They used explosives. It blew the door clean off.

October 23, 2018 4:48 PM

Little Rock’s dangerous and illegal drug war: "The outside camera had recorded two odd incidents. First, a man whom Talley didn’t know approached the apartment while Talley wasn’t home. Looking anxious, the man knocked, waited a few moments and then left. A few days later, the camera picked up a police officer outside the door. The officer looked around, snapped a photo of Talley’s door with his cellphone, and left.

Talley at one point told his father about the two visits, who in turn relayed the story to a police officer friend. “When he heard about both men, he told my dad, ‘It sounds like they’re about to kick down your son’s door,’ ” Talley says."

The Techdirt/Freespeech summary is very Metafilter summary-like, if you want one of those before you dive into the full story.

This is a story about illegal and dangerous "drug" raids carried out, repeatedly, by a rogue police department. You'll need to decide if you're up for reading another one of these stories.

posted by krisjohn (17 comments total)

The tone does kinda swerve back and forth between kinda funny and, oh my god, this is life in a fascist hell-scape. Like Super-Troopers except with the impossibility of civil rights.
posted by es_de_bah at 4:55 PM on October 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

"But if they aren't criminals then they don't have to worry."
"It's only a few bad apples."
"Blue lives matter."

Presents this article into evidence.

"Libtard."
posted by JakeEXTREME at 6:24 PM on October 23, 2018 [26 favorites]

Sadly, it is depressingly common for drug task forces to become corrupt. If they aren't lying on warrant applications and/or framing people they are running the drug trade themselves or abusing civil forfeiture to give themselves nice perks like first class flights to conferences and sometimes even unauthorized bonuses.

Literally every place I have lived has had some kind of corruption scandal in a federal, state, or local drug task force active in the area. Sometimes more than one. And that's just what made the news that I also happened to see!
posted by wierdo at 6:55 PM on October 23, 2018 [15 favorites]

There's so much wrong with this but for some reason the part that I got hung up on is that this informant guy goes around knocking on random doors, then tells the cops that he bought hundreds of dollars of cocaine, and like ... do they not ever actually ask to see the cocaine??
posted by mannequito at 6:59 PM on October 23, 2018 [11 favorites]

... do they not ever actually ask to see the cocaine??

What? And risk missing out on all that sweet civil forfeiture swag? Pfft.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:20 PM on October 23, 2018 [4 favorites]

I recently had grand jury service in my state, which requires that a grand jury confirm any felony charges that a prosecutor wants to proceed with. Most of the presentations were pretty convincing but there were a couple of cases where I voted not to return a "true bill" (i.e. confirm the felony indictment and send it to trial) where I didn't think the police and prosecutor had established the facts they were claiming. And in some of those I found myself cataloging all of the perfectly innocuous household items I possess that would surely show up in any grand jury proceeding if I were ever arrested.

Hmmm.. you seem to have a lot of ziploc bags. Surely you don't need that many ziploc bags. What are you using them for? What's this scale for? Baking, you say? Cup measures were good enough for my grandma, who uses a scale for baking? etc, etc.. We also found a white crystalline powder that is used in the preparation of crack cocaine. The defendent claims it's baking soda and says he uses it in chocolate chip cookies, but on "the street" they use that to prepare "rock"..
posted by Nerd of the North at 7:42 PM on October 23, 2018 [32 favorites]

Part 2 posted yesterday, including wierdo's warrant hijinks.
posted by rhizome at 8:16 PM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

In another lifetime I once did IT support for a small narcotics office. The head of the narc unit had the "introduction speech" from the movie Training Day printed out and mounted in a frame on the wall above his desk.

If you're not familiar with the movie its the one about a corrupt narcotics unit.
posted by glonous keming at 8:32 PM on October 23, 2018 [14 favorites]

Balko is an interesting Twitter follow. Leans libertarian but not an asshole.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:09 PM on October 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

... do they not ever actually ask to see the cocaine??

The article refers to the informant only getting a cursory search before the supposed buy. That search supposed to happen to make sure they don't have any drugs on them beforehand that can be passed off 10 minutes later as something they just bought. Those drugs are what are handed over to the police afterwards.
posted by thecjm at 9:31 PM on October 23, 2018

That entire narcotics unit needs to be fired. The LRPD should be motivated to do this or face drastic budget cuts to pay for the fines that they need to be paying.
posted by arcticseal at 2:16 AM on October 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

Even if most cops are good people, trying to help, wanting to make the world a better place, the culture and incentives are too fucked up. They act with the power of the state. They can use violence at will. And the culture has shifted too much towards militaristic and dominance tactics. As long as any officer could be corrupt (or even have a bad day and make a mistake) and expect to be protected by their peers, ordinary citizens can't trust them.

This is the tragedy of Frazier v. Cupp - It's not that you might get tripped up by a police lie, it's that now the expectation is that they can lie to you, and we all know it. We all know they can't be trusted. We all know we should not talk to them. Think about how much harder that makes their job? It's just all broken.
posted by Nothing at 2:22 AM on October 24, 2018 [16 favorites]

This is also partly the result of selling military shit to police departments. When Ferguson, MO first blew up, my retired Army combat engineer husband, watching the coverage, said, "WE aren't allowed to do that to the enemy. That's not how you use that stuff."
posted by corvikate at 5:40 AM on October 24, 2018 [11 favorites]

More on TechDirt today:

The Little Rock Drug Raid Story Is A Fourth Amendment Story. But It's Also A First Amendment One

That entire narcotics unit needs to be fired.

Fired? I think they need to go to jail.
posted by M-x shell at 6:55 AM on October 24, 2018 [9 favorites]

It doesn't help that the most consistently abusive part of any department is siloed away on its own, operating mostly in secrecy from the rest of the department. In a lot of places, there's surprisingly little visibility into task forces from all but the very highest levels of commend. Given that in any moderately large department the chief and their direct reports do very little direct management of individual units, it takes active effort and considerable thought to ensure that effective oversight is maintained.

The system is designed in such a way that it will fail not only in the face of actual malice, but also people being too busy or just bad at their jobs. Sadly, there are a large number of voters in this country who don't consider there to be a problem. As long as there is no political will to reform the structure of policing and its oversight odious people will continue to coopt the law enforcement apparatus for their own nefarious ends even if the vast majority of individual officers are the very model of what we would hope a police officer to be.
posted by wierdo at 2:15 PM on October 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

It sure is a weird coincidence that this happens mostly in multi-unit housing occupied by people of color and not at The Estates at Oak Meadows, a Windermere Community.
posted by Nerd of the North at 3:46 PM on October 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

More longform coverage from Little Rock by the same reporter, Radley Balko, ‘If you don’t get at that rot, you just get more officers like Josh Hastings’:

Fifteen-year-old Bobby Moore was fatally shot in 2012 by Josh Hastings, a police officer with the Little Rock Police Department. Despite serving on the force for only five years, Hastings’s tenure would prove to be enormously consequential. He had been hired over the objection from a high-ranking black police officer, and that objection was well-founded: Before his hiring, Hastings had once attended a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan, then lied about it on his application. He went on to accumulate an astonishing disciplinary record, usually resulting in lax punishment for misconduct.

Hastings once boasted about body-slamming a homeless black woman to the ground. Video footage showed he had lied about a burglary investigation. He slept on the job, drove recklessly and had problems activating his dashboard-mounted camera. He admitted to using racist language. He sometimes needed help writing reports, and colleagues described him as lazy, incompetent and unfit to be a police officer.

Hastings’s ultimate confrontation with Moore, then, seemed almost inevitable. He confronted Moore and two other boys after reports that they were breaking into cars. When the boys managed to get one of the cars started, Hastings fired into the car, killing Moore. Hastings would later claim Moore was attempting to run him over, but forensic analysis showed the vehicle was either stopped or moving backward, and Moore’s wounds were consistent with a driver backing up, not surging forward. The other boys were not wounded.

But Hastings’s story isn’t one of a rogue, aberrant cop so much as a glimpse into the police culture of Arkansas’s largest city. Disturbing as Hastings’s disciplinary record may be, other officers in the department have even thicker personnel files. In fact, many of the very officers who trained and supervised Hastings have had lengthy histories of misconduct — including domestic violence, lying, and the use of excessive force.

posted by peeedro at 7:40 AM on November 4, 2018 [4 favorites]