Earlier this month, Monitor reporter Nick Reid described a 4 a.m. drug raid on two separate Concord apartments conducted by two SWAT teams of 30 members each. The raids resulted in 10 arrests and the confiscation of two handguns, $8,500 in cash and a modest quantity of drugs. No one was killed or injured in the raids, which perhaps saved lives by keeping the drugs off the street. But it doesn’t always work out that way.
It was during such a drug raid in 2012 that Greenland police Chief Michael Maloney was killed.
Last weekend, the New York Times published a two-part series on the impact nationally of the increasing use of “dynamic entry” – more colloquially known as “no-knock raids” – by police who use military tactics and often surplus military equipment provided free by the Department of Homeland Security.
This gradual militarization of police departments – remember the battle over Concord’s BearCat armored personnel carrier – may be making police and citizens less, not more, safe.
The series in the Times begins by telling the story of a raid to capture a suspected drug dealer who no longer lived at that address. One SWAT team member broke down the door with a battering ram. Another tossed in a flash grenade, which is used to blind and disorient a home’s occupants. The grenade landed in a toddler’s crib, severely burning the boy.
Police must get a warrant for a no-knock raid. Theoretically, that means that a judge assessed the situation and decided that the added risk created when police smash doors in the middle of the night is justified.
But the Times listed New Hampshire as one of the states where warrants are routinely granted, and the law permits them when a judge is convinced that the suspect could flee or destroy evidence. Nationally, one law enforcement officer told the Times that that’s had a perverse effect. The raids, he said, are used most often when the quantities of drugs are small, since they can be flushed in a second.
“Why am I risking people’s lives to save an ounce of something that they’re bringing in by the freighter every year?” the former SWAT team commander said.
The statistics from 2010 to 2015 are grim.
“In the Times’s inventory, 47 civilians and five officers died as a result of the execution of knock-and-announce searches, while 31 civilians and eight officers died in the execution of no-knock warrants. The type of warrant could not be determined in three civilian fatalities,” reporter Kevin Sack said.
The routine use of tactics developed for war has cost taxpayers millions of dollars in damage settlements won by the victims, but it is doing something worse. It is fostering us-versus-them feelings between police and citizens and increasing the distrust of law enforcement and government, particularly in poor and minority communities.
Oregon prohibits no-knock entries. Florida’s Supreme Court banned no-knock warrants citing the “staggering potential for violence to both occupants and police.” In several cases, a jury has exonerated a home occupant who shot and killed a police officer during a no-knock raid because defending one’s home and family against an unknown attacker is both an instinct and a right.
New Hampshire issues no standards or guidelines governing no-knock raids and as a state, despite its horrific drug problem, police abuse or mistakes appear rare. But before another police officer, low-level drug dealer or innocent homeowner is killed, the Legislature should debate how and when no-knock raids should be conducted.
The state of Utah prohibits their use when the only suspected offense is drug possession. New Hampshire should do the same.