"At an ACLU conference on drug informants in Atlanta last March, I was taken aback when a rapper named Immortal Technique said (as Cam'ron would echo later in the Cooper interview) he wouldn't cooperate with the police under any circumstances, even if, for example, he'd witnessed an innocent old woman in his neighborhood get murdered. I still find that idea repugnant, of course. But what I think of it isn't really the point. The point is that that sentiment is out there, and there are real, troubling reasons why it's gaining momentum—reasons other than 'those black people are just lawless heathens.' The same guy, Immortal Technique, repeated the comment a bit later in the conference, then added some food for thought: 'Isn't the police 'blue wall of silence' the most successful stop snitchin' campaign in history?'"
TheAgitator.com: Interview With a Former LAPD Narcotics Officer: Comments:
"RB: Do you think what happened with Kathryn Johnston in Atlanta--where the cops invented an informant out of whole cloth in order to obtain a search warrant--was an anomaly? Or do you think that kind of thing is common?
Doddridge: Oh, it happens everywhere. There's tremendous pressure to 'climb the ladder' after you make a drug bust. You want to get up that ladder before word hits the street, and the higher-up guys you're after know that you're on to them. That leads to the temptation to take shortcuts. What happened in Atlanta goes on all over the country.
...RB: At what point in your career did you conclude that the drug war wasn't working?
Doddridge: About halfway through. We had just hauled this young woman off in handcuffs, mostly for helping her boyfriend. She was going to lose her kids, her house, her future. And it hit me--all of this is for what? What are we doing here? We arrest one drug dealer, and two take his place. I watched while we ransacked parents' homes because their kids were dealing. I saw the looks on their faces, knowing that their kid's future was over, and they were probably going to lose their home. This thing [the drug war] was ripping apart the fabric of our communities.
RB: One aspect of the drug war I've spent quite a bit of time researching is the militarization of police, the increasing use of SWAT teams. A common response I get from cops is that SWAT teams make warrant service safer. Do you agree with that?
Doddridge: Laughs. Oh, no. Of course not. SWAT teams are trained to deal with dangerous people. When you bring a SWAT team to serve a drug warrant, a drug offender, you're escalating the situation, not de-escalating it. One thing you have to understand: Cops love action. They crave action. You have thousands of these SWAT teams across the country, now. You've got these guys in some small town in Idaho with nothing better to do just looking at each other. "What do we do with this warrant? Well, might as well give it to the SWAT team." It isn't necessary.
RB: Police groups say that drug dealers are armed to the teeth. Heavily-armed, military-style SWAT teams are necessary to counter this high-powered weaponry.
Doddridge: I've heard that. And it's just not true. In 21 years at LAPD, I never once saw any assault weapons on a drug raid. Drug dealers prefer handguns, which are easier to conceal. Occasionally you'll find a shotgun. But having a bunch of high-powered weaponry around is just too much trouble for them. It's too much for them to worry about."
Reason Magazine - Stop Abusing Snitchin':
"Late last month, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on the death of the Kathryn Johnston, the 92-year-old Atlanta woman killed by police during a November 2006 drug raid on her home.
Johnston died when she mistook a team of narcotics officers for criminal intruders. When the police broke down her door, she met them with an old pistol. They opened fire, and killed her.
A subsequent investigation revealed that the entire chain of events up to and shortly after Johnston's death were beset with lies, planted evidence, and cover-up on the part of the narcotics cops. They fabricated an imaginary informant to get the search warrant for Ms. Johnston's home. They planted evidence on a convicted felon, arrested him, then let him off in exchange for his tip—which he made up from whole cloth—that they'd find drugs in Ms. Johnston's house.
When they realized their mistake, they then tried to portray an innocent old woman as a drug dealer. They planted marijuana in Ms. Johnston's basement while she lay handcuffed and bleeding on the floor.
More investigation revealed that this kind of behavior wasn't aberrant, but common among narcotics officers in the Atlanta Police Department. Police Chief Richard Pennington eventually dismissed or reassigned the entire narcotics division of the APD.
What came out at the hearings investigating Kathryn Johnston's death was even more disturbing.
In one eye-popping exchange, two congressmen—one Democrat and one Republican—confronted Wayne Murphy, the assistant director of the FBI Directorate of Intelligence about the way the FBI uses drug informants. Rep. Dan Lundgren, R-Calif., and Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., told Murphy they were troubled by reports that the FBI had looked the other way while some of its drug informants participated in violent crimes, and that the agency then failed to notify local authorities, leaving many of those crimes unsolved.
Lundgren and Delahunt said they were also troubled by reports that in order to protect the identity of its informants, the FBI had withheld exculpatory evidence from criminal trials, resulting in innocent people going to prison.
This is worth repeating. The FBI has determined that in some cases, it's better to let innocent people be assaulted, murdered, or wrongly sent to prison than to halt a drug investigation involving one of its confidential informants.
Could Murphy assure the U.S. Congress, Delahunt and Lundgren asked, that the FBI has since instituted policies to ensure that kind of thing never happens again?
Murphy hemmed and hawed, but ultimately said that he could not make any such assurance."
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