A little over a year ago, the Fourth Amendment was conveniently forgotten to capture an unarmed 19-year-old.
Early on April 19th, an order was sent out for Watertown, Mass. residents to shelter-in-place. Innocent people were forced out of their homes at gunpoint as door-to-door searches were conducted.
One resident had an assault weapon trained on him for looking out the window.
It was the largest shutdown in an American city since the 1965 Watts Riots in L.A. Ultimately, it was pointless.
Police and Guardsmen eventually cornered and captured one of the Boston Marathon bombers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, due to a far less dramatic — and far more reasonable — way to handle crime.
A guy saw the cover was off his boat. He checked it out, saw a guy in there, and called it in two hours after the lockdown ended.
As bad as it is for the Fourth Amendment to have 9,000 cops and National Guardsmen canvas a city and force people out of their homes for warrantless searches at gunpoint, it gets worse thanks to a recent ACLU investigation.
A large number of “private corporation” SWAT teams armed with re-purposed gear from the Department of Defense participated in the carte blanche violation of Fourth Amendment rights in and around Boston.
Yet it gets even worse in light of a recently rejected Supreme Court case.
We’re at the point where these “private corporations” can violate your Fourth Amendment rights based solely on whether or not you exercise your Second Amendment rights.
False Intentions
Back in 1972, there were only a few hundred paramilitary drug raids per year in the U.S.A. Since then, the numbers have jumped at a rate far in excess of crime rates. 2001 saw 40,000 SWAT team raids, and 2013 saw 80,000.
In a June 14th release, appropriately named “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” the ACLU released the conclusions of a year-long study.
Flush with DHS funding and re-purposed surplus gear from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, local police forces have dramatically ramped up of the use of military tactics on civilian suspects for increasingly dubious reasons.
“No-knock” raids are now the norm, along with night time raids that are reminiscent of searches conducted throughout the occupation of Iraq.
As the ACLU report notes, these tactics are beyond heavy-handed and completely unnecessary:
- 62% of the SWAT raids surveyed were to conduct searches for drugs.
- Only 7% of SWAT raids were “for hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.”
- Just under 80% were to serve a search warrant, meaning eight of every 10 SWAT raids were to investigate someone still only suspected of committing a crime.
- In at least 36% of the SWAT raids studies, no contraband of any kind was found. This figure could be as high as 65% due to incomplete police reports on these raids.
- 65% of SWAT deployments resulted in some sort of forced entry into a private home, by way of a battering ram, boot, or some sort of explosive device. In over half those raids, the police failed to find any sort of weapon, the presence of which was cited as the reason for the violent tactics.
- Of the SWAT raids the ACLU studied in which police cited the possibility of finding a weapon in the home, they actually found a weapon just 35% of the time.
Bringing up the Watts Riots shows how far mission creep has gone. One of the earliest and most prominent SWAT teams was formed in L.A. in 1967 by Inspector Daryl Gates, who would go on to become the chief of police.
The intention was to respond to and manage critical situations involving shootings while minimizing police casualties, or provide security in times of civil unrest. In other words, the intent was to respond to existing scenarios, not speculate about the potential for a suspect to be armed.
Use the 2nd, Lose the 4th
And boy, do police like to cite the mere potential to be armed as justification for busting down doors without announcing they are police.
In fact, one such case almost made it to the Supreme Court, which decided it would refuse to hear it.
Texas police obtained a search warrant for John Quinn’s home based on information that Quinn’s son might possess drugs. The warrant did not authorize police to enter the residence without knocking and announcing their entry.
Nevertheless, based solely on the suspicion that there were legal firearms in the Quinn household, the SWAT team forcibly broke into Quinn’s home after he had gone to bed and proceeded to carry out a search of the premises.
During the raid, Quinn was shot by police because he had reached for his lawfully-owned firearm, thinking that his home was being invaded by criminals.
Lower courts rejected Quinn’s objection to the “no-knock” entry on the grounds that, because police had information that guns were present at the residence, they were justified in making a forced and unannounced invasion into Quinn’s home.
By refusing to hear the case, the Supreme Court tacitly supported gun ownership and possession as grounds for police to evade the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment and improperly limit the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
Going Private
This brings us full circle to how private corporations can effectively use your Second Amendment rights against you to circumvent the Fourth Amendment.
To complete its report, the ACLU filed standard information requests to SWAT teams across Massachusetts.
As it turns out, About 240 of the 351 police departments in the state belong to what are being called “law enforcement councils” (LECs).
These LECs are directly funded by several police agencies in an area and overseen by an executive board. Virtually all of these boards only consist of police chiefs from member police departments.
Some of these LECs have also incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. Here is where it gets bad.
You see, these LECs operate SWAT teams for their members while refusing to release any data on their operations because they exist on paper as private corporations.
These agencies oversee police activities. They employ cops who wear badges, carry military gear, and show up to drug busts with APCs.
They raid private residences, are protected by the law, and have the power to detain, arrest, injure, and kill.
They collect paychecks funded by taxpayers, and only have their jobs and privileges because the law authorizes governments to maintain police forces.
Yet, because they’re incorporated, they claim to be immune from Massachusetts’s open records laws. They want to enjoy the privileges and power derived from laws for the public good, but refuse to bear the responsibility to prove they are acting on the public’s behalf.
The state’s residents aren’t permitted to know how often the SWAT teams are used, what they’re used for, what sort of training they get, or who they’re being used against.
What we can infer is that they are acting just like SWAT teams around the nation. That means heavy-handed night time raids to seize some kid’s dime bag.
Private, corporate SWAT teams are now justified in ignoring the terms of a warrant, busting down your door, and violating the Fourth Amendment. All based on an occupant exercising his or her Second Amendment rights.
And if the Massachusetts police get away with it and set a new precedent, you can be sure LECs will be nationwide as soon as possible. No one would ever know how bad the problem becomes.
