04.28.07
Police State
I don’t know if you’ve heard about the Kathryn Johnson case, but it’s one of the canonical examples of police excess in prosecuting the War on Chemical Substances. She was an octogenarian living in Atlanta who was killed by police after firing a single shot to defend her home after police broke in with a ‘no-knock warrant.’ There were no drugs in her home, and narcotics officers have now admitted planting marijuana and presenting false evidence of cocaine purchases in order to cover up their mistake.
Two of the officers have pled guilty to manslaughter and are testifying that members of their squad routinely lied and planted evidence to get search warrants. They apparently did this because it was too hard to catch and convict drug dealers the Constitutional way.
No-knock warrants are meant to protect officers when entering homes that have surveillance equipment and, possibly, weapons that may endanger their lives. In fact, officers were able to get such a warrant for Kathryn Johnson’s home by falsely stating that her home was equipped with surveillance devices.
This is not a case of a corrupt police force. They didn’t take bribes or kickbacks. This is an overzealous, almost vigilante group like the NYPD’s Street Crime Unit in the Giuliani days. They’re the good guys and anyone who lives outside the narrowly defined behavior that they approve of are bad people, to be watched until there’s some pretense to arrest them. I’m glad the corruption in the APD is being exposed, but it’s foolish to think that this sort of thing doesn’t happen all over the country.