The Rights of the People (23 page)

The narcotics were discovered as they searched him and pulled a bag of crack from his underwear. “They’re not my underpants,” the seller protested; they were borrowed, he insisted. The cops got a kick out of this, and to prolong the comic relief made fun of his T-shirt inscribed with drawings of two goats and the inexplicable words
GOAT WRESTLER
. On the street, you grab a laugh wherever you can find it.

A lot of sellers operate in teams of three: a runner, a juggler, and a holder. The runner makes the connection with the buyer, takes the money, and delivers the cash to the juggler, who gets the drugs from the holder and passes them back through the chain. That way, nobody is actually exchanging drugs for money directly with the U.C. So it seems logical that the less sophisticated operators are the ones who get caught, which raises a question: Has this so-called war on drugs gone about as well as the war in Afghanistan? Supply has increased, driving prices down. Treatment centers are saturated with addicts, with no beds to spare. Drug-related murders continue unabated. And courts whittle away the Fourth Amendment, all in the name of stopping a scourge that won’t be stopped.

The cops rationalize their work by speculating that things would be even worse if they weren’t there, and that may be. Murder rates do drop
when the squad is operating in a neighborhood, Brennan says. But the overall inability to sense significant progress reduces the effort to a series of isolated contests, each of which has to be won individually to cause any satisfaction.

So if the refs aren’t looking, you can get away with a foul here and there—and why not? The cops know their man is guilty. They don’t need a jury to tell them; he just sold them crack. Besides, it’s hard to help crossing the line in the heat of the moment, as it’s easy to imagine officers doing when they’re less well led than Brennan’s bunch and unaccompanied by, say, a civilian writing a book.

I saw a case that skated close to a line and might have fallen apart had it led to an arrest. A U.C. bought drugs from a fellow wearing a Redskins jacket, who then entered an apartment house, exited, and entered again. The narcotics squad swarmed the block of two-story buildings, each with four apartments, two upstairs and two down, but they lost him. Someone on the radio said that he might have left by the back, so we zoomed around into an alley, where a white officer was already questioning a black woman leaning on a fence at the rear of the tiny yard. She was smoking languidly, trying to look casual.

He spoke roughly to her. “I saw you come out of that apartment. I saw you. Open that door.” The ground floor apartment he pointed to was dark. She hadn’t come from there, she insisted, and took a puff. He then felt the outside of her pockets, looking for keys—an illegal pat-down, since she was not suspected of anything, had done nothing to suggest she was armed, and did not fit the description of the “lookout” the police were trying to find.

The cop went to the back door and pounded on it. No answer. Finally, the door was opened by—another cop! They entered with no warrant, no hot pursuit of anyone with drugs or a gun, and found a vacant flat empty of furniture, under renovation—and no drug dealer. “How do you lose a two-hundred-pound guy?” one officer asked in frustration.

They gave up. They couldn’t search further without warrants, and which apartment would they cite to a judge? They hadn’t seen the dealer enter a particular one, so they couldn’t proceed, despite a tendency by the Supreme Court to give law enforcement more and more latitude for warrantless entry. The Court ruled in 1976 that Philadelphia cops were justified in following a woman into her house after she’d just been paid for heroin by a U.C.
³⁴
In 2006 it exempted police from the warrant requirement if they saw violence inside a private home—in that case, a juvenile punching an adult during a loud party with underage drinking.
³⁵

But here, the narcotics squad was legally stuck, and they weren’t about to search the whole block unconstitutionally, at least not with me along for the ride.

“Cops take shortcuts,” said one of Brennan’s men, a lean veteran with a shock of gray hair. He didn’t do it himself, he said, because he had seen the consequences, like a kid who gets caught cheating in first grade and never does it again. A case many years ago, when he was fairly new to the force, was thrown out because the officer in charge failed to get a warrant. A chambermaid had seen drugs in the room of a prominent basketball player in a Washington hotel. The cop just went into the room, instead of securing it and getting a warrant, and seized the drugs. The judge excluded the evidence.

Since then, the lanky officer told me, he’d been scrupulous about warrants, even to the displeasure of his colleagues on the force, many of whom prefer to just do the search. He remembered once when officers wanted to open two suitcases and he insisted on waiting for a warrant. They were mad at him. But he was right, and they made the case, because inside one they found six kilos of cocaine, and fourteen in the other. “Cops take shortcuts.”

P
OLICE!
S
EARCH WARRANT!”

The policewoman knocked loudly. She waited about two seconds. She yelled again, “Police! Search warrant!”

In three or four more seconds, too little time for anyone to answer the door, she stepped aside to make way for a brawny officer in civilian clothes. He cradled a cylindrical steel battering ram fitted with handles.

He swung it back and slammed it against the double doors. From inside came a woman’s yelp of alarm. Again he swung the ram, the doors burst open, and a dozen armed cops rushed in, big men suddenly filling the house, swarming through the broken entryway and all through the ground floor, up the stairs, fanning out rapidly into every bedroom without a word of explanation to the owner, a black woman of middle age standing with her mouth open, her eyes fixed wide.

She had been in her kitchen talking on the phone. She picked it up again. “They just raided my home,” her voice trembled to someone at the other end of the line. Then she hung up. Her personal sanctuary had just been invaded in accordance with the Constitution.

The last bastion of the Fourth Amendment is the home. Honored by history and protected by law, it remains the zone of privacy least vulnerable to the cold pragmatism of judges and legislators who diminish the people’s rights in the name of security and efficiency. Unlike automobiles, boats, bank statements, travel records, and even the pockets of a person on the street, the house is mostly—not always, but mostly—impenetrable to police intrusion without a judge’s order.

Yet even a legal search feels like a violation. Judicial oversight cannot dilute its brutality. Courteous officers cannot sweeten the insulting upheaval that turns every possession out of the private darkness of drawers and closets into the cruel light of chaos. It is a form of plunder sanctioned by the state, which in the name of order creates disorderly wreckage even when the police observe the strictest requirements of the Constitution.

This was a row house, once elegant, in Northeast Washington, D.C. A confidential informant had told a narcotics officer of buying drugs here, and on the basis of the officer’s sworn affidavit as to the C.I.’s reliability, a judge had signed a search warrant.

The squad did not have the dealer’s name, but the officers had a briefing in a nearby parking lot by the lead detective, a lanky woman named Lavinia Quigley, an African-American dressed casually in a red shirt and white shorts to blend into the neighborhood. They were a motley bunch of cops, some with long hair and jeans, a few in uniform. “It’s a big house,” she told them. “He keeps drugs upstairs. The good thing is his toilet don’t work. The reservoir don’t fill up fast. I ain’t seen no dogs, no kids.”

The officers were tense and hurried when they entered. As in executing every such warrant, they worried that someone might pull a gun, or at least might flush away the evidence. They left their own guns holstered, but they were as edgy as soldiers going into combat, their hands ready, their eyes watchful. They scattered rapidly through the old house and found nobody else.

They kept the owner, “Wendy,” seated in a straight-backed chair in the living room. You have no right to watch a search even in your own home, and it’s standard practice to prevent you from wandering around so you can’t hassle the cops or hide evidence or grab a gun. This is fine with the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1981 that officers may detain occupants while executing warrants.
¹

The house was already in some disarray when they arrived. Odd pieces of shabby furniture were scattered about; clothing lay on beds, floors, and tables; here and there stood boxes that, when searched, disgorged bits and parts of stereo equipment, CDs, and other random pieces of people’s lives. There were no books.

The officers added to the mess many times over. When they confronted a locked bedroom door upstairs, they didn’t ask for a key but just busted in the door, afraid somebody armed might be lurking inside. They pulled clothes out of closets, felt quickly along the seams, carefully examined pockets, and threw everything on the floor. They upturned mattresses,
emptied drawers onto beds and floors, ransacked storage boxes, and spent a good deal of time admiring the architecture of the house: “I’d love to have this.” “This is a gold mine.” “This is real construction. This is the way they used to build houses.” The hardwood floors of the attic were authentic two-by-sixes, one officer observed, laid at a time when they were actually a full two inches thick and six inches wide, “instead of what you get now at Home Depot.” The attic reminded another cop of the one in his childhood home, so big that he used to roller-skate up there.

The unit commander, Sergeant J. J. Brennan, listened to the rhapsodic talk for a minute and said, “I’m glad you guys are finding all this good construction. How ’bout finding some drugs?”

They did not find drugs, however, just some razor blades for cutting and ziplock bags for packaging. In the back bedroom, which was full of men’s clothing, they found ammunition—a box of nine-millimeter shells on a shelf in the closet, and a few rounds atop the stereo—illegal at the time in D.C. In the middle bedroom, among the many purses in the closet, an officer opened a black pocketbook, felt something hard inside a pair of black tights, unwrapped it, and shouted, “I got a gun.” It was a .38.

In the locked front bedroom, a big cop unpacked a white plastic storage box sitting on the floor, and nestled among the clothes he discovered a small Beretta pistol, fully loaded. He hollered for help, saying he had never seen such a gun and was scared that it might go off if he touched it. Somehow the drill seemed senseless, because once he had gathered others around, he then warned them to step away as he picked it out gently, and safely. Buried further down in the same box, he discovered a sealed letter-size envelope stuffed with cash—the top bill a hundred, the rest singles—which the cops then confiscated as possible drug money.

Downstairs, an officer found a closet locked, asked Wendy for the key, and drew his gun while he opened it. Pawing through the boxes inside, he came across a forgotten Confederate ten-dollar bill carefully preserved in a plastic envelope. He handed it to Wendy, told her it might be valuable, and got a wan smile in return.

“Who do you live here with?” Brennan asked her. He was dressed casually in civvies, his longish hair was slightly disheveled, his voice calm, his low key a relaxed counterpoint to the crisp tempo of the men searching around him.

“My son,” Wendy answered, and his girlfriend, she added. He was thirty. Wendy worked at the Department of Homeland Security in a position that had become permanent just a year earlier. “I might as well kiss my job goodbye,” she remarked sadly.

Although they had found no drugs and had only an informant’s word, Brennan and Quigley had absolutely no doubt that the house was being used to sell narcotics. They figured the son was dealing, and maybe his girlfriend as well, and since he wasn’t home they weren’t surprised not to have found a stash, which dealers didn’t always keep in their houses, especially their mothers’ houses.

One after another, as a tag team of cops questioned Wendy, lectured her, warned her, and threatened her, snippets of information came out like the disjointed belongings being strewn about her home.

She played the innocent convincingly. She got up early every morning and went to work and returned at night without knowing what was going on under her roof during the day, she insisted. Quigley asked whether her son had ever been arrested for drugs. Yes, she answered. “Using or selling?” Quigley asked.

Wendy answered in a small voice, “Selling.”

“While you out bustin’ your butt, you son doin’ this stuff,” Quigley said disgustedly.

Wendy was sitting, and Detective Quigley stood, bending her tall frame over her and scolding her like a stern mother with a naughty child. “Tell your son he got to get out, do his business elsewhere,” she commanded.

The cops were trying to like her. She was not confrontational, she seemed genuinely in shock, and she was cooperating. “Can I have a hug?” Wendy asked at last, and Quigley leaned over and gave her one.

After the Beretta was found in the front bedroom, an officer came down and asked Wendy a few questions without telling her about the gun. Which room was hers? The front bedroom, she said.

The cop had hoped for a different answer. He turned away and made a face of disappointment and regret. Then she was peppered with queries by Quigley and another black officer. They asked about the cash that had been found. She had money hidden all over the house, she said. Where? She was vague, which annoyed them, because they wanted to learn whether she had known of the cash in the white box.