attributed to smart decisions, but logic is rarely the primary focus when police are given their “merit badges,” as Balko characterizes it. Radley’s point is well taken; They get paychecks for doing their jobs. Do they need small pieces of metal to feel better about themselves?
But the crux of this massive screw up was the rat. The cops point to the rat’s bad information as the cause of this embarrassing moment in aggressive policing. It’s not their fault; blame the rat.
Bennett nails the problem:
How about this: the buck stops with the cops. If the cops trust the wrong informant and make the wrong call, they didn’t do everything right. In fact, they screwed up.
You see, the use of the rat’s information doesn’t happen in some amorphous vacuum, distinct and separate from the good, thoughtful, kindly police initiative. The warrant must meet the Aguilar-Spinelli test, a two-prong test that requires the cops to show that the rat has a basis for his claimed information, and that the rat is a reliable source of information.
The reliability prong of the test is invariably met by a cop vouching for the rat’s credibility. He’s worked with the rat, the rat has provided verified reliable information in the past, and the like. What it does is place the officer’s credibility on the line, asking a judge to accept the officer’s belief that the rat is reliable. In other words, some cop told some judge that he should accept the rat’s word because the officer vouches for him.
So it isn’t just the rat after all. It’s the cop who ran the rat. It’s the cop who wants to use what the rat has to say who makes the representation that the judge should sign off on the rat’s word. It’s the cop who sells the judge on the rat being a credible source of rat-formation.
The problem is that the rat is a rat. This is a person who has placed his personal self-interest above others when he engaged in crime in the first place. He then placed his personal self-interest above his fellow criminals when he chose to sell out his buddies to try to skim some time off his sentence. He has proven that he’s got no integrity whatsoever, and that he will do anything to save himself.
Does a person for whom honesty and integrity have had no meaning suddenly become the poster boy for integrity as he tries to buy his way out of prison? Or is he a lying, manipulative user, seeing what he can sell the cops to save himself? And if he has nothing left to sell, why not scam the cops, or better yet let the cops use him as their whipping boy whenever they need an excuse to break down a door.
In the Khang’s case, the rat’s scam was readily apparent. But they are often molded into such upstanding liars when their information is a little better and they give up someone who was engaged in crime, like their mother or brother. The rat then puts on a manufactured act for the benefit of the judge and jury and our prosecutors do everything in their power to perpetuate the scam by arguing that they only get the benefit of the deal if they testify “truthfully”, one of the most laughable arguments ever made but invariably successful with juries.
A system that depends on the use of liars, and does everything possible to conceal the fact that they are, without a doubt, liars, is a system that lends itself to shooting up the Khangs. While you might not feel as badly when they frame the guilty, the Khangs didn’t deserve this. But nobody gave the Khangs any medals.
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Yup, to almost all of that. It’s been interesting to follow the ever-changing stories emanating from Jesse Garcia III — the MPD spokesman. Initially, the informant was claimed to be somebody who had given the MPD repeated good leads; when reporters starting looking into it (miracles do happen!) that shrunk to three, then to two, one of which was the Khang’s address.
That said, it would have been easy to avoid this. A quick search of property records would have shown that Mr. Khang was the owner; two minutes of observation would have shown that the house was occupied by the Hmong family, and not Rolling 60’s Crips.
But, of course, that wasn’t bothered with.
Another interesting aspect of this whole cockup is that it pretty clearly shows the flaw with the whole “No Knock” theory — which is that, because of the element of surprise, criminals won’t be able to flush the evidence*, nor respond with violence.
So, we have a sleeping Hmong guy, who is nevertheless able to retrieve and load a shotgun while the fine, professional law enforcers of the MPD SWAT team are busy kicking down doors and throwing around flashbangs (almost certainly, that’s what the wife actually heard, and thought was gunfire; note that that’s missing from the police pravda, as well), and get off at least one shot while the professional law enforcers of the MPD SWAT team are busy “surprising” him.
Me, I think that the award should have gone to Sergeant Garcia — but not for heroism.
Creative writing.
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*Although how a criminal is going to flush a gun — the object of the search warrant — will be left as an exercise to somebody with more imagination than I have; I’m just a fantasy writer, after all.
Oh, and the “almost”? Forgetting, for a moment, what should be done about the first time or two, the same rule applies to informants (or, if you’d prefer, “rats”) that it does to anything else*: past behavior is the single best predictor of future behavior. An informant/rat who has repeatedly given reliable information in the past is very, very likely to be giving reliable information now. Not guaranteed, but it’s a good bet. (Good enough to justify a no-knock warrant, aggressive doorkicking and “dynamic” entry when there’s less dramatic and dangerous ways to accomplish the same reasonable objective? I ask. Nah.)
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* Except in investment products. I used to have to write those disclaimers, when I was a copy writer for an insurance company.
There’s one difference for rats. Once they run out of good (even if trumped up) information, but have yet to do enough to buy their way out of prison, they start scrambling to manufacture crimes, whether out of whole cloth or by active participation.
So maybe they aren’t as likely to behave like venereal disease, the gift that keeps on giving.
That’s unfair. You expect the cops to employ actual thought in the performance of their duties. That would undermine the fundamental scheme of American justice (and cause innumerable headaches).
Rat-formation. That’s good.
Follow-Up on the “Big Shove”
In last week’s “But for Video” post, I had the honor of presenting a little home town magic as a video camera caught a police officer nail a bicycle in mid-flight during the Critical Mass cycle protest down 7th Avenue.
At Least They Didn’t Get Medals (Yet)
Lest anyone think that Minneapolis has a monopoly on stupid search warrant executions, consider the thoughtful approach of the Buffalo police.
Blogring for aguilar+spinelli
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