"Democracy means that if the doorbell rings in the
early hours, it is likely to be the milkman."--Winston
Churchill
It's 3 a.m. You've been asleep for hours when suddenly you
hear a loud "Crash! Bang! Boom!" Based on the yelling, shouting and
mayhem, it sounds as if someone--or several someones--are breaking
through your front door. With your heart racing and your stomach
churning, all you can think about is keeping your family safe from
the intruders who have invaded your home. You have mere seconds
before the intruders make their way to your bedroom. Desperate to
protect your loved ones, you scramble to lay hold of
something--anything--that you might use in self-defense. It might
be a flashlight, your son's baseball bat, or that still unloaded
gun you thought you'd never need. In a matter of seconds, the
intruders are at your bedroom door. You brace for the
confrontation, a shaky grip on your weapon. In the moments before
you go down for the count, shot multiple times by the strangers who
have invaded your home, you get a good look at your accosters. It's
the police.
Before I go any further, let me start by saying this: the
problem is not that all police are bad. The problem, as I point out
in my book
A Government of Wolves: The
Emerging American Police State, is that increasing numbers
of police officers are badly trained, illiterate when it comes to
the Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment, and, in some
cases, willfully ignorant about the fact that they are supposed to
be peacekeepers working for us, the taxpayer.
Unfortunately, with every passing week, we are hearing more
and more horror stories in which homeowners are injured or killed
simply because they mistook a SWAT team raid by police for a home
invasion by criminals. Never mind that the unsuspecting homeowner,
woken from sleep by the sounds of a violent entry, has no way of
distinguishing between a home invasion by a criminal as opposed to
a government agent. Too often, the destruction of life and property
wrought by the police is no less horrifying than that carried out
by criminal invaders.
Consider, for example, the sad scenario that played out when a
SWAT team kicked open the door of ex-Marine Jose
Guerena's home during a drug raid and opened fire. Thinking his
home was being invaded by criminals, Guerena told his wife and
child to hide in a closet, grabbed a gun and waited in the hallway
to confront the intruders. He never fired his weapon. In fact, the
safety was still on his gun when he was killed. The SWAT officers,
however, not as restrained, fired 70 rounds of ammunition at
Guerena--23 of those bullets made contact. Guerena had had no prior
criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his
home.
Seven-year-old Aiyana Jones was sleeping on her living room
sofa, which was positioned under a window, when suddenly, the
silence of the night was shattered by a flash grenade thrown
through the living room window, followed by the sounds of police
bursting into the apartment and a gun going off. Rushing into the
room, Aiyana's father, Charles, found himself tackled by police and
forced to lie on the floor,
his face in a pool of
his daughter's blood. It would be hours before Charles would be
informed that his daughter was dead. The 34-year-old suspect the
police had been looking for would later be found elsewhere in the
apartment building.
Then there was the time police used a battering ram to break
into the home of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnson,
mistakenly believing her house to be a drug
den. Fearing that burglars were entering her home, which was
situated in a dangerous neighborhood, Johnson fired a warning shot
when the door burst open. Police unleashed a hail of gunfire,
hitting Johnson with six bullets. Johnson died.
Eighty-year-old Eugene Mallory suffered a similar fate when
deputies with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, claiming to
have smelled chemicals related to the manufacture of
methamphetamine, raided the multi-unit property in which Mallory
lived. Thinking that his home was being invaded by burglars,
Mallory allegedly raised a gun at the intruders, who
shot him six times. Mallory died. "The lesson
here," observed the spokesman for the sheriff's department, "is
don't pull a gun on a deputy."
In Fort Worth, Texas, two rookie police officers sent to
investigate a possible burglary circled 72-year-old Jerry Waller's
house with flashlights shining. Waller, concerned that
his
home was being cased, went to his garage, armed with a gun for
self-defense. The two officers snuck up on Waller, who raised his
gun on the intruders. When Waller failed to obey orders to lower
his gun, the officers shot and killed him. It turned out the
officers
had gone to the wrong address. They
blamed the shooting death on "poor lighting."
During a raid in Ogden, Utah, police dressed in black and
carrying assault rifles charged into a darkened home. Upon entering
the hallway and encountering a man holding a shiny object that one
officer thought was a sword, police opened fire. Three shots later,
45-year-old Todd Blair fell to the floor dead. In his hands was
a shiny golf club.
In Sarasota, Florida, a mixture of federal and local police
converged on the apartment complex where Louise Goldsberry lived
after receiving a tip that a child rape suspect was in the complex.
Unaware of police activity outside, Louise was washing dishes in
her kitchen when a man wearing what appeared to be a hunting vest
pointed a rifle at her through her window. Fearing that she was
about to be attacked, Louise retrieved her revolver from her
bedroom. Meanwhile, the man began pounding on Louise's front door,
saying, "We're the f@#$ing police; open the f@#$ing door."
Identifying himself as a police officer, the rifle-wielding man
then opened the door, pointed a gun at Goldsberry and her
boyfriend, who was also present, and yelled, "Drop the f@#$ing gun
or I'll f@#$ing shoot you." Ironically, the officer later justified
his behavior on the grounds that he
didn't like
having a gun pointed at him and because "I have to go home at
night."
These incidents underscore a dangerous mindset in which
civilians (often unarmed and defenseless) not only have less rights
than militarized police, but also one in which the safety of
civilians is treated as a lower priority than the safety of their
police counterparts (who are armed to the hilt with an array of
lethal and nonlethal weapons), the privacy of civilians is
negligible in the face of the government's various missions, and
the homes of civilians are no longer the refuge from government
intrusion that they once were.
It wasn't always this way, however. There was a time in
America when a man's home really was a sanctuary where he and his
family could be safe and secure from the threat of invasion by
government agents, who were held at bay by the dictates of the
Fourth Amendment, which protects American citizens from
unreasonable searches and seizures.
The Fourth Amendment, in turn, was added to the U.S.
Constitution by colonists still smarting from the abuses they had
been forced to endure while under British rule, among these home
invasions by the military under the guise of writs of assistance.
These writs were nothing less than open-ended royal documents which
British soldiers used as a justification for barging into the homes
of colonists and rifling through their belongings. James Otis, a
renowned colonial attorney, "condemned writs of assistance because
they were perpetual, universal (addressed to every officer and
subject in the realm), and allowed anyone to conduct a search in
violation of the essential principle of English liberty that a
peaceable man's house is his castle."
As Otis noted:
"Now, one of the most essential branches of English
liberty is the freedom of one's house. A man's house is his castle;
and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his
castle. This writ, if it should be declared legal, would totally
annihilate this privilege. Custom-house officers may enter our
houses when they please; we are commanded to permit their entry.
Their menial servants may enter, may break locks, bars, and
everything in their way; and whether they break through malice or
revenge, no man, no court can inquire. Bare suspicion without oath
is sufficient."
To our detriment, we have now come full circle, returning to a
time before the American Revolution when government agents--with
the blessing of the courts--could force their way into a citizen's
home, with seemingly little concern for lives lost and property
damaged in the process.
Actually, we may be worse off today than our colonial
ancestors when one considers the extent to which courts have
sanctioned the use of no-knock raids by police SWAT teams (
occurring at a rate of 70,000 to 80,000 a year and
growing); the arsenal of lethal weapons available to local
police agencies; the ease with which courts now dispense search
warrants based often on little more than a suspicion of wrongdoing;
and the inability of police to distinguish between reasonable
suspicion and the higher standard of probable cause, the latter of
which is required by the Constitution before any government
official can search an individual or his property.
Indeed, if Winston Churchill is correct that "democracy means
that if the doorbell rings in the early hours, it is likely to be
the milkman," then it's safe to say that we no longer live in a
democracy. Certainly not in a day and age when the Fourth
Amendment, which was intended to protect us against the police
state, especially home invasions by government agents, has been
reduced to little more than words on paper.
John W. Whitehead is an attorney and author who has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law and human rights. Whitehead's aggressive, pioneering approach to civil liberties has earned him numerous accolades and (more...)