Abetting Police Aggression: The "COPS Effect"

Publicly funded poseurs: The tax-funded cast of the "reality" TV program Dallas SWAT, who -- unlike other television performers -- have official permission to shoot some of their co-stars.


They really didn't have to wreck the house, but they did it anyway.


There was no tactical advantage to be gained by perforating the house with tear gas grenades (one of which remained, for a long time, embedded in an attic vent), blowing out five windows, leaving part of the ceiling collapsed and the whole house uninhabitable because of the suffocating residue left by the gas attack.


As the residents of the home on South Oak Cliff drive in Dallas insisted, the murder suspect sought by the SWAT team -- 18-year-old Cristobal Jaimes -- wasn't there. As Cristobal's father Francisco pointed out to the local ABC affiliate, the family cooperated fully with the SWAT team, consenting to a search of the home and staying out of the way.


For their part, the SWAT operators followed established procedures. This meant that, despite being clad in body armor, carrying high-performance weapons, and dramatically outnumbering their quarry, the officers proceeded at a glacial pace. For more than a half hour, they ran remote cameras into several rooms of the house and otherwise took care to avoid a direct confrontation with an individual they believed to be armed and potentially dangerous.


It was only after they had established, to something approximating a moral certainty, that Cristobal wasn't in the home, that the SWAT team began the tear gas fusillade. When that failed to flush out the suspect, the officers gathered their gear and drove away, leaving the Jaimes family with a devastated and uninhabitable home and without a word of apology.

Aftermath: Cristobal Jaimes' mother examines a bedroom left wrecked by the SWAT assault on their home. The persistent odor of tear gas made most of the house uninhabitable.



As far as the Dallas PD was concerned, the department had no moral or ethical responsibility to repair the damage done to an innocent family's home. That is -- cue voice of chastened reverence -- Official Policy. Accordingly, the SWAT team, after thrashing the Jaimes' home, simply gave the family the equivalent of a High School bully's distracted shrug and left in search of the nearest donut emporium.


Between January 1, 2007 and late June of this year, when the raid took place on the Jaimes' residence, "ten other property owners filed similar claims against the city for SWAT damage," reported WFAA-TV. "But Dallas has never paid a dime for the kicked in doors and other property damage. It likely won't go back and pay it now, either."


However, in a minuscule concession to public outrage provoked by media coverage of the Jaimes raid, "SWAT officers will at least let victims like the Jaimes know where to turn for help to decontaminate after [a] tear gas [assault]. It's a small gesture no other department in the state has done. In fact, DPD said it only found two other departments in the nation with similar programs"-- one in Detroit, the other in Las Vegas.


So if your house is needlessly trashed in a SWAT raid, it's all but certain that the people responsible for leaving your abode a smoking, choking ruin won't even condescend to tell you the name of a local company that can clean up the mess.


The Dallas Police, seeking to contain the PR damage, referred the Jaimes to a local non-profit called Victim Relief, which offered to clean up the house at its expense. The group's founder, an apparently decent man named Gene Grounds, tried to depict the Police Department's actions in the best possible light: "We understand that [the police] have a job and their job ends when they complete their assignment," he observed.


The "assignment" here, recall, was to arrest 18-year-old murder suspect Cristobal Jaimes. One would expect this to be a matter of some urgency, given that a SWAT team was dispatched to take him into custody.


But oddly enough, within a few days of the assault on the Jaimes residence, the police blew an opportunity to arrest Jaimes without violence: When the young man called 911 in an attempt to turn himself in, he was told by the operator that he would have to arrange for his own transportation. "[T]ake a car, bus whatever ... but [the police] won't come and pick you up," the operator told a no doubt puzzled and frustrated murder suspect, who reacted by calling 911 again, getting a second operator, and eventually arranging for his own arrest.*


So ... arresting this murder suspect wasn't a sufficiently high priority to warrant the dispatch of a regular black-and-white, but at the same time it was urgent enough to justify a paramilitary assault on the home of his innocent family?


Behind that contradiction lurks another important question: What effort, if any, was made to find and arrest Cristobal through conventional police methods? I suspect the answers would run the spectrum from "very little" to "none at all."


For decades prior to the introduction of the militarized police units called SWAT teams forty years ago, street officers and detectives routinely tracked down and arrested dangerous murder suspects, and I'm sure that this is still done today, at least in some jurisdictions. But now that practically every community is occupied by a federally subsidized SWAT outfit, it has become common to use those teams for routine missions -- not just arresting potentially violent suspects, but serving warrants and other non-crisis situations.


In the case of the Dallas SWAT team, the apparently irresistible temptation for the promiscuous use of SWAT teams is exacerbated by the distorting influence of "reality" television. The Dallas SWAT team, after all, isn't just a law enforcement agency. Its members are also television stars in search of the proper setting in which to display themselves.


In physics, the phrase "Observer Effect" refers to the way in which the act of observing something changes the behavior of the object under observation. A similar phenomenon can be found in the entertainment genre called "reality" television. No intelligent person can believe that human interactions caught on a less-than-candid camera are spontaneous and unaffected.


The worst and most troubling version of "reality" television programs are those chronicling the experiences of law enforcement agencies -- the decades-old Fox program "COPS" and its imitators, one of which is Dallas SWAT (which has engendered its own regional spin-offs, as well).





Police work is carried out by armed people invested with the power to commit discretionary lethal violence; it's a monumentally bad idea to appeal to the vanity of such people and to encourage them to act in ways calculated to enhance their image.


"Reality" programs involving police tend to emphasize photogeneity over professionalism, not only in terms of the personnel chosen to represent a given department but also in terms of the decisions made in a given situation. Chases and confrontations make for dramatic television; patient de-escalation does not.


Perhaps this is why Dallas SWAT -- which lost one of its cast members when he was found consorting with a groupie who turned out to be a prostitute -- seems to favor high-publicity operations of exceptionally dubious merit, such as raiding underground poker games.




Yes, these armored paladins of public order are bold as Achilles when storming a card game -- but timid as church mice when surrounding the home of a teenager believed to be armed and dangerous. That contrast, I think, throws into sharp relief the priorities of a law enforcement body that is also -- or perhaps primarily -- a propaganda instrument.


A legitimate documentary featuring the work of genuine peace officers would yield little of the adrenalized melodrama peddled by Fox and its imitators. Showing the routine arrest of Cristobal Jaimes on the streets, or his booking after the young man turned himself in, wouldn't play on the Idiot Box. Showing him being dragged out of a house by an amped-up SWAT team, on the other hand, is Good Television.


What we might call the "COPS Effect" is intimately related to the mindset I call the "Showtime Syndrome, which manifests itself whenever a police officer threatens, or indulges in, unnecessary violence. But this lethal mimicry isn't limited to law enforcement.


Private sector thugs watch the same "reality" programs, after all, and it's becoming increasingly common for criminals to stage home invasion robberies while disguised as SWAT operators or other police personnel carrying out armed raids.


In fact, Dallas police just recently broke up an urban gang that specialized in home invasion robberies of that kind. For more than two years, that gang rampaged across several counties, stealing enough to branch out into the nightclub business and real estate ventures (including mortgage fraud -- of the unofficial variety, that is). The crooks often posed as SWAT operators; on a few occasions, following the Bush Regime's lead, they used "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding to break down the resistance of victims trying to conceal the location of cash and other valuables.

They took their cues from the police (left to right): Davin Stephens, Courtney Farmer, Earnest Ross, William Autrey.






Home invasions of that variety work best when they're carried out without resort to gunplay, which can attract the attention of neighbors and passersby. This leads me to wonder if some of those robberies could be thwarted if people weren't indoctrinated to see armed assaults as an increasingly routine form of police work. Again, we see evidence of the distorting influence of the "COPS Effect" at work.



Commentator Charles Featherstone describes COPS and its offspring as "the perfect morality tale for the evolving American police state.... It's 30 minutes – minus commercials – of moral superiority and vicarious entertainment at the expense of people who won't amount to much anyway."


That "morality play" is lethal, as it cultivates within the viewer a sense of identification with armed agents of State power and a sense of distance from the unsavory criminal suspects on the receiving end of State-sanctioned violence.


Officer Friendly, he ain't: The face of contemporary law enforcement, as depicted in the A&E series Dallas SWAT. Does this really look like something we'd expect to see in a genuinely free society?


"The watcher of COPS gets to marvel at the stupidity of everyone detained, the pettiness of their crimes, and more importantly – the fact that we are watching, which means we aren't being apprehended ourselves," continues Featherstone. "In fact, we're quite convinced we're not the kind of people who would ever wind up on the wrong side of a loaded police officer, and can laugh and shake our heads at the pathetic folks who are."


Of course, police work is hardly the incessantly dangerous occupation depicted on television. And thanks in some considerable measure to the attitudes cultivated by Police State Television, the odds are improving that each of us, no matter how hard we try to avoid it, will find ourselves on the "wrong side of a loaded police officer" at some time in our lives.


*A few years ago, a 911 dispatcher in Watuga -- a suburb of Ft. Worth -- reacted to an anguished mother's call describing a destructive tantrum by a 12-year-old child by sneering: "OK -- do you want us to come over and shoot her?" I don't think the intent here was to underscore to the mother that all police interactions involve the implicit threat of lethal violence.



On sale now!











Dum spiro, pugno!

"Tumult and Blood" (Updated, June 5)

A troubled, and troubling, fellow: Former Denver police officer and accused sexual predator Joseph Bini.


















The arrest yesterday (Tuesday, June 3) of 39-year-old Denver resident Joseph Bini on charges of sexual assault and child sexual enticement is an unsavory coda to a really bad decade in the life of a troubled and troubling man. It also serves as an appropriate postscript to a scandal that typifies our militarized law enforcement culture and illustrates the corrupt impunity enjoyed by agents of the emerging Homeland Security State.


Ten years ago, Bini wasn't a middle-aged former bodybuilder with an ill-advised soul patch and a skeevy interest in under-aged girls. He was an officer in the Denver Police Department with a gift for fiction-writing. He used that skill to obtain no-knock search warrants from indifferent judges. In 1998, Bini was caught fabricating "evidence" to obtain a warrant. This is first-degree perjury, a class 4 felony under Colorado law. And this variety of perjury is the most serious kind, since it is used to obtain a warrant to commit State-sanctioned violence.


Bini wasn't prosecuted, nor did he face serious professional sanctions for his offense. This meant that he was still on the force, and still regarded as a credible affiant, when he swore out the September 29, 1999 affidavit used to obtain a no-knock warrant for a domicile at 3738 High Street.


In his affidavit, Bini claimed to have sent a "reliable" informant to that address several days earlier to purchase $20 work of crack cocaine. That informant would later admit that no such transaction occurred. But Bini was a police officer whose testimony was considered self-ratifying. As the Denver Post would later observe, "No-knock search warrants appear to be approved so routinely that some Denver judges have issued them even though police asked only for a regular warrant."


Steroid-enhanced street cop: Bini posing at a bodybuilding contest prior to his retirement from the Denver Police Department.


The rationale behind a "no-knock" warrant is that requiring police to "knock and announce" would result either in the destruction of evidence or intolerable danger to the officers -- "officer safety" being the summum bonum of contemporary police work. The imperiled "evidence" is usually a very small quantity of narcotics. And the danger to the officers is almost always overstated by several orders of magnitude: After all, they're the ones who are carrying firearms and swaddled in body armor.


Let it also be acknowledged that were it not for the demented and patently unconstitutional "War on Drugs," none of this would be in play. Police in most jurisdictions wouldn't be kicking down doors in order to seize minuscule amounts of drugs were it not for decades of federal subsidies, mandates, and incentives to carry out such policies.


At the time Bini swore out the second lying affidavit, all that was necessary for him to receive authorization for a no-knock raid was the assertion that there was an unspecified threat to the evidence and to the officers sent to conduct a search and any necessary arrests. So the warrant was issued, and a SWAT team was sent to the address at 1:47 p.m. on September 29, 1999.


Three minutes after the SWAT team arrived, 45-year-old Ismael Mena was dead, his body perforated by eight rounds fired by police officers.

According to the initial report on the incident, the SWAT operators "moved towards a bedroom located on the first floor of this residence, where they were confronted by the suspect ... who as kneeling on the floor, described as a three-point stance, and pointing a pistol at the officers. The threatened officers began yelling `police' and `'policia' at the suspect and ordered him to lower his weapon, which the suspect refused to [do]. The suspect continued pointing a pistol at the Metro SWAT officers who eventually felt that their lives ... were in danger and they fired on the suspect."


That summary of events was supplied by a detective who relayed the description from a SWAT officer who took part in the raid. A few months later, Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas had conducted an independent inquiry that produced a very different account: In this version, Mena was on the bed in his second-story bedroom when the invaders materialized. Wielding his gun, he supposedly advanced on the officers and fired three shots.


Thomas, noted an investigative report by the independent journal Westword, maintained that "From a legal perspective, whether Mr. Mena fired first is not significant." By merely pointing a gun at the police officers, Mena created a situation in which the officers were justified in using deadly force. At least that's how Thomas saw it, and why he didn't file any charges against the officers on-scene.


In fact, if the officers had no legal justification to be in Mena's home, it was he, not they, who was justified in using lethal force. That right is recognized in the Common Law and in federal judicial decisions. More to the point: It is enshrined in Colorado state law in the form of a "Make My Day" statute explicitly protecting the right to armed self-defense against intruders or aggressors of any kind.


Just as surely as if they were common armed robbers, the SWAT team had forced its way into Mena's home illegally. This was true whether or not they "announced" their presence as they barged into the home, as police consistently claim in disputed home invasions. Mena was within his legal and moral right to kill every one of the invaders. The same was not true of the SWAT team: Armed robbers, after all, can't claim self-defense if they shoot a resident who attempts to repel their criminal aggression.


Scene of the crime: The house in which 45-year-old Ismael Mena (seen with his family in the photo below) was murdered by a Denver SWAT team.


Outrage quickly coalesced over Mena's murder, and it gathered additional strength from a series of outrageous disclosures. A police officer working for the counter-narcotics unit involved in the incident publicly admitted that she had been pressured to fabricate reports to her superiors claiming that Mena had been the subject of previous police complaints.


In fact, Mena, a Mexican immigrant, had no previous contacts with law enforcement in this country. A former police officer with a family of nine children in Jalisco, Mena worked long hours at a local soda bottling plant and otherwise kept to himself, as Mexican nationals of dubious immigration status tend to.


The Burgo .22 caliber pistol SWAT operators claimed to have found in Mena's hands was untraceable. This, coupled with the wildly divergent accounts of the shooting, led to speculation on the part of some police critics that police had simply gunned down Mena and then planted a "drop gun" at the scene.


"The stories just don't add up," complained LeRoy Lemos, head of the Justice for Mena Committee. "What happened to the three-point [shooting] stance [that Mena supposedly assumed before being shot by the police]? How hard is it to put a gun in a dead man's hand and fire it off?"


Police found no narcotics in Mena's residence. A coroner's inspection of the man's lifeless body likewise turned up no evidence of narcotics consumption. The "reliable" informant cited by Officer Bini disavowed making a purchase at 3738 High Street. Police and municipal authorities were spinning like Dervishes on Red Bull. Three days after the official inquiry ended with the purported vindication of everyone involved in the raid, Police Chief Tom Sanchez suddenly developed an irresistible urge to "spend more time with the family" and resigned.


About a year later, Bini became the only official of any kind to face criminal charges growing out of the State-sponsored murder of Ismael Mena.


As is usually the case in such matters, Bini's trial on three felony charges was as rigged as a pro "wrestling" event: The prosecution wasn't permitted to introduce any evidence relating Bini's actions to the death of Ismael Mena, or the fact that no drugs were found in his home. Nor did Judge Shelly Gilman permit the prosecution to mention that Bini had perjured himself in 1998 in order to obtain a no-knock warrant.


The fix was in, and he went free: Officer Joseph Bini smiles after the Judge and prosecution seal a foul-smelling deal that let him go free with a trivial "official misconduct" charge.



Rather than take the case to trial, the prosecutors -- I'm guessing they weren't bent double beneath the weight of their disappointment -- cut a deal. Bini was permitted to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of "official misconduct," which carried penalties of up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. And of course, Bini was spared the jail time so he could return to his work as a police officer.


Mena's family received $400,000 in taxpayer funds to settle its lawsuit against Denver's municipal government and police force. But nobody was actually held accountable for Mena's death, even after a similar incident in 2003 involving a mentally handicapped man led to some anodyne "reforms."


Bini -- who went on to compete as a bodybuilder and to survive two bouts with cancer -- was described by many as a flawed but decent cop, one of the better officers on the force. Oddly enough, that might be the case.


In an affidavit filed in 2000, Colorado Police Detective Betty J. Smith, who worked for the department's Civil Liability Bureau, documented that 7,515 complaints alleging "sexual harassment, assault, sexual assault, battery or any sexual misconduct or crimes of violence" had been filed against the force since 1990. Of that number, some 1,859 complaints had been "sustained." This means, as Westword put it, Denver cops were involved in various crimes of violence and sexual misconduct "on an average of once every other day" during the 1990s.


The same was true, interestingly enough, of the home invasion operations conducted purusant to "no-knock" warrants.


During the late 1990s, Westword noted in 2000, "Denver police enter a private residence unannounced every two or three days. County court judges approved 107 `immediate entry' warrants in 1997, 148 in 1998.... [E]stimates [for 1999] based on monthly totals indicate SWAT officers executed between 160 and approximately 180 no-knock warrants last year."


The plague of no-knock warrants continues unabated. Radley Balko of Reason magazine, author of the definitive study on this subject, continues to chronicle the routine atrocities committed pursuant to such warrants.



"Immediate entry" warrants are close kindred to the writs of assistance issued by British colonial authorities in the years immediately before the War for Independence. As the heroic James Otis, Jr. explained in his magisterial February 1761 presentation before the Massachusetts Superior Court, the writs were alien to the English constitution (the corpus of due process guarantees and other protections growing out of the Magna Carta and common law) and instruments of "wanton tyranny."


"Every man prompted by revenge, ill-humor, or wantonness to inspect the inside of his neighbor's house, may get a Writ of Assistance," Otis pointed out. "Others will ask it from self-defence; one arbitrary exertion will provoke another, until society be involved in tumult and in blood."


Otis's complaint seems touchingly naive today, when our rulers treat the Fourth Amendment with a mixture of puzzled amusement and incredulous contempt.


The "wanton tyranny" of George III's rule now seems like an era of enlightened restraint, living as we do under a Regime that is frequently responsible for spectacles of "tumult and blood" the likes of which Otis could only have imagined after madness tragically claimed ownership of his once-incomparable mind.


UPDATE


According to the arrest affidavit for Joseph "Short Eyes" Bini, two very young girls -- underage runaways -- showed up at the GNC store were Bini worked on May 21. That store is owned by his wife (who is also his ex-wife -- they divorced and re-married), a professional bodybuilder named Marina Lopez.


The troubled girls had seen a poster of Bini's wife and asked if they could meet her.

For some reason as they said this to Bini, what he apparently heard was something like this: "We're lonely, hungry, vulnerable, and eminently exploitable, and for some unaccountable reason eager to be imprisoned for several hours by a creepy middle-aged man and forced to perform sex acts on each other to stimulate his prurient interests."


Well, in any case, that's what Bini proceeded to do: He lured the runaways into a back room, locked it, and offered them twenty dollars, saying something to the effect that he'd always wanted to see two "young girls" do various things to each other.


According to the girls -- who later picked Bini out from a suspect line-up -- they repeatedly pleaded to be released, but Bini was apparently too busy, ah, flogging his wedding tackle to release them. At one point Bini -- fully exposed -- approached the girls and tried to touch them. He eventually lost interest, told the victims their performance wasn't "worth" twenty bucks, and let them loose.


Bear in mind that this guy -- despite multiple criminal offenses that resulted in the death of an innocent man in 1999 -- was a police officer until just a few months ago, when he retired for medical reasons.



Available now!












Yes, Virginia, there is an official "List."