In 1992, Donald Scott, the eccentric owner of a large Malibu estate, was killed in his home by an ad hoc team of raiding cops. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department led the raid, but a panoply of state and federal police agencies participated too. Police claimed Scott was operating a large marijuana grow on the property. Scott, who always feared the government would take his land, actually repudiated the use of illegal drugs.

No marijuana or any illicit drugs were found on his property. A subsequent investigation by the local district attorney confirmed Scott wasn’t paranoid: The LA County Sheriff’s Department was motivated by a desire to take Scott’s property under civil asset forfeiture laws, auction it off, and keep the proceeds for the department. Bizarrely, Scott’s home wasn’t even in LA County. Despite recent reform efforts, the promise of forfeiture continues to be a major motivating force in drug policy across the country.

Transcript

Radley Balko: In the early hours of October 2, 1992, a wealthy, eccentric Californian named Donald Scott and his younger artistic wife Frances were up late drinking, as they often were. The couple eventually passed out in the bedroom of their large cabin in Malibu at around 2 or 3 a.m.

As they fell asleep, they may have heard the waterfall that splashed down onto their sprawling 200-acre property. They called it “Trail’s End Ranch.” And then just before 9 a.m., Frances Plante Scott awoke with a start.

Frances Plante Scott: We were in bed asleep, and the house started shaking, and the dogs were going crazy and … [sigh]

Radley Balko: That’s Plante in an ABC “20/20” interview from 1993, describing the morning that ruined her life.

Frances Plante Scott: I got up as fast as I could to get dressed. And I was going to the door, and I see this face looking at me. At that point, the door burst open, and I just saw all these guns. These men had guns, and I didn’t know who they were or what they were doing.

Radley Balko: As Plante threw on a shirt and pair of overalls, a team of 30 law enforcement officers loomed near the entrance to her home.

The raid team was an alphabet soup of police and government agencies, including officers from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, the Drug Enforcement agency, the California Bureau of Narcotics, the U.S. Forest Service, the Los Angeles Police Department, the National Park Service, the California National Guard — and there were even a couple of researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Notably, the raid team didn’t include a single police officer from Ventura County, where the ranch was actually located.

The motley crew of heavily armed officials had made their way up the winding road to the ranch in 15 different vehicles. Now they were inside Plante’s home, with their guns drawn.

Frances Plante Scott: I just screamed, “Don’t shoot me, don’t kill me,” and I was backing into my living room. My husband heard me. He came running out of the back of the house into the living room. I heard him say, “Frances, are you all right?”

Radley Balko: Unsure of what was causing all of the commotion, Plante’s husband Donald Scott grabbed the .38 revolver on his nightstand. He was groggy, and his vision was likely still foggy from recent cataract surgery.

Frances Plante Scott: He had his gun pointed above his head. He looked at me, and the next thing, someone yelled, “Put your gun down, put your gun down, put your gun down.” Bang, bang, bang. My husband fell down right in front of me.

Capt. Richard DeWitt: Looks like 927D here.
Dispatch: At the location?
Capt. Richard DeWitt: Yeah.
Dispatch: Some bodies there?
Capt. Richard DeWitt: No, we put ’em down.
Dispatch: We killed him?
Capt. Richard DeWitt: Yeah.

Radley Balko: That’s Capt. Richard DeWitt of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, on the phone with his commanding officer. You can hear the surprise on the other end of the line, as the commander learned that someone had been killed.

What had Donald Scott done? What merited this sort of overwhelming police response?

Scott wasn’t a murderer or an arms dealer. He wasn’t an escaped felon or a dangerous fugitive. Instead, the police claimed on their search warrant affidavit that he was growing marijuana.

Bill Aylesworth: They couldn’t care less about the weed if there was any there. Basically, they wanted the land.

Radley Balko: In the years leading up to the raid on his home, Donald Scott’s friends and family said that he had grown increasingly paranoid that the government wanted to take his property from him.

Frances Plante Scott: He had a feeling that, it was just a feeling that they were going to try to get the land from him somehow. He thought that they wanted the land to the point of where they would kill him for this land.

Radley Balko: It turns out that Donald Scott was right. The government really did want his property. A lengthy Ventura County District Attorney investigation confirmed Scott’s suspicions and concluded that seizing his ranch was one of the motivating factors for obtaining and serving the search warrant.

The lead LA County Sheriff deputy on the case filed an affidavit claiming that there was a marijuana grow on the property. If the agency uncovered it, they might be able to seize all 200 acres of Trail’s End Ranch under civil asset forfeiture laws, and then they could auction it off. The millions of dollars in proceeds would go right back to the LA Sheriff’s Department and the other participating agencies. The raiding officers would be heroes. It was the sort of bust that could make a cop’s career.

Except that isn’t what happened. There was no major marijuana operation. In fact, there wasn’t a single marijuana plant anywhere on the property.

Dan Alban: At the end of the day, they were just looking for an excuse to invade his ranch, search everything, and find some basis for the seizure — which, in this case, they didn’t find.

Radley Balko: For the next decade, the dispute over what exactly happened that morning at Trail’s End would fuel countless national news stories, lawsuits, and defamation claims. It would pit the Ventura County district attorney’s office against the LA Sheriff’s Department and the state attorney general’s office. Those latter two agencies would issue their own findings exonerating the sheriff’s deputies for Scott’s death.

It would also spur a furious debate over the policy of civil asset forfeiture, and would become just the latest in a series of corruption and brutality scandals to rock the largest sheriff’s department in the country.

From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage.

I’m Radley Balko. I’m an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years.

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeating drug addiction, but the “war” part quickly became all too literal.

When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and ’90s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric, and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections. All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause. But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage.

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is Episode Eight, “Legalized Takings: The Land Grab That Killed Donald Scott.”

Donald Scott led a privileged life.

He was raised in Switzerland, attended elite prep schools in New York, and he lived off of a trust fund.

The Scott family fortune was fueled by his grandfather’s invention: Scott’s Emulsion, a cod liver oil supplement marketed as a cure-all. It took off in the U.S. and Europe, and it’s still popular in parts of Asia.

Scott’s Emulsion ad: Scott’s Emulsion, I like you. You help me to grow. Mmm, I like it!

Radley Balko: Scott’s jet-setting life was eccentric, worldly, tumultuous, and saturated with booze. He consorted with Hollywood stars and starlets, raced Ferraris, and generally relished the role of an international playboy. He bounced all over the globe.

In the 1960s, he had a six-year relationship with the glamorous French actress Corinne Calvet. That relationship ended badly, as did his next marriage. But later in life, Scott settled down with Frances Plante, an aspiring country music singer 23 years his junior.

Frances Plante Scott’s song “Drunk on Pain” plays: I’m drunk on pain. / It’s driving me insane.

Bill Aylesworth: Frances was from Texas, Galveston. She was a red-headed, hot-fired, wild, high-energy lunatic and absolutely gorgeous as well. Just an amazing person.

Radley Balko: That’s Bill Aylesworth. Nearly a decade after Donald Scott was killed, Aylesworth met and became romantically involved with Plante, Scott’s widow. And from her, Aylesworth became intimately familiar with the story of Trail’s End.

Bill Aylesworth: Spending that much time with her, four and a half years. I wrote a treatment for the whole thing. All I would hear is her all day long talking about it. She was obsessed with it.

Radley Balko: Aylesworth also collaborated with Plante professionally and produced some of her music.

Frances Plante Scott’s song “I Tried It” plays: I wanna shake more than your hand, Tammy Wynette.

Radley Balko: Donald Scott bought the lush Malibu property known as Trail’s End in the 1960s. Over the years, he’d converted it into a hideaway, transforming it into a surrogate of the grand mansion he grew up in Geneva. It was also a sanctuary for his eclectic collection of books, Persian rugs, and ancient maps.

Friends said Scott could also be incredibly generous to those he trusted. For example, gifting a collector’s model 1959 Cadillac Eldorado to a friend and family attorney named Nick Gutsue. But Scott was also worn down by years of legal fights with his ex-wives over money. He grew reclusive and began drinking more heavily. He also became increasingly distrustful of the government. Scott had stopped filing federal income tax returns, and he was worried that the government had designs on the property that had become such an important part of his identity.

Bill Aylesworth: So it’s 200 acres. I mean, just unbelievable, right? And it’s so attractive that the park service, National Park Service, owned all of the property on either side of Donald’s property.

Radley Balko: Trail’s Ends Ranch was hidden by a dense thicket of heavily vegetated forest dominated by oak and sycamore trees. It sat in the Santa Monica Mountains, about 4 miles from the Pacific Ocean.

Scott and Plante lived in a 1,000-square foot stone and wood ranch-style cabin about a quarter mile in on the property. It also included a bunkhouse and a barn. On three sides, Trail’s End was framed by towering cliffs, streams, and a 75-foot waterfall. But amid all of that canopied tranquility, the creeping border of federal parkland was causing Scott persistent anxiety.

The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area had acquired parcels bordering Scott’s ranch. His relationship with the park’s administrator, the National Park Service, had been contentious. Scott complained that visitors were harming his property. He said hikers would throw or kick rocks into the waterfall. Scott also suspected that the government wanted to absorb Trail’s End into the parkland.

Bill Aylesworth: It wasn’t paranoia because they were actually coming up, making offers to buy it. That’s not paranoid, saying, “They want to take my land.” They want to take your land!

Radley Balko: The National Park Service denied it offered to buy the ranch or had any plans to seize or condemn it. Additional reporting over the years hasn’t supported that claim. But a former park ranger and a superintendent of the park revealed Scott’s land was of interest.

Bill Aylesworth: They wanted his land, and he didn’t want to sell it. So they came up with a scheme to get it for free: Just take it from him.

Radley Balko: And Scott’s land wasn’t just beautiful; his 200 acres in Ventura County was worth millions. And according to a subsequent report by a Ventura County district attorney, police agencies in the area had also taken notice.

Dan Alban: This is pretty classic policing for profit.

Radley Balko: Dan Alban is a senior attorney at the libertarian law firm the Institute for Justice. He co-directs the firm’s national initiative to end forfeiture abuse.

Dan Alban: There was a $5 million estate. There was an eccentric millionaire who was suspected of somehow being involved in growing marijuana plants. And the idea was, if we can catch him in the act — catch him with these marijuana plants — then regardless of what the penalty would be for having 50 to 100 marijuana plants, we could seize the entire estate and then sell it off to someone and pocket the $5 million.

Radley Balko: The LA County Sheriff’s Office spent nearly a year investigating Scott’s alleged marijuana operation. In the end, they found nothing. Not a single plant.

At the core of their strategy was a legal concept called civil asset forfeiture.

Dan Alban: Asset forfeiture law has its origins in 17th-century English maritime law. England was in a trade war at the time with various other countries, including Spain.

Radley Balko: England passed laws saying they could seize ships or cargo that had been involved in smuggling or piracy.

Dan Alban: And the reason was if a ship was smuggling goods into your port, and you’re England, you want to prosecute the owner of the ship, but the owner of the ship is very rarely on the ship. The owner of the ship is back in Lisbon or Madrid or somewhere. And so there’s no way to actually exact justice on that person or deter them from behaving badly in the future. And so, because you didn’t have jurisdiction over the actual people committing the criminal acts, or at least not all of them, the way to resolve that and to enforce these various customs laws that England was trying to enforce was to seize the ship, or to seize the goods, or both, and forfeit them to the crown.

Radley Balko: The early American colonies adopted similar asset forfeiture laws. And while the Supreme Court expanded them during the Civil War, they were used only sparingly. But that changed with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.

Dan Alban: The originally very narrow concept of forfeiture that was used in maritime law was expanded during Prohibition. Because during Prohibition, people weren’t just smuggling in rum and alcohol by ships, but they were also bringing it over the Canadian border and the Mexican border by trucks. And so it was a natural analogy to say, “Oh, well, you know, they aren’t ships exactly, they’re sort of ships of land that have wheels on them. We’re going to seize those too.”

And then when the war on drugs really began in earnest in the ’70s and ’80s, forfeiture was pulled out again as, “Oh, here’s a tool that we can use to scoop up as much property as we can, and anything that was somehow involved in drug trafficking or that we think was somehow involved in drug trafficking is now forfeit to the state.”

Radley Balko: And this is where asset forfeiture really starts to go off the rails. Under the old common-law rules, law enforcement agencies could take the property of someone who had been convicted of a crime, on the theory that criminals shouldn’t be enriched by ill-gotten gains. Known as criminal forfeiture, it thus required a criminal conviction.

The practice of civil forfeiture — in which a conviction is not needed, just probable cause — was rarely used until the 1970s. That’s when Congress passed bills that allowed police to seize narcotics and anything used to manufacture or distribute them.

As the drug war ramped up in the early 1980s, Congress introduced additional bills to expand civil forfeiture. The Comprehensive Forfeiture Act, signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1984, allowed for a wider range of property to be eligible for seizure. It also empowered law enforcement to confiscate property like cash, vehicles, and homes, without even an arrest. A property owner would then have to contest the seizure in court in order to get their stuff back.

Dan Alban: They don’t have to be charged with a crime. They don’t have to be convicted.

Radley Balko: But even under that 1984 law, any forfeiture proceeds still went into the U.S. Treasury’s general fund. It was in 1986 that Congress added an amendment that would dramatically change drug policing in the United States — and ultimately would lead to the death of Donald Scott.

Under the 1986 amendment, federal law enforcement agencies themselves could keep any cars, cash, or other assets that they seize. Or they can auction them off. The cash and proceeds from those auctions would then go back to both the federal law enforcement agency, and to any state or local police departments involved in the case. In Donald Scott’s case, because the LA Sheriff’s Department was the lead agency in the investigation, they stood to benefit the most.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan championed civil asset forfeiture, arguing that it was a powerful weapon against drug dealers.

Ronald Reagan: You can increase the price by cutting down on the supply, by confiscation of the means of delivery, and so forth. The government, right now, already owns quite a fleet of yachts and airplanes and trucks and so forth that have been involved in that trade and that we have already intercepted.

Radley Balko: Police now had a clear financial incentive to seize property and to devote more resources to drug policing. Every drug bust now brought the potential for new police gear, office improvements, and “professional development” trips to conferences at sunny destinations.

Dan Alban: The money is sent to a dedicated fund that’s controlled by DOJ and the law enforcement agencies under DOJ, like DEA and FBI, and can only be spent on what they call “law enforcement purposes” — which is essentially anything they want to spend money on because they’re law enforcement.

Radley Balko: This change to incentivize police to seize property has wrought a sea change in drug policing, and it was the brainchild of a couple familiar names. One of them was an up-and-coming U.S. attorney in New York.

Dan Alban: And so that change, which, yes, was championed by Rudy Giuliani.

Radley Balko: And another architect of the policy was a senator from Delaware named Joe Biden.

Joe Biden: We changed the law so that if you are arrested and you are a drug dealer, under our forfeiture statutes, you can, the government can take everything you own. Everything from your car to your house, your bank account. Not merely what they confiscate in terms of the dollars from the transaction that you just got caught engaging in. They can take everything.

Dan Alban: That law, as well as a few others that were passed around the same time in the early to mid-’80s, really changed how civil forfeiture was used in the United States. Instead of it being this kind of obscure area of law that was very rarely used and only in exceptional circumstances when you can’t actually bring the perpetrator within your jurisdiction, it suddenly became this free-for-all where any property that you could find that you thought was somehow connected to a crime, you would seize and try to forfeit because at the end of the day, your agency — or at least DOJ, which your agency was under — got the proceeds from that forfeiture.

And so this created this huge off-budget slush fund that DOJ and its agencies could use to fund all sorts of things. And many states followed suit, creating their own funds or allowing counties to create their own funds, so that at the state and county levels, this same profit incentive was replicated all across the country. And that led to a huge explosion in forfeiture.

Radley Balko: Forfeiture proceeds are basically slush funds for police and prosecutors. In many jurisdictions, there’s little oversight or accounting. Over the years, police officials have spent forfeiture funds on purchases that you might say aren’t exactly critical to the practice of law enforcement.

One district attorney in Texas used forfeiture money to purchase kegs of beer, bottles of rum and tequila, and a margarita machine for his office. A South Carolina sheriff’s office spent $26,000 investigating a strip club — just good old fashioned police work involving lap dances and $300 bottles of champagne.

When the investigation of Donald Scott began, California police agencies were operating under this forfeiture-driven drug policy. Whatever they could seize, up to 80 percent of it would essentially become theirs.

As reporter Lynn Sherr reported in her “20/20” investigation into Scott’s death, there were plenty of reasons for the sheriff’s department to be looking for sources of revenue.

Lynn Sherr: LA County was in a fiscal crisis. With the upcoming budget a billion dollars short, the sheriff’s department was being hit hard. So like other law-enforcement agencies around the country, it relied more on the proceeds of drug investigations to supplement the budget.

Radley Balko: The investigation of Trail’s End unfolded over the course of a year. But six months after Scott’s death, the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office, led by Michael Bradbury, released a report that began to connect the dots.

The ABC News show “20/20” also played a key role in bringing public attention to the missteps by the LA County Sheriff’s Department. We’ll refer back to that episode throughout this story — not only because of its reporting, but because it includes one of the few in-depth interviews Frances Plante gave at the time.

We made numerous attempts to reach Plante for this story, but we were unable to track her down. And then, as we were producing this episode, we learned that she had recently passed away.

Plante’s “20/20” interview will be the only account from her that you’ll hear.

The investigation of Trail’s End began with an LA sheriff’s department deputy named Gary Spencer. District Attorney Bradbury’s investigation found that Spencer claimed to have received an anonymous tip that a woman named Frances Plante had been acting suspiciously around town in Malibu.

Plante hadn’t broken any laws, but Spencer claimed that the informant told him Plante was carrying lots of cash, paying for small items with $100 bills, and had been tipping generously.

Of course, Malibu is filled with eclectic and extraordinarily wealthy people. So it seems unlikely that tipping well and flaunting wealth would be unusual there. But Spencer saw these as signs of possible drug dealing. Spencer would later falsely assert in an affidavit that Plante’s car was registered to Donald Scott. Plante’s car was actually registered in Nevada, and Scott’s name was nowhere in the paperwork.

In September 1992, 10 months after the tip about Plante, Spencer claimed he received another tip from an informant who was never publicly identified. The informant told him there were 3,000 to 4,000 marijuana plants growing on Scott’s property. Spencer also claimed to have learned that Frances and an associate were allegedly linked to investigations into heroin and other narcotics smuggling.

So Spencer started investigating.

Bill Aylesworth: The lead was Gary Spencer. The whole thing was orchestrated by him. And he’s the guy who ended up killing Donald Scott. It was this guy who thought it would be a feather in his cap, his star would rise. The department needed money at the time. He was very ambitious.

Radley Balko: On September 10, 1992, Spencer and two deputies hiked to the top of the waterfall on Scott’s ranch to look for those thousands of marijuana plants. They found nothing.

Spencer then requested a California Air National Guard plane fly over the ranch to look for a pot farm and to snap photos. Those photos didn’t show much. At best, a DEA analyst named Charles Stowell said there might be some visual evidence of a small illegal water system. But even an unlawful set of water pipes could have been used to grow any number of perfectly legal plants. And as it turns out, there was really no irrigation system at all.

On a second flight two weeks later, DEA Agent Stowell claimed to have seen 50 marijuana plants. But for reasons that aren’t clear, he didn’t take any photos. Finally, Spencer asked a Forest Ranger to assemble a ground team to hike onto Scott’s property to find the plants. And for some reason, they contacted the U.S. Border Patrol to assist.

This new ground team got within 150 feet of Scott’s house but told Spencer that they saw no marijuana. They also said it was extremely unlikely that there were 3,000 plants growing on the property.

According to Bradbury’s investigation, as Spencer was building his case, he also sent a park ranger and a sheriff’s sergeant to Scott’s property under false pretenses. The ranger had previously responded to a complaint Frances Plante had made to the National Park Service.

Spencer told them to pretend to be interested in adopting a puppy from the Scotts. In reality, they were there to provide a threat assessment on the property. In other words, he wanted them to tell him what sort of force he would need to use when serving his search warrant.

Spencer finally got his search warrant on October 1, 1992, but only after telling the DEA that his mysterious informant’s story had changed. Forget the thousands of plants — the informant now reportedly said that Scott was growing only enough plants to yield about 40 pounds of pot. By DEA estimates, that would have amounted to about 50 plants. So the new story conveniently aligned with what the DEA agent improbably claimed to have spotted during his flight.

The informant would later deny that this particular conversation ever happened, though that was also disputed by the sheriff’s department. Bradbury’s investigation found other problems with Spencer’s search warrant affidavit. For example, Spencer had omitted the fact that two ground teams had visited the property and failed to spot any marijuana.

Spencer also wrote that DEA Agent Stowell had used binoculars when he claimed to have spotted the 50 or so pot plants. But there were no binoculars. Stowell claimed to have seen them from 1,000 feet in the air with the naked eye. A Forest Service employee with extensive aerial surveillance experience would later say that to do so from a plane like that would be like “seeing a corn dog sticking out of the ground.”

Michael Bradbury: There is virtually no way that Stowell could have seen through that canopy of trees. It’s like a rainforest. It’s impenetrable.

Radley Balko: That’s Ventura County District Attorney Michael Bradbury picking apart Spencer’s case with “20/20” reporter Lynn Sherr.

So to summarize, Spencer obtained a search warrant based on a DEA agent’s improbable claim to have spotted 50 pot plants from 1,000 feet with the naked eye. But he failed to photograph it, and he wasn’t certain about what he’d seen.

Spencer then corroborated that with an unidentified informant who revised the number of plants he claimed to have seen on Scott’s property from several thousand to just 50.

While Spencer claimed that the DEA agent had spotted the plants, he failed to note that two ground teams failed to find any plants when they visited the property in person.

Michael Bradbury: He provided misinformation to the magistrate, and he left out a lot of very material facts that would have indicated to the magistrate that in fact marijuana was not being cultivated there.

Radley Balko: But with the warrant in hand, Spencer then began planning his raid. Remember how he had previously sent those park rangers to visit the property and make a threat assessment?

Well, those rangers concluded that a SWAT team wasn’t necessary. “Just drive up to the house and the Scotts would let them inside.”

But that isn’t what happened.

Bill Aylesworth: This guy was a cowboy, Gary Spencer. He’s not a guy who’s gonna hang around and talk about procedures, you know, “We’re gonna go in, we’re gonna arrest him, we’re gonna take his weed and his property.”

Radley Balko: There’s other evidence that forfeiture was a prime motivator in Spencer’s investigation. About a month before the raid, deputies had also been given documents that included a property appraisal of the ranch, and that included a handwritten notation that an 80-acre plot of land nearby had recently sold for $800,000. It also pointed out that the Trail’s End Ranch covered 200 acres.

[Break]

Radley Balko: Just after sunrise on October 2, 1992, 31 people from at least eight government and law enforcement agencies gathered in the Malibu office of the LA Sheriff’s Department for a briefing. At least two people at that briefing heard it mentioned that if the raid produced marijuana plants, the police agencies could seize Scott’s entire property under asset forfeiture laws.

So the 15-vehicle caravan then made its way to Trail’s End. At 8:30 a.m., they cut a padlock off the outer gate. Several of the officers would later say that they had knocked and announced themselves for somewhere between 1 and 4 minutes. According to police, when no one answered, a team of five deputies then forced their way into the home with a crowbar and a battering ram.

Spencer was the first one through the door.

Bill Aylesworth: And she starts screaming. So, you hear your wife screaming. Obviously, you’re gonna grab your gun and go down and see what’s happening.

Radley Balko: According to Spencer, Scott came out holding a .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver. He was holding it above his head, in his right hand, as if he were going to hit someone with it, not shoot it. According to Plante, Scott was still recovering from an eye surgery he’d had a few days earlier, and he couldn’t see well.

Bill Aylesworth: They tell him, “Put down the gun. Put down the gun.” And so literally, the order they gave him is also the reason they used for killing him. Because he had a handgun, as he was putting it down, they blew him away.

Radley Balko: Spencer said he told Scott to drop the gun three times, though he admits he never identified himself as a police officer once Scott entered the room. According to Spencer, as Scott brought the gun down, he rotated it until it was pointing at Spencer. That’s when Spencer fired. Deputy John Cater fired next. Then Spencer fired another round. According to Spencer, Scott lurched backward, stammered, and fell. He died instantly.

Capt. Richard DeWitt: Captain DeWitt here.
Dispatch: Yeah.
Capt. Richard Dewitt: I’m on a search warrant with the Hidden Hills crew on this marijuana eradication thing.
Dispatch: Yes.
Capt. Richard DeWitt: And they just — Looks like 927D here.
Dispatch: At the location?
Capt. Richard DeWitt: Yeah.
Dispatch: Some bodies there?
Capt. Richard DeWitt: No, we put ’em down.
Dispatch: We killed him?
Capt. Richard DeWitt: Yeah.

Bill Aylesworth: They’re basically saying, “Yeah, we killed him.” And then you could hear how surprised they were on the other end. They’re like, “You mean the property owner?” They were just, like, shocked. “The property owner? He’s dead? You shot him?”

Radley Balko: Frances Plante would later use that recording in a song she created and produced with Aylesworth. They called it “I’m Going to Stop You.”

[Frances Plante Scott’s song “I’m Going to Stop You” plays]

Bill Aylesworth: At the very beginning of the song before a song even starts, we have the actual recording to the headquarters.

Verse from “I’m Going to Stop You” plays: We killed him, we killed him. We killed him.

Bill Aylesworth: Malibu sheriff headquarters saying, “Yeah, we killed the subject.” “Killed the subject? What do you mean?” on that record we recorded and released. And I named the album “Conspiracy Cocktail” because all the songs she wrote were about the government and what happened to her.

Frances Plante Scott’s “I’m Going to Stop You” continues playing:

I’m going to stop you

Do we defend ourselves from you

Protect and serve you’re supposed to do

I’m going to stop you …

Radley Balko: There were a number of inconsistencies about where Donald Scott’s hand and gun were pointing when he was shot. What’s undisputed is that the subsequent search of Scott’s property not only turned up no marijuana plants, or other narcotics, it also turned up no unusual or illegal irrigation systems. There were no ropes. There was nothing hanging from the trees that could have supported a grow operation. Frances Plante would later say, dryly, that when the police asked where the plants were, she responded, “I’m the only Plante here.”

Spencer later claimed deputies found a cigar box with marijuana stems, two charred joints, and some residue that may have been pot. But there’s no mention of that on the evidence return sheet, which is supposed to list everything seized during the search. And Spencer later couldn’t say where the box was found.

Trail’s End was in Ventura County, yet the investigation into Donald Scott’s nonexistent marijuana farm and the raid that ended his life were conducted by the sheriff’s office in neighboring Los Angeles County. The fallout from his death would pit two veteran California law enforcement officials against each other in a way that became very nasty and very public.

Soon after Scott’s death, Ventura County District Attorney Michael Bradbury announced that he’d be launching an investigation. Six months later, he issued his scathing report.

It was about as damning a document as one law enforcement agency could publish about another. Bradbury then defended his report in the media.

Barbara Walters: This week, investigators examining the case issued their report. The findings are explosive, as you are about to hear in the conclusion of Lynn Sherr’s report.

Michael Bradbury: Donald Scott did not have to die. He should not have died. He’s an unfortunate victim in the war on drugs.

Radley Balko: Bradbury’s report said that the U.S. Border Patrol had no jurisdiction to be involved in the case and criticized its agents for trespassing on Scott’s property. He was also hard on DEA Agent Charles Stowell, saying, “He was either lying or not sure that he saw marijuana.”

But Bradbury saved most of his criticism for Deputy Gary Spencer, writing, “This search warrant became Donald Scott’s death warrant.”

After outlining the numerous discrepancies in Spencer’s affidavit, Bradbury’s report concluded, “the misstatements and omissions discussed above are material and would invalidate the warrant.”

Bradbury also wrote that there were numerous reasons to doubt Spencer’s version of events. Although, he advised against perjury charges for the deputy.

He also questioned the LA County Sheriff’s Department’s motives. When Bradbury’s report came out, the Los Angeles County sheriff was a reserved man named Sherman Block.

In a written statement, Block condemned the report, which he said was filled with “conjecture and supposition” and reeked of “sensationalism.” He also accused Bradbury of having “a complete lack of understanding of the nature of narcotics investigations.”

And Block questioned Bradbury’s motivations, pointing out that the report was released just as ABC News was airing that “20/20” report on the Scott case.

Announcer: Tonight, a Lynn Sherr investigation: Why did Donald Scott die?

Radley Balko: Block conducted his own internal inquiry into the raid, which disputed all of Bradbury’s findings. He completely exonerated Spencer, his deputies, and DEA Agent Stowell, and argued that a 1,000-foot aerial naked-eye sighting of marijuana plants is both possible and “ideal.” According to Block, Bradbury’s own tape-recorded interview with the informant revealed that the informant never denied telling Spencer about the 40 pounds of marijuana on the ranch.

Block concluded that Spencer did not lie to obtain the search warrant, and wrote, “It is not true that the interest in forfeiture dominated or even rivaled the criminal concerns in this investigation.” He accused Bradbury of “willful distortions of fact” and of attacking “the integrity of veteran law enforcement officials.”

But Bradbury wasn’t the type to needlessly attack law enforcement. He was a law-and-order Republican. His memoir, published a few years ago, included photos of himself with Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, and various other conservative luminaries of the 1980s and 1990s.

What’s most striking about Block’s investigation is that it lacks any introspections. Three months before the Scott raid, Block’s department was strongly criticized for a series of fatal shootings. A 359-page report commissioned by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors found “deeply disturbing evidence of excessive force and lax discipline.” The report described a culture of lawlessness among sheriff’s deputies and a reluctance by Block and his top aides to hold them accountable.

Now, Block’s deputies had killed another innocent man. And even assuming everything his Deputy Gary Spencer put in the original affidavit was correct — and we know that it wasn’t — Block’s officers had gunned down a man in his own home over 50 marijuana plants that they never found.

After his investigation, Block continued to reject Bradbury’s conclusions. He expressed no remorse or willingness to examine the policies that allowed the killing of an innocent 61-year-old man over what was at most, a few dozen pounds of cannabis. He never questioned the appropriateness of deploying a huge raid team with personnel from several agencies who had never worked together. Even if they had found the pot they claimed Scott possessed, the manpower that morning would have amounted to one law enforcement officer for each 1.7 marijuana plants.

Block even sent his report to the California attorney general, and requested an inquiry into Bradbury for abusing his powers. Despite the botched raid and death of an innocent man, the state attorney general backed Sheriff Block. He also cleared Spencer and disputed Bradbury’s report, accusing him of using “unsupported and provocative language.”

Law enforcement officers have killed a lot of people in the name of the war on drugs. And it probably goes without saying that most of them aren’t rich, white, eccentric millionaires. Studies have consistently shown that the people targeted by these policies — from forfeiture to aggressive home invasions by police — are disproportionately poor and Black. But it tends to be cases like Scott’s that attract media and public attention, because the public tends to find them more sympathetic.

Dan Alban: Although the Donald T. Scott case is one of the maybe more extreme or memorable examples, it’s one that I think hits home for a lot of people — because they realize, “That could have been me.” Like, if police come charging into my house, and I don’t know that they’re there, and I hear my wife screaming, am I going to try to come to her aid? And if so, am I going to get shot? And could it be over something that I had no fault in? Absolutely it could.

Radley Balko: Civil asset forfeiture policies gave Deputy Spencer a strong incentive to conclude that Donald Scott was guilty. It also incentivized him to look for evidence to support that conclusion — instead of the other way around. Bradbury called it a “fishing expedition.”

Throughout making this episode, we tried to get a comment from Spencer, but we were unable to reach him through publicly available information.

Donald Scott had no criminal record. And after his death, friends and acquaintances told media outlets that he wasn’t fond of illicit drugs. That’s something they might also have told investigators if they had bothered to ask.

The possibility of civil asset forfeiture pushes drug cops in one direction: to produce evidence of a target’s guilt. There’s little incentive to search for exculpatory evidence, especially once they’ve invested some time and resources in the investigation.

Dan Alban: So forfeiture absolutely distorts the priorities of law enforcement agencies and drives a lot of activities that they would not otherwise engage in.

Radley Balko: Alban says there’s data showing that when law enforcement revenue increases due to forfeiture, there’s a corresponding decrease in the rate at which they close crimes like murder or robbery.

Dan Alban: One of the things that folks who are really sort of pro-law enforcement or pro-law-and-order often fail to fully appreciate about the dangers of the profit incentive in forfeiture is, it’s not just something that gives the police more tools to fight crime. It’s something that distorts law enforcement priorities, distracts them from what they’re supposed to be doing, and diverts all kinds of resources into things that have nothing to do with actual crime prevention and are instead are much more oriented toward revenue generation.

Radley Balko: That means more unsolved violent crimes. Which means less public confidence in the police. And that only feeds the cycle of mistrust between cops and marginalized communities.

Dan Alban: There are a number of studies that have shown that civil forfeiture and the aggressive use of civil forfeiture has caused distrust in minority and low-income communities because it’s viewed as enabling the police to just steal from people — and particularly to just steal from the poorest, the people who have the least resources and who are most vulnerable.

Not only are they the ones who are sort of hit hardest by it, but they’re also the ones least able to defend themselves because they have less access to attorneys or to the political system that might enable them to call some of these things into question or have politicians start investigations.

Radley Balko: The city of Philadelphia is a particularly compelling case study. That city has been home to a long-running forfeiture abuse scandal first exposed in 2014.

CNN: In two years, nearly 500 families in Philadelphia had their homes or cars taken away by city officials, according to Pennsylvania’s attorney general. They use a civil forfeiture law that allows them to …

Dan Alban: The court allowed us to do a survey of the victims of Philly’s forfeiture program — the first survey that’s ever been done of all of the victims of a single forfeiture program. And in that case, only about 1 in 4 respondents was actually found guilty or pled guilty to any wrongdoing, yet they all had their property seized and forfeited.

Radley Balko: Alban’s organization brought a class-action suit in Philadelphia on behalf of thousands of local residents who’d had their cars, homes, and cash seized by police.

Dan Alban: The lead plaintiffs in that case were the Sourovelis family, whose son had gotten into trouble. He was selling a few hundred dollars worth of drugs, and he was keeping it in a backpack in his bedroom. And one day, the Philly PD raided the house, told the family they had just a few minutes to pack up everything and get out, and that the house was going to be seized and sealed for forfeiture because their son had, of course, unbeknownst to them, been selling relatively small amounts of drugs. And this was, of course, horrifying to the family. They thought they were going to lose their entire house over this.

Radley Balko: Alban’s group was able to save the Sourovelis family home. But he says that case is part of a pattern, where small offenses can lead to life-altering losses, often to people who had no involvement in the underlying crime.

Dan Alban: Many of those instances were people who obviously had no idea that their grandson, or whoever was staying with them, was involved in illegal activity and certainly didn’t condone it. But they didn’t have legal resources to fight back. And so there were, I think, 80 to 100 properties that ended up being forfeited from people, many of whom weren’t actually accused of committing that crime. And that same sort of scenario plays out time and time again across the country.

Probably the most common scenario is, you know, the mom lets their son or daughter borrow the family car or minivan. They’re at the park and get caught selling some weed to their friends or something. The police not only seize the weed, of course, and the money — but also the family car.

And then mom is stuck in this terrible position where, you know, she of course wasn’t allowing her kid to use the minivan for illegal purposes, but now doesn’t have a car, can’t get to work, can’t get the kids to school, can’t get to the grocery store, to run other errands — but isn’t actually a person accused of the crime.

Radley Balko: In 2000, Congress passed some reforms to federal forfeiture law, including an “innocent owner defense” that owners of seized property can use. But it’s almost impossible to prove a negative.

Dan Alban: It’s proving something like, “I didn’t want my son to use the family minivan to deal drugs.” How do you actually prove that? It’s not like you probably sent him a text message saying, “Now son, I don’t want you to use the family minivan to use drugs.” So satisfying that burden of proof is very difficult.

Radley Balko: The bill also failed to mandate a conviction for asset forfeiture or curb the profit incentive driving it. Weaker federal reforms and sharing agreements have allowed police to bypass tougher state forfeiture laws.

There are long-standing questions about how law enforcement agencies use the proceeds of civil asset forfeiture. Critics say the lure has pushed police to become more aggressive and more militarized.

Dan Alban: We’ve seen lots of those sort of surplus military vehicles, [Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles], and other sorts of things purchased with forfeiture funds. Lots of military or pseudo-military equipment. In Philadelphia, for example, the Philadelphia police department used forfeiture funds to buy, I think, about two dozen submachine guns and to pay for a range that they were using for those automatic weapons.

If you know that your city council or county board or the state legislature isn’t going to approve you buying a BearCat armored vehicle or something similar, you can nonetheless purchase that same vehicle, using forfeiture funds. And that sort of thing happens all the time.

Related

“Do Not Resist”: The Police Militarization Documentary Everyone Should See

Radley Balko: And once cops have this gear, they want to use it. So the equipment then gets used in more drug raids, which results in more seized property, which results in more revenue to buy more gear. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. It can also just be a waste of public resources.

Dan Alban: A lot of the time with the armored vehicles, the various militarized equipment, the submachine guns, that kind of stuff — those are things that are tremendous fun to play with, may not have much practical use or practical value to many police departments.

Radley Balko: The use of civil asset forfeiture isn’t limited to drug crimes. But the drug war is by far the biggest driver of the policy.

In about the time between Congress loosening asset forfeiture laws in 1984 and Scott’s death, law enforcement authorities nationwide had seized roughly $3 billion in assets. In Los Angeles County alone, about $205 million was taken by law enforcement. In the five years before Donald Scott’s death in 1992, the county averaged more than $30 million a year in seizures.

PBS “Frontline”: In 1987, the sheriff’s department seized more than $26 million in drug money, another $33 million in 1988.

Radley Balko: In 1990, the PBS show “Frontline” aired an investigation about how the drug war was corrupting police officers throughout the country.

Dan Garner: You see that there’s big money out there, you want to seize the big money for your department. For our unit, that was a sign of whether you were doing good or poorly, was how much money you seized and the kind of cases you did. And my supervisor made it extremely clear that big money cases were a lot more favorable for your overall evaluation than big dope cases.

Radley Balko: In a 1993 interview, the head of narcotics at the LA sheriff’s department told the LA Times that the salaries of 24 of the unit’s 200 officers were funded entirely with forfeiture proceeds. And the top forfeiture prosecutor in the state attorney general’s office said drug war asset forfeiture can “become addictive to law enforcement.” He then added, apparently without irony, “It’s a little like crack.”

The addiction isn’t just institutional. That much loose cash can also be a temptation for police officers to slide into corruption, seizing and keeping property for themselves. Donald Scott’s death, in fact, followed a larger department-wide scandal in Los Angeles.

PBS “Frontline”: Seven sheriff’s deputies are now on trial in Los Angeles, charged with stealing $1.4 million in drug money. More than 30 narcotics officers here have been implicated in the largest current police corruption scandal in the country.

Radley Balko: Most of the charges were related to deputies skimming the cash they confiscated in drug busts, which they then used to buy cars, vacations, and even new homes. And the LA County sheriff at the time? It was Sherman Block.

Sheriff Sherman Block: I think we had individuals who succumbed to temptation, who somehow, I’m sure, in their own minds, they probably were able to rationalize what they were doing was not really wrong, since the individuals who they were dealing with were not honorable people in themself.

Radley Balko: None of the police officers involved in the killing of Donald Scott were ever disciplined for the raid itself. Deputy Gary Spencer sued Bradbury, the Ventura County DA, for defamation. When the suit was dismissed, he was ordered to pay Bradbury’s legal fees of about $50,000. Spencer later declared bankruptcy. “I was made out to be this callous, reckless, Dirty Harry kind of guy, and I wasn’t able to say anything about it,” Spencer told the Los Angeles Times in 1997.

Spencer did express regret for Scott’s death. And he would go on to say that the raid ruined his life. He told the LA Times that he developed a twitch in response to stress from the case, and that his children had to defend his reputation to their classmates. Still, Spencer continued to defend the raid, saying that he didn’t consider it botched because “that would say that it was a mistake to have gone in there in the first place, and I don’t believe that.”

Michael Bradbury deserves a lot of credit in this story. He was a rising star in Republican politics when the Scott raid went down. He saw a problem in law enforcement that had caused a tragedy, and he tried to do something about it.

Here’s Bradbury again speaking to “20/20.”

Michael Bradbury: When you keep that information out of a warrant, you deprive the judge of making an informed decision. And in fact that can, and in this case did, in our opinion, invalidate the warrant.

Radley Balko: When I first reached out to Bradbury, who is now in his 80s, he initially agreed to be interviewed for this podcast. But after consulting with his attorney, he told us that he would have to decline. It seems that Spencer is still around too, and Bradbury’s attorney feared that Spencer could still sue Bradbury for defaming him.

But in our initial phone conversation, Bradbury also told me something that hasn’t been widely reported about this case. In 2001, the George W. Bush administration contacted Bradbury and asked if he’d accept a nomination to be U.S. attorney for the district of Southern California. For a DA like Bradbury, this was a major promotion. Bradbury said he’d be honored, and he traveled to Washington to meet with White House officials. But when he arrived, he was told that the administration had changed its mind. According to Bradbury, the LA Sheriff’s Department had complained, citing the Scott case, and scuttled the nomination.

Bill Aylesworth: Frances is the one who really became like a political activist and stayed on the property and armed herself, and they kept coming, doing harassment, raids, all kinds of crazy stuff.

Radley Balko: Things would get worse for Frances Plante. After Donald Scott died, Plante inherited only a portion of Trail’s End. And she struggled to buy out the portion that went to his other family members. A little more than a year after the raid, the Malibu fires of 1993 then ravaged every manmade structure on the property. The fire also destroyed an urn containing Donald Scott’s ashes. Broke and heartbroken, Plante vowed to press on.

Bill Aylesworth: They thought, well, she’s going to leave now for sure. And she didn’t. She bought a tipi from like a tribe up in Oregon or something. You can see pictures of her online in front of her tipi holding a shotgun in her wedding dress. And she really got into it — the whole political activism thing about the asset forfeiture. And she wanted to get it out there that this is happening and stop it. So she was on “20/20.”

Lynn Sherr: Today, Frances takes little pleasure from this land. The memories of her husband and his love for these hills have now dissolved into the painful reality of one morning in October.

Frances Plante Scott: I’m not sailing off into the sunset with Donald Scott, so I’m stuck here, and I’m going to stay here and keep the land just like Donald did all these years.

Radley Balko: In 1993, Plante, Donald Scott’s estate, and his children filed a civil rights lawsuit against the various police agencies and deputies involved in the raid. The authorities dragged out the lawsuit for years, causing Plante to rack up massive legal debts.

Dan Alban: And so while Donald Scott, the raid on his house and his ranch, was over 30 years ago. It’s something that we haven’t fixed. We haven’t really addressed, and that’s one of the reasons why there needs to be substantial reforms made at the federal level, made at the state level.

Radley Balko: Alban’s organization, the Institute for Justice, launched an “End Forfeiture Initiative” in 2014. And since then, there have been significant changes. Three states: New Mexico, Nebraska, and Maine have abolished civil forfeiture completely. And that’s in addition to North Carolina’s ban which dates back to 1985.

Thirty-seven states, plus the District of Columbia, have reformed their civil forfeiture laws to some degree. One of the most popular changes include requiring a criminal conviction before seizing property — a measure that, arguably, should have been a foundational principle from the outset.

But many of these piecemeal changes have fallen short of fully protecting people’s money and property. According to the Institute for Justice, in 2018 alone the federal government and states have collected more than $3 billion in seized assets. Over the last roughly 20 years, that number jumps to about $68 billion. And that’s likely an undercount, since not all states fully report their forfeiture data. When it comes to changes at the federal level, the courts have been going back and forth on the issue.

PBS NewsHour: A unanimous decision today from the U.S. Supreme Court limits the ability of states to seize private property and impose excessive fines.

Radley Balko: That was back in 2019, in a decision authored by former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But as the court’s ideological leanings have swung, so has its treatment of the issue. Here’s another case decided in May of 2024.

Fox News 10: The 6-3 ruling held that states aren’t required to hold a preliminary hearing shortly after police seize property or money. The case involved a Georgia woman who challenged the seizure of her vehicle by police …

Radley Balko: Reform efforts have also stalled in Congress.

It would take seven years, but in April 2000, Los Angeles County finally settled with Donald Scott’s estate, paying out $4 million. The federal government also settled with the Scott estate for $1 million.

For most of this time, Frances Plante had been living in that tipi that she had put up at Trail’s End. Because she inherited her husband’s valuable land but not his wealth, she fell behind on property taxes.

And in the end, after paying attorneys’ fees and the shares to Scott’s children, Plante’s share of the $5 million settlement wasn’t enough to save Trail’s End. And after news of the settlement hit the press, the IRS came calling, claiming that Plante owed $1 million in inheritance taxes from when she obtained the ranch from Scott.

So in August 2001, almost nine years after an LA County tactical team had killed Donald Scott, a federal SWAT team — complete with two helicopters — descended upon Trail’s End Ranch to evict Frances Plante from the property.

They then did precisely what Donald Scott always feared the government would do: They seized his land, sold it at auction, and kept the proceeds for themselves.

That’s it for Collateral Damage.

Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept.

It was written and reported by me, Radley Balko.

Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer, who also served as producer and editor.

Laura Flynn is our showrunner.

Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief.

The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal.

We had editing support from Maryam Saleh.

Truc Nguyen mixed our show.

Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow.

Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan.

Art direction by Fei Liu.

Illustrations by Tara Anand.

Copy editing by Nara Shin.

Social and video media by Chelsey B. Coombs.

Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance and to Ali Gharib for editorial feedback on this episode.

This series was made possible by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund.

If you want to send us a message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

And to follow my work and reporting, check out my newsletter, The Watch, at radleybalko.substack.com.

Thank you for listening.

The post Episode Eight: Legalized Takings appeared first on The Intercept.

In 2004, New York narcotics officers raided Alberta Spruill’s home, shattering her door and detonating a flash grenade. Spruill, a 57-year-old city worker, went into cardiac arrest and died two hours later. The raid was based on faulty intel from a discredited informant, and the suspect they were searching for was already in custody. Spruill’s death came amid a surge in New York City Police Department raids, which had skyrocketed from 1,400 in the mid-’90s to over 5,000 by the time she was killed, nearly all no-knock.

Despite repeated warnings that these reckless raids would end in tragedy, few listened. This episode of Collateral Damage, hosted by Radley Balko, explores how Spruill’s death catalyzed the political rise of Eric Adams, a young Black NYPD officer who would later become mayor. It also examines how promises of reform quickly faded, and the NYPD returned to business as usual.

Transcript

Radley Balko: On an early spring morning in Harlem, 57-year-old Alberta Spruill was getting ready for work. She had worked for the City of New York for nearly three decades. And at the time, she worked in the personnel office of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services.

Joel Berger: Alberta Spruill was a Black woman, a perfectly innocent person with no criminal record of any kind.

Radley Balko: As Spruill went through her morning routine, a heavily armed team of police officers lined up outside her apartment. Seconds later, they took down her door with a battering ram.

Derek Sells: The police on May 16, 2003, at a little past 6 a.m. broke into Ms. Spruill’s apartment. They knocked the door off its hinges. They threw in a stun grenade, which is a percussion grenade, so that it makes a loud flash and a bang.

C. Virginia Fields: I could only imagine how frightening, terrifying, to be in a situation with your door being knocked down and a grenade being thrown into your space.

Derek Sells: When the police went in, instead of finding some drug den, what they found was a neat, tidy apartment of a older woman who lived alone. By the time they realized their mistake, Ms. Spruill was in pain. She could not catch her breath. She was frightened. The police then got EMS to come to the scene. She was taken to the hospital. And 20 minutes later, she was pronounced dead from cardiac arrest.

Radley Balko: The New York Police Department had raided the wrong apartment. The cops were acting on a tip from an informant who had previously been discredited. And they were using a warrant for a suspect who had already been arrested. They also deployed a flash-bang grenade, a device designed to temporarily blind and deafen anyone nearby.

The police had literally scared Alberta Spruill to death.

Joel Berger: This was the biggest news story in the city at the time. It shocked everybody.

Eric Adams: All of us must be outraged of an innocent 57-year-old woman who was inside her home — all of a sudden being disturbed in such a violent fashion.

Cynthia Howell: We want justice. Of course we want justice. We’re gonna do whatever it takes to get justice for her murder. Because who’s next? It’s gonna be your neighbor or whoever’s neighbor.

Radley Balko: A week later, Ousmane Zongo, a West African immigrant, was also killed by New York City police. Protests erupted around the city.

Seventeen years before the police killing of Breonna Taylor brought “no-knock” raids into the national spotlight, New York City residents were demanding an end to the practice.

Joel Berger: Spruill was really a watershed. It should have been a wake-up call. It should have been a warning. And instead, it was responded to with just the most perfunctory promises that we all knew perfectly well were not going to be kept over the years.

Kimberlé Crenshaw (#SayHerName: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence event):

[Humming]

Alberta Spruill.
Say her name.
Alberta Spruill!
Say her name.
Alberta Spruill!
Say her name.
Alberta Spruill!

[Humming]

Radley Balko: Alberta Spruill went to church frequently. She had a son, and six siblings. She was a unique person with her own life, her own interests, her own family. But her death, and the angry public backlash to it, and the unkept promises for reform from public officials were all too familiar. You could easily swap in the names of numerous other Black women killed in the war on drugs — not just Breonna Taylor, but also Kathryn Johnston, who we covered in our first episode.

There’s also Annie Rae Dixon, shot and killed in a raid by a Texas police officer who had mistakenly fired his gun. Tarika Wilson was killed by an officer in Lima, Ohio, while holding her 1-year-old son. The couple Lillian Weiss and Lloyd Smalley died from smoke inhalation after Minneapolis police mistakenly raided their home and deployed a flash-bang grenade. Lynette Gayle Jackson, Geraldine Townsend, Laquisha Turner — the names go on and on.

C. Virginia Fields: My reaction to the tragic death of Breonna Taylor was, one: Here we go again. What has really changed in all of these years, even though we’re talking different states, different region of the country? Here we go again.

Radley Balko: From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage.

I’m Radley Balko. I’m an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years.

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeat drug addiction, but the “war” part of that metaphor quickly became all too literal.

When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and ’90s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections.

All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause. But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we became more willing to accept some collateral damage in the drug war. In this modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is Episode 7, Dirty Information: The NYPD’s Shock Tactics and the death of Alberta Spruill.

C. Virginia Fields: I guess I heard about it along with everyone else on the news report. And it was very, very disturbing, the circumstances around it. Where this, what, 57, 59-year-old woman was already dressed to go to work and had been working in her position with the city for over some 29 years. And by all indications, a very, very solid church-going person.

Radley Balko: When C. Virginia Fields found out about the death of Alberta Spruill, she knew the scene of the incident well.

C. Virginia Fields: And I knew many people in that building, being in the political office that I held. And I often would go there for various meetings and political stuff.

Radley Balko: At the time, Fields was Manhattan borough president, essentially the equivalent to being the mayor of Manhattan.

C. Virginia Fields: We immediately connected with some of the people we knew in the building, the president of the association and some other tenants just to get a better sense from them. And we also was in contact with the police commissioner, Ray Kelly, to find out from the police side, what had happened.

Radley Balko: And what happened in that apartment, according to public officials, wasn’t quite matching up with the information that was trickling out.

Cynthia Howell: They sugar-coated it to the press. They didn’t want nobody to know.

Radley Balko: Spruill’s niece, Cynthia Howell, quickly became a spokesperson for the family.

Cynthia Howell: She had a glass table in her apartment. When they threw the bomb in, either it landed there and shards of glass struck her, or either when they went in, they threw her down. That’s the only way we can see fit where she got that broke arm and those gashes in her legs. And we got the pictures to prove it. As well as the autopsy report. So she died brutally.

Christian Covington: If you read the report, it doesn’t even make sense.

Radley Balko: That’s attorney Christian Covington, who helped facilitate a community meeting in Harlem about police brutality a few months after Spruill was killed.

Christian Covington: If you read the report, they make it seem like the police came in, they threw a stun grenade, they picked up Ms. Spruill, called the EMTs, and EMTs came, and everything was fine. And the police department patted her on the back and said, “Have a nice day.”

Radley Balko: One detail that sets Alberta Spruill’s death apart from many others is that the police acknowledged that they had made a mistake. According to authorities, the police apologized to Spruill right away in her apartment, before she went into cardiac arrest. The police commissioner also publicly apologized.

Cynthia Howell: It’s little consolation that they did take responsibility for it because it should’ve never happened. They did respectfully apologize in the news. Mayor Bloomberg attended the funeral.

Michael Bloomberg: On behalf of 8 million people of the city of New York, to you, Alberta’s family, I want to express our heartfelt condolences.

Radley Balko: That’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, speaking at Spruill’s funeral at the time.

Michael Bloomberg: [applause] I want to assure all of you that Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who’s here with me, and I are doing a thorough review of what took place that morning. And we’ll institute better practices for everyone that will ensure that Alberta will not have died in vain. [applause]

Today, we must look at ourselves in the mirror and admit that at least in this case, existing practices failed. Our laws and procedures failed the public. As mayor, I failed to protect someone I was chose to work with. We all failed humanity. An innocent human being was taken from us, and our actions caused it.

Radley Balko: Mayor Bloomberg promised to improve how police operated in the city — to put policies in place to prevent a death like Spruill’s from ever happening again.

Joel Berger: This was in their first year and a half where they wanted to show that they were different from [former Mayor Rudy] Giuliani. The overall atmosphere of it was, “This was horrible. We’re not going to let this happen again. We’re going to change.”

Radley Balko: The problem is that Alberta’s Spruill’s death could have been prevented. The bad policies, shortcuts, and mistakes that caused police to barrel into the wrong apartment? Narcotics officers had been operating this way for a long time in New York. In fact, under previous Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the 30th Precinct in Harlem was notorious for “operating like gangs”: breaking down doors without search warrants and stealing money and drugs.

There were ample warnings that unless things changed, someone was going to be killed. No one listened — or at least no one in city government who had the power to do anything about it.

Joel Berger: You would call it a comedy of errors, except it wasn’t a comedy since someone died.

Radley Balko: Joel Berger is a longtime New York civil rights lawyer. He’s been working on police misconduct issues since the 1990s.

Joel Berger: They had the wrong apartment. The informant had given them the wrong place. In fact, the guy they were looking for was actually in custody by the time of the raid. They went in with a percussion device, which was designed to strike fear into the residents. And the poor woman died of a heart attack.

Radley Balko: In the first few months after Spruill’s death, public debate focused on two issues: the use of confidential informants, and the practice of serving no-knock raids to serve drug warrants.

The path that led police to Alberta Spruill’s apartment door that morning had begun months earlier, when police were making a routine street arrest for drugs.

Derek Sells: There was an individual whose name has never been revealed, but who was arrested on a minor trespassing offense.

Radley Balko: Attorney Derek Sells was part of the team representing Spruill’s family. Here, he testifies to the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence in 2021.

Derek Sells: He was stopped by police, questioned, he was frisked, and they found a small amount of narcotics on him. He was charged, arrested with criminal trespass and possession of some narcotics. And he was given an opportunity to get a reduced sentence and a favorable plea — if he would simply provide information about higher-level drug dealing that was going on.

Radley Balko: We should note here that this specific detail isn’t in the police report, but offering deals like this to low-level offenders was, and still is, common practice. Of course, it’s risky too.

Police are relying on people breaking the very laws they’re trying to enforce — whether they’re drug sellers looking to knock off competition, people in custody looking to cut a deal on their own charges, or drug users willing to do or say almost anything for money to feed their addiction.

Derek Sells: And so having missed six appointments, without explanation, he was deemed unreliable, and he was decertified as a police informant.

The police in the 28th Precinct, however, did not put this information into the system that would alert other police precincts that this individual was no longer certified confidential informant because he was deemed unreliable. So he instead went to another Manhattan-based precinct, the 25th Precinct, where they accepted him with open arms.

Radley Balko: Sells told the human rights commission that the informant in Spruill’s case had been decertified after failing to show up for scheduled meetings, but the NYPD report says his previous handlers told the 29th Precinct that he was credible.

Derek Sells: This information that he gave was that there was an individual named Melvin Boswell who was heavily armed and was a drug dealer, someone who was dealing drugs out of apartment 6F at 310 West 143rd Street.

Radley Balko: The police now had a name and address from an informant. At this point, they should have done more investigating to corroborate this information. They had Spruill’s name as the occupant of Apartment 6F, and could have done some research into who she was. They did not.

They could have done surveillance, but later explained that the building was just too busy to watch the apartment without raising suspicion. The next step, then, was to obtain the warrant.

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Episode Five: What Fourth Amendment? 

Getting a warrant to forcibly enter a private residence should be a difficult process. Getting a warrant to break in without first knocking and announcing should be even tougher. Judges are supposed to scrutinize these warrant applications to protect the Fourth Amendment rights of people suspected of crimes.

But as Joel Berger says, that process is too often just a rubber stamp.

Joel Berger: When the police go to get a warrant, they submit an affidavit to a judge. Usually they go before the judge, and the judge asks questions, quite often very perfunctory questions. Occasionally, the informant is brought before the judge, although not always. Sometimes the police just by hearsay say, “Oh, he’s a good informant. We’ve used him and he’s been helpful in the past.”

They don’t provide any proof of that, and they’re not asked for any proof of that. Sometimes in lawsuits I’ve been able to get discovery about the actual reliability — or supposed reliability — of the informant. And often the discovery will show that he’s wrong like half the time, a third of the time.

Radley Balko: In this case, the informant claimed that the suspect, Boswell, who lived upstairs, dealt drugs out of Spruill’s apartment.

Here’s Spruill’s niece, Cynthia Howell again.

Cynthia Howell: They just went on a word of a drug addict informant. And the informant just said it’s that apartment.

Radley Balko: This was the police’s second mistake: bad information. But as attorney Christian Covington points out, it’s also one that should have been easy to correct.

Christian Covington: They like to make the issues seem that it was all due to this confidential informant given the wrong information, but that’s not the issue. The issue was that they’re supposed to substantiate the information and investigate the information, and they didn’t do anything. They just got the warrant and went in there and knocked down the door.

Radley Balko: If police had done basic surveillance of the apartment, or just asked around, they would have realized the apartment they were about to raid was the home of a church-going 57-year-old woman who had worked for the city for decades.

Here’s Police Commissioner Ray Kelly testifying before the city’s Committee on Public Safety about a month after the raid.

Raymond Kelly: Even after getting the warrant, there should have been a lot more observation of the location, see what trafficking was going on.

Radley Balko: If the cops had done that basic observation, they also would have noticed something important in the days before the raid. Their target, Melvin Boswell, hadn’t been coming or going from his own apartment. The reason why is almost comically unbelievable.

Here’s attorney Derek Sells.

Derek Sells: Had they done another simple check on Melvin Boswell, they had checked their own records — they would have learned that Melvin Boswell was in prison.

Radley Balko: Boswell had been arrested four days earlier by a different group of NYPD cops, at a different precinct.

After the break, the raid that killed Alberta Spruill.

[Break]

Radley Balko: The morning of the raid, a team of law enforcement officers gathered to discuss how it would all go down.

City Councilmember Phil Reed would later grill Police Commissioner Kelly on this critical moment, what happened next, and what should have happened.

Philip Reed: Who knew, who should have known that this Boswell country character had already been incarcerated? Was there anybody at this tactical meeting that had that information and that wasn’t shared?

Raymond Kelly: Yes.

Philip Reed: Who was that?

Raymond Kelly: Precinct personnel knew that.

Philip Reed: So they were at the tactical meeting before they broke down the woman’s door. They knew that Boswell had already been arrested, and they didn’t tell anybody?

Raymond Kelly: They didn’t communicate that to the emergency service personnel, that’s correct.

Philip Reed: At the tactical meeting just moments before they went in?

Raymond Kelly: That’s correct.

Philip Reed: So they knew the person they were looking for was in jail, but they didn’t tell anybody.

Raymond Kelly: That’s right.

Radley Balko: In case you missed that exchange: Someone at the raid planning meeting knew that the targeted drug dealer was already in jail — but didn’t tell the rest of the team. And without this crucial information, the police just went full steam ahead.

That brings us to the second major public debate Spruill’s death sparked: the use of no-knock raids to serve drug warrants.

Derek Sells: Most searches are required to be done with what’s called a “knock and announce,” which means that armed with a legal search warrant, police go to a home, and they knock on the door, and they announce their purpose.

In order to get a no-knock warrant, the police and prosecutors are required to show the additional proof that not only was there probable cause, but also that the individual whose place that they wanted to search presented a danger.

Radley Balko: The no-knock raid pops up in several episodes of this podcast series, because it’s a staple of the war on drugs. It’s also a tidy encapsulation of how the drug war prioritizes arresting and convicting suspected drug dealers, over the rights and safety of the people police are supposed to be serving and people who are disproportionately low-income and Black or Latino.

Joel Berger: Supposedly the excuse is that, in the case of drugs, they can be easily disposed of. Which is kind of interesting because, if it’s such a small quantity of drugs that they could be easily flushed down the toilet, why do they really need to use 20 officers to begin with? If it’s a major drug house, the culprits are not going to be able to flush everything down the toilet. So that knocks out the need for no-knock except in the most extreme circumstances.

Radley Balko: No-knock raids are supposed to be rare. They’re supposed to be reserved for only the most dangerous offenders. But under questioning by City Councilmember Frank Vallone, Commissioner Kelly conceded that no-knocks were the norm — much as they were in the rest of the country

Raymond Kelly: This is the total up to April 30. For 2001 through 2003, the total number of warrants are 12,950 warrants.

Frank Vallone: Out of those search warrants, how many were no-knock?

Raymond Kelly: I would say the vast majority are no-knock. Most of the warrants are aimed at narcotics. The vast majority of the warrants are targeted at seizing narcotics. And as a general rule, narcotics can be destroyed or disposed of — at least that’s our belief — if you knock on the door and give notice of your appearance, so they’re endorsed for what we call a no-knock entry.

Radley Balko: When the police raided Alberta Spruill’s apartment, they had problems prying open her door. They finally forced their way in with a battering ram. But they also feared that the time they had lost put them at risk. So they set off a flash grenade.

In case you don’t know what those sound like, here’s a police demo.

APD SWAT officer: You guys give me a countdown from three, and on one, I’ll throw it, OK?

Children: Yes.

APD SWAT officer: Everybody plug your ears. Ready? Go ahead.

Children: Three, two, one.

[Explosive sound]

Radley Balko: Councilmember Gifford Miller questioned Kelly about flash-bang grenades.

Gifford Miller: What are the factors that causes the Department to decide to use them at all, and in what circumstances? And what are the factors that cause people to want to use them in particular circumstances?

Raymond Kelly: The purpose of it is to shock someone. There is usually a determination made that there are weapons at the scene, that there’s a possibility of those weapons used against police officers. So it’s a loud noise, it’s a flash. It certainly is shocking in nature, and the belief is that it would stop someone from using a weapon — or act as a diversion.

Let’s say you wanted someone to go to another location in the house. You might do that in the back of a house and then hit the front door, something like that, in a coordinated fashion. But there has been an increased use, and I think there was a belief on the part of officers that it protects them.

Gifford Miller: Have you done any analysis of that? Is there an analysis of the use of these devices that suggests that in these kinds of raids, there are less shootings or less injuries on the part of officers, or less injuries on the part of people who are raiding? Or have you done any kind of analysis that suggest their actual effectiveness?

Raymond Kelly: We haven’t …

Radley Balko: In 2008, the federal government criminally indicted a Georgia-based flash-bang grenade manufacturer. The suit alleged that the company’s grenades were prematurely detonating. One such incident had badly injured several FBI agents, who all experienced hearing loss. That indictment was eventually dropped. But even when they work correctly, police routinely blindly toss these devices into private homes.

By design, flash-bang grenades instill terror and shock in suspects who have often yet to even be charged with a crime. But they can also do quite a bit more damage than that. And of course, the grenade itself can’t distinguish suspects from innocent bystanders.

These devices have caused dozens of injuries and several deaths over the years. During a 2014 raid in Georgia, police threw a flash-bang that blew a hole in the chest of a 2-year-old boy. And of course, there are demographic patterns as to who gets targeted most.

Joel Berger: It’s almost always poor people, people of color, frequently people of the housing projects.

Radley Balko: Today, not a single state or Washington, D.C., track no-knock raids. The most recent data available comes from a 2014 ACLU survey of police departments around the country. That survey found that 42 percent of suspects targeted by no-knock raids were Black. Black people make up about 14 percent of the U.S. population.

Joel Berger: One of the excuses, even though it isn’t always articulated, is “We want to scare these people into making sure they don’t have anything more to do with the guy we’re looking for.” So it is very much a form of social control — just as stop-and-frisk was a form of social control. Saying, “OK, maybe you don’t have guns on you, but if you’re friends with anybody in a gang, you better keep away from them.”

They are designed to strike fear into the hearts of low-income people in neighborhoods where there’s a lot of drug traffic or guns. And as a result, they frequently wind up harming police community relations much more than they contribute to any solving of crimes.

Radley Balko: Spruill’s fate was determined by the race and profile of the people around her, and by police conceptions of who is and isn’t a criminal.

Derek Sells: When the police went into Ms. Spruill’s apartment, what they believed was that they were going to confront an African American, stereotypical, drug-dealing gunslinging male, and that’s what they went prepared to do. And so when Ms. Spruill happened to be there, she was treated as if she was part of his crew. And she was thrown to the ground, she was violently handcuffed even before they could figure out what really was going on. And so yes, even though the ultimate victim in this case was a 57-year-old African American woman, the target was a stereotypical individual who the police believed was a Black male gunslinging drug dealer.

Radley Balko: Police claimed they found Spruill on her bedroom floor.

Even when no one is physically injured, the trauma from a violent police raid can do lasting psychological damage.

Joel Berger: All of the victims almost all suffer from some form of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. They tell me every time they hear, you know, a little bit of noise outside their door, they’re afraid the cops are coming back. It could just be a neighbor throwing out the garbage, but they don’t know that. They are extremely frightened. They’re frightened every time they hear sirens. Some of them say they’re frightened every time they see a police officer on the street.

Radley Balko: In Black, brown, and low-income neighborhoods across the United States, this fear of police, this alienation, has been set in place after decades of overzealous, violent actions by law enforcement. About a decade before Spruill’s death, for example, police in Boston mistakenly raided the home of the Rev. Accelyne Williams, also based on a bad tip from an informant. Like Spruill, the trauma of that raid sent Williams into cardiac arrest, which proved fatal. His death also sparked protests and demands for reform. New York City in 2003 was no different.

C. Virginia Fields: The community response in learning about Ms. Spruill’s death was again: How many more times do we have to go through this and no changes that are occurring?

Radley Balko: After Spruill’s death, both the city and community groups held public meetings about the police department’s tactics.

C. Virginia Fields: We had people, I think, from almost probably every borough, maybe not Staten Island, who came and talked about experiences they either had had or knew about this no-knock policy.

Mr. Rodrigues: About 3 o’clock in the morning, six cops break my door. I was sleeping when I heard the noise. They hit the door three times, and the door fell down. They grabbed me up and from my shirt, one gong on my head, one gong on my chest.

Bonnie Paley: I was almost killed by the New York City Police. The public housing precinct, [Police Service] number 8 in Throggs Neck, came after me at 9:30 in the morning. Twenty-five cops targeted me and targeted my then-19-year-old daughter.

Mary Barti: They stormed into the house, forced us to lay on the floor, hands out. My husband, who’s sitting here, my daughter and her little daughter, 2 years old, on the floor in the living room.

Radley Balko: These stories shocked a lot of people. But for the people who lived in these communities and who had been paying attention, they weren’t surprising. The local media had been reporting on similar botched raids for more than a decade. Journalists had been covering the failure of judges to properly scrutinize search warrants. They had covered the use of unreliable informants, and the resulting terror inflicted on innocent people and their families.

Members of the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, or CCRB, had expressed frustration that they lacked the authority to do much about any of this. The CCRB investigates complaints that New Yorkers file against police officers, and while it can recommend discipline when it finds wrongdoing, the final decision rests with the NYPD commissioner.

Here’s William Aquino, a CCRB investigator from 1998 to 2002.

William Aquino: In multiple cases, other investigators and I were ordered to exonerate officers who had not done sufficient investigation and went into innocent people’s homes.

Radley Balko: Narcotics search warrants surged in New York City during the 1990s. In 1994, NYPD executed about 1,400 warrants. That figure doubled by 1997. The majority of these were for no-knock raids. And civilian complaints about searches on the wrong apartment or wrong address climbed alongside this rise in raids.

In June of 2003, Commissioner Kelly said out of 2,000 search warrants executed that year, just five had been on the wrong address. But Kelly couldn’t say for sure, because the NYPD just didn’t track how often it got the wrong address. This was common enough, however, that the agency had made maintenance workers available around the clock to fix the doors that police had mistakenly torn down.

The most chilling warning came from Norman Siegel, an attorney and former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who had filed a lawsuit on behalf of people had been wrongly raided. “We must do a better job of no-knock search warrants,” he said in a press conference. “Otherwise, someone might wind up dead as a result of how we implement this procedure.”

That was less than a year before the raid on Alberta Spruill.

Spruill’s death even inspired some criticism of the NYPD from members of its own force. Here’s a clip from a Democracy Now! interview with a young Black officer who would later go into politics.

[Democracy Now! theme music]

Amy Goodman: … A court had granted the police a no-knock warrant. It turns out the police raided the wrong apartment. We’re joined right now by Lt. Eric Adams. He’s founder and president of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. Welcome to Democracy Now!

Eric Adams: Thank you very much for having me this morning.

Amy Goodman: There’s been a lot of activity this weekend after what happened on Friday. Can you describe what you know at this point?

Eric Adams: Well, all things are still currently under investigation, and the police department has been very reluctant in turning over detail of, findings of what happened. What we do know is that it appears as though the wrong apartment was targeted.

Radley Balko: Almost 20 years later, former Lt. Eric Adams would become mayor of New York City. At the time, Spruill’s death provided a platform for his advocacy group and raised his public profile.

Joel Berger: A young Eric Adams trying to make a name for himself as head of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement, being highly critical of the police department’s behavior — which now goes on today, continuously under his mayoralty.

Radley Balko: Here’s Adams speaking to the City Council’s Committee on Public Safety.

Eric Adams: If I could just quickly go through why this Spruill incident should not be identified as an isolated issue. Back in March 2002, the Queens Narcotics Unit entered a home of a Ms. Flornell out in Rockaway. The police commissioner responded to Rockaway, he met with the NAACP, he had a meeting with them, and he stated it was a tragedy. He would do all he can to ensure it does not happen again; he will have a comprehensive report. No report was done. The tragedies continue.

October 15 of that same year. Mr. Rogers and his wife, a retired police officer and retired captain, same thing. Police entered their homes. Mr. Rogers had his gun drawn. He was about to get into a fire-fight with the police officers until he saw they were cops. He hid his gun. He was handcuffed. His wife had heart trouble; she had to go to the hospital for several days. He spoke with the police commissioner, the police commissioner stated it was a tragedy, he was going to do all he could so that it doesn’t happen again, and a report would be done. Nothing was done.

Radley Balko: Spruill’s death did inspire some reforms, at least in the short term. Kelly ordered that flash grenades could only be used with a sign-off from a high-ranking NYPD official. The city required more corroboration of tips from informants, better documentation of their reliability, and better communication between precincts.

There were also promises for better training, and to create a database to track warrants, how they were served, and what the police found. And Berger says that, at least for a time, the procedures around when and how to conduct searches and raids did actually start to shift.

Joel Berger: For a few years, they were a little more careful because of all the negative publicity surrounding Spruill. I mean, of course, the percussion device was part of what scared her to death, and they haven’t used that very much since.

Radley Balko: Consequently, the number of overall raids dropped, from more than 5,000 warrants for drugs and guns per year to around 3,500. But even this lower figure was still 150 percent higher than just a decade earlier. It also didn’t take long for the bad habits to return.

Joel Berger: Everything else that they promised to do — checking out who really lives there, checking out whether the informant is reliable, checking out whether there’s been any information other than from the informant that would verify what the informant is saying — almost all of that has gone completely by the wayside over the past 20 years to the point where I have had numerous cases where totally innocent people had their apartments raided on no-knock warrants, and the police didn’t find anything at all.

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And nonetheless they defended that, “Oh, well, you know, we had information,” and the city’s law department fights the cases tooth and nail, and in the end, you usually have to settle for less than it’s worth, and worse yet, the cops are never punished.

Radley Balko: Around the country, accountability is always the major sticking point in efforts to rein in police misconduct. New York City after Spruill was no exception. Members of the Civilian Complaint Review Board had tried for years to warn city officials about the out-of-control drug raids.

William Aquino: Unfortunately, Alberta Spruill is just the latest victim of a pattern of recklessness with search warrants and bench warrants that the NYPD and the Civilian Complaint Review Board have known about and tacitly encouraged for years.

Radley Balko: Former review board investigator William Aquino told the committee on public safety that when he had discovered wrongdoing, he was often pressured or forced to alter his official findings.

William Aquino: For example, a Brooklyn case where narcotics informant’s only description of the premises was that it was the door to the right of the stairs. When I went there I found two doors on the right, yet the officer simply guessed and sent ESU in with a grenade anyway. In circumstances remarkably similar to Ms. Spruill’s case, an older woman was handcuffed and kicked to the ground.

In another example, a Bronx case, in which a sergeant misrepresented a description of the house to a judge and CCRB, and misled his own supervisor into thinking that he had done the standard checks of utilities records. After I refused to comply with my manager’s demand that I change my report and exonerate the officer, the CCRB panel exonerated the search.

Radley Balko: Aquino, who served under mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, described how officers wouldn’t do the legwork to verify the addresses of warrant requests, and then would dodge accountability after the fact.

William Aquino: Officers and their union lawyers invariably insist that everything is legal once a cop is holding a warrant, as if questionable information magically becomes gospel once you sell a too-trusting judge on it. To them, once a judge signs off or issues a bench warrant, the police are absolved of all responsibility, even if they know that their information is actually thinner than the paper the warrant is printed on. End of story.

Radley Balko: In other words, even if the police lied to get a warrant, once that warrant was signed by a judge, it became legal. This made holding the police, or individual officers, accountable virtually impossible. Ultimately, efforts to empower the board to scrutinize NYPD narcotics policy, and the investigations that led to these warrants proved futile.

Joel Berger: There have been deaths, and there’re gonna be more deaths.

Radley Balko: Berger continues to represent victims of police abuse but he says that even when he wins on paper, it’s just part of an endless cycle: Police terrorize innocent people, the city pays out a settlement, and then nothing changes. And then it all happens again.

Joel Berger: There are no consequences for the police officers who do these things. I mean, I bring lawsuits. I get compensation for the victims. Not only are the lawsuits ineffectual, but the city deliberately slows them down and fights tooth and nail against even getting some compensation for people.

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NYPD Cops Sued for Misconduct Cost City Millions in Settlements — Then Get Promotions

The city spends millions of dollars a year settling these cases or paying out judgments. This all comes out of the taxpayer’s money, and nothing is done to the officers. Or at most, even in the most extreme cases, all that’s likely to happen is the officer gets a slap on the wrist. Maybe 10 days’ vacation time is taken away from him, sometimes not even that.

So the lawsuits are unfortunately ineffective in bringing about genuine change. That is one of the most frustrating things in what I’ve been doing for a living, having to explain that to people. I have had cases where when I hand over the settlement check to the client; the client breaks down in tears saying it’s not enough. It’s just not good enough. It’ll never really be enough.

Radley Balko: The city of New York eventually paid Alberta Spruill’s family $1.6 million. But the raids continued.

Cynthia Howell: You know, they’ll hand out a settlement, a settlement, a settlement. That doesn’t settle the fact that if you don’t change your policing policies, those settlements don’t mean nothing.

Radley Balko: Spruill’s niece, Cynthia Howell, often mentioned that hers was the rare family to receive an apology from the mayor. Mayor Michael Bloomberg also named a daily bus run after Spruill. It’s the 6:52 a.m. bus on the M1 line. It’s the bus Spruill was preparing to take to her city job on the morning she was killed, as she had every day for 29 years. But that symbolic gesture hardly seems sufficient.

Joel Berger: The NYPD is an incredibly powerful agency, and it exercises its power vociferously. It gives into a more, even more vociferous union, which gets altogether too much attention. City Hall, even under better mayors than the one we have now, has been afraid to go up against the NYPD. Even the City Council has been reluctant to really clamp down. The state legislature has been reluctant to clamp down and only did so a little bit in the wake of George Floyd, only to the extent of making police disciplinary records more accessible.

The city comptroller’s office continues to settle cases all the time without requiring that anything be done to the police officer. The DAs keep records on officers who they believe are not credible, but does not prosecute them for lying in specific cases. There are so many different agencies that all contribute to this.

C. Virginia Fields: I believe in community police relationships. I am not one to talk about defunding the police. To me, that’s not the answer, but I do know that I expect and demand police to come into communities and be respectful, to not mistreat people.

Radley Balko: C. Virginia Fields isn’t in government anymore. She says the failure of Spruill’s death to bring real change left her discouraged about the possibility of fixing the system.

C. Virginia Fields: Unfortunately, we don’t even hear about change, or we don’t talk about change, until an incident comes up. Then we all get very busy, we’ve got to do something, and that lasts for a short period of time. There is not the intentional, purposeful, continuation of working on these issues to follow them through at the level, the top, where we need to be making the changes.

Radley Balko: In 2003, Alberta Spruill joined the long and ever-growing list of innocent people killed in drug raids. Each of those deaths added new voices to the movement for reform.

In the years after her aunt’s death, Cynthia Howell helped found a group called Families United 4 Justice, along with the uncle of Oscar Grant — the man shot and killed by a police officer while lying face-down in an Oakland subway station.

Cynthia Howell: What we are caring about is accountability. We are caring about justice. And none of these families, not even my own, has received the justice.

[“Say Her Name” song by Janelle Monae plays]

Alberta Spruill, say her name!
Alberta Spruill, say her name!
Alberta Spruill, say her name!

Cynthia Howell: A fight ain’t a fight unless you fight, and we have no choice but to fight. We have been thrust into this by circumstances.

Radley Balko: Next time on Collateral Damage.

Bills Aylesworth: They cooked up a scheme, a story, that he was growing marijuana on the property.

Richard Dewitt: Captain Dewitt here. I’m on a search warrant with the Hidden Hills crew on this marijuana eradication thing.

Bills Aylesworth: And raided his house.

Dan Alban: They were just looking for an excuse to invade his ranch, search everything, and find some basis for the seizure.

Radley Balko: Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept.

It was reported and written by me, Radley Balko.

Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer, who also served as producer and editor.

Laura Flynn is our showrunner.

Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief.

The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal.

We had editing support from Maryam Saleh.

Truc Nguyen mixed our show.

Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow.

Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan.

Art direction by Fei Liu.

Illustrations by Tara Anand.

Copy editing by Nara Shin.

Social and video media by Chelsey B. Coombs.

Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance.

Thank you to the WNYC archive for audio from Alberta Spruill’s funeral service and from the Harlem Interfaith Group on Police Brutality. We also want to thank the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States for audio from the“Hearing on the case of Alberta Spruill,” and the “Let Them Talk” show for excerpts from their interview of Cynthia Howell.

This series was made possible by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund.

If you want to send us a message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com

To continue to follow my work and reporting, check out my newsletter, The Watch, at radleybalko.substack.com.

Thank you for listening.

The post Episode Seven: Dirty Information appeared first on The Intercept.

Veronica and Charity Bowers, a young Christian missionary and her daughter, are killed when the Peruvian Air Force shoots down a small passenger plane in 2001. The plane had been mistaken for a drug smuggling plane and was shot down as part of a joint anti-drug agreement between the CIA and the Colombian and Peruvian governments.

President Donald Trump has made the Bowers’s deaths newly and urgently relevant since he began ordering the U.S. military to strike down alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean in September 2025. By early November, the U.S. had launched a total of 17 strikes, killing at least 70 people, and those figures seem to grow almost by the day. The attacks are illegal under both U.S. and international law. The administration also provided no documentation of the alleged drug trafficking.

The attack on the Bowers family pierced the veil that obscures drug war foreign policy because of their nationality, skin color, and relatability. More than 20 years ago, House Oversight Committee hearing members Jan Schakowsky and Elijah Cummings demanded accountability after U.S. drug interdiction forces killed the Bowers. They demanded to know how such a mistake could happen, and how we could prevent the loss of innocent life going forward.

“The kind of action we saw in Peru … amounts to an extrajudicial killing,” said Schakowsky at the time. Cummings added, “The Peruvian shootdown policy would never be permitted as a domestic United States policy precisely because it goes against one of our most sacred, due process principles — namely, that all persons are presumed innocent until proven guilty.”

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Now, a new administration openly celebrates summary execution of alleged drug smugglers without a hint of due process, and is now threatening to topple another government to prevent the U.S. from sating its appetite for illicit drugs.

The story of Veronica and Charity Bowers is a stark reminder of how aggressive drug policy is wasteful and futile, how we never seem to learn from past failures, and how the generations-long effort to stop people from getting high also — and necessarily — treats human lives as expendable.

Transcript

Radley Balko: It’s April 20, 2001. In the skies above the Peruvian Amazon, a small floatplane flies over the rainforest, along the river. There are five people aboard. They don’t know it, but their plane is being tracked. A U.S.-based surveillance plane — contracting with the CIA — is closely following.

U.S. Pilot 1: We’re trying to remain covert at this point, but what we do know is it’s a high-wing single-engine floatplane that we picked up just along the border between Peru and Brazil.

Radley Balko: Working with the CIA contractors, a plane from the Peruvian Air Force begins to pursue the mystery plane. It doesn’t appear to have an authorized flight plan, and it isn’t responding to their radio messages. The CIA and Peruvian government suspect that it could be trafficking illicit drugs.

In one telling exchange, the piloting crew discuss whether they should try to identify the plane. But the U.S. officer directs them to stay covert. They’re concerned that the plane might get away.

U.S. Pilot 1: You know, we can go up and attempt the tail number, but the problem with that, if he is dirty and he detects us, he makes a right turn immediately and we can’t chase him.

U.S. Pilot 2: See, I don’t know if this is bandido or if it’s amigo, OK?

Peruvian Air Force pilot: OK.

U.S. Pilot 2 (in Spanish): I don’t know.

Radley Balko: That’s one of the CIA contractors, speaking really poor Spanish, telling the Peruvian Air Force pilot that he’s not sure if the plane in question is a “bandito” or “amigo” — a bandit or a friend.

The plane was then given multiple warnings to land.

Peruvian Air Force pilot (in Spanish): If you do not comply, we will proceed to take you down.

U.S. Pilot 2: This guy doesn’t, this guy doesn’t fit the profile.

U.S. Pilot 1: OK, I understand this is not our call, but this guy is at 4,500 feet. He is not taking any evasive action. I recommend we follow him. I do not recommend “Phase 3” at this time.

Radley Balko: “Phase 3” is code for the most drastic action possible: shooting the plane down from the sky. Under an agreement between the United States and the governments of Peru and other Latin American countries, any planes suspected of running drugs in the region could be plucked from the clouds.

That effectively put U.S. officials from the CIA or Drug Enforcement Agency — along with officials in the Peruvian government — in the role of judge, jury, and executioner.

Peruvian Air Force pilot: It’s three phase, authorized, OK?

U.S. Pilot 2: OK. But you sure it’s bandito? Are you sure?

Peruvian Air Force pilot: Yes.

U.S. Pilot 2: It’s bad? OK.

Peruvian Air Force pilot: OK.

U.S. Pilot 2: If you sure.

Peruvian dispatch: Tucan, Tucan, autorizado fase 3.

U.S. Pilot 1: I think we’re making a mistake, but—

U.S. Pilot 2: I agree with you.

Radley Balko: You can hear the hesitancy in their voices, in their words. And there’s good reason to be unsure. It turns out that in addition to the pilot, the plane is carrying a family of American missionaries: Jim and Veronica Bowers and their two children, 6-year-old Cody and 7-month-old Charity.

The pilot had actually been in touch with a control tower down below in the town of Iquitos but on a different radio frequency. But by the time the CIA and Peruvian Air Force realize their mistake, it’s too late.

U.S. Pilot 2: [unintelligible]

Peruvian Air Force pilot: Sí.

U.S. Pilot 2: He’s going to Santa Clara now.

Peruvian dispatch: Approximente 30 mille de Iquitos.

U.S. Pilot 2: The plane is talking to Iquitos tower.

Bowers’s Pilot (in Spanish): They’re killing us! They’re killing us!

U.S. Pilot 1: Tell them to terminate.

U.S. Pilot 2: Don’t shoot!

U.S. Pilot 1: Tell them to terminate. No más!

Radio chatter: Roger. No más, no más! Tucano, no más!

Radley Balko: As gunfire strikes the floatplane, the pilot screams, “They’re killing us. They’re killing us.” The plane then drops from the sky, leaving a streak of smoke as it plummets on to the Amazon river. The whole thing is caught on video by the CIA observers.

U.S. Pilot 1: There’s a plane right there. Where’s the plane?

U.S. Pilot 3: See them? And there’s the people getting them.

U.S. Pilot 2: Yeah, but I don’t see the plane. …

U.S. Pilot 3: It’s upside down. See, the float’s upside down and the people getting them? Right there.

U.S. Pilot 2: Yeah. Yeah. OK.

U.S. Pilot 3: There’s a bunch of boats down there.

U.S. Pilot 1: Yeah, I only see one. Oh, over here by the—

U.S. Pilot 2: You got a good, good film of that?

U.S. Pilot 1: Uh-huh.

U.S. Pilot 2: OK. Let’s go.

Radley Balko: Miraculously, Jim Bowers and his son Cody survive the crash, as does the pilot, despite being shot in the leg. But Veronica Bowers and 7-month old Charity are killed by gunfire before the plane goes down. The incident quickly makes international news.

George W. Bush: The incident that took place in Peru is a terrible tragedy. And our hearts go out to the families who have been affected.

Radley Balko: But as is often the case with the drug war’s collateral damage, no one would be held accountable.

Brian Ross (ABC Nightline): In Congress today, the CIA was accused by a top Republican of running a nine-year-long effort to stonewall and mislead Congress, failing to reveal how and why all of the program’s strict rules were ignored by the CIA.

Pete Hoekstra (on ABC): If the rules as outlined had been followed, the Bowers plane would not — would not — have been shot down.

Garnett Luttig (on ABC): I want to know the truth. I want to know why. I wonder why my baby’s gone.

Radley Balko: The CIA had been working with the governments of Peru and Colombia to shoot down planes they suspected of carrying drugs for years. We don’t know how many times it happened or how many of the victims were innocent, because the people in almost all of those planes weren’t American citizens. So there was no media outrage. No congressional hearings. No demands for transparency from powerful people.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: We have spent billions of taxpayer dollars, employed personnel from numerous agencies around the world, and the drugs continue to flow into the United States. Are the Bowers acceptable collateral damage in this war on drugs?

Ian Vásquez: The drug war creates all sorts of innocent victims. People who may have absolutely nothing to do with the drug war, which of course was the case with the shootdown of the airplane in Peru. That was a mistake, but it was directly related to bad policy that Peru was following with the help of the United States.

Radley Balko: As we were producing this episode, President Donald Trump’s administration made the Bowers’s deaths newly and urgently relevant.

In early September 2025, Trump announced that he’d ordered the military to strike a small boat in the Caribbean that he claimed was being used by drug traffickers. Eleven people, all believed to be Venezuelan, were killed.

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The attack was illegal under both U.S. and international law. The administration also provided no documentation of the alleged drug trafficking. The U.S. military then expanded its attacks to include the eastern Pacific Ocean. By early November, the U.S. had launched a total of 17 strikes, killing at least 70 people, and those figures seem to grow almost by the day.

The attack on the Bowers family pierced the veil that obscures drug war foreign policy because of their nationality, their skin color, and their relatability. Even Republicans criticized how the George W. Bush administration reacted.

But we now face a brazen new administration that has carried out multiple extrajudicial executions in international waters — one that even jokes about how some of those they’ve killed may actually be innocent.

Donald Trump: I don’t know about the fishing industry. If you want to go fishing, a lot of people aren’t deciding to even go fishing.

JD Vance: [Crowd laughter] I would stop, too. Hell, I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world. [laughter]

Radley Balko: It’s also an administration now openly preparing to invade Venezuela under the pretext of fighting a drug war.

The story of Veronica and Charity Bowers is a stark reminder of how aggressive drug policy is wasteful and futile, how we never seem to learn from past failures, and how the generations-long effort to stop people from getting high also — and necessarily — treats human lives as expendable.

From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage.

I’m Radley Balko. I’m an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years.

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeating drug addiction, but the “war” part quickly became all too literal.

When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and 1990s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric, and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections.

All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause. But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage.

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is Episode 6, “Airborne Imperialism: The Tragic Deaths of Veronica and Charity Bowers.”

It could be difficult to remember how the world worked, and how it felt, back before the attacks of September 11, 2001. It was easier to fly then. People felt safer. Life was less complicated. Former congressman Pete Hoekstra certainly thought so.

Pete Hoekstra: So it’s 2001, everything in America is great. I got on the [House] Intelligence Committee in January of 2001.

Radley Balko: Hoekstra, a Republican, was serving his fifth term in Congress, representing Michigan’s 2nd District.

Pete Hoekstra: Someone from West Michigan called me and said, “Hey, a couple of your constituents have died in Peru. They were shot down. What can you find out about this?” And so that’s when you go to the Intelligence Committee and say, “All right, will you help me take a look at the circumstances of this tragic event? Two of my constituents are killed. It appears that the CIA may have been involved in this. And I just want to get as much information as I can.”

Radley Balko: During his time in Congress, Hoekstra hadn’t focused much on either the drug war or on Latin America. But now two of his constituents were dead because of an incomprehensible mistake. So he had some catching up to do.

Pete Hoekstra: And so I still remember George Tenet coming — who at that time is the director of the CIA — and comes in to brief the Intelligence Committee. And it was a fascinating hearing. It’s when we actually, in Congress, on the Intelligence Committee, we did things in a bipartisan way. And so Tenet comes in, and he explains to us exactly what happens. And the director says, “There’s a protocol in place. And every step in the protocol was followed.” So basically justifying the shootdown of the Bowers plane.

Radley Balko: But then one of Hokestra’s colleagues spoke up.

Pete Hoekstra: It was one of the Democrats, says, “Mr. Director, do you have an audio or a video capturing the events of that day, of that flight, of that interdiction?” And he kind of says no, there’s no recording. He looks around. There’s a little commotion in the wall by someone sitting against the wall. And Tenet looks around, and the guy whispers something to the director, and the director says, “Excuse me, I am mistaken. There are recordings of exactly what happened at that event.”

Radley Balko: It seems unlikely that the CIA wouldn’t have known that there was video of the incident. Perhaps Tenet wanted to keep the damning footage away from Congress and the public. Or perhaps someone further down at the CIA wanted that, and so they never told Tenet that it existed. Hoekstra isn’t sure. But that recording prevented the incident from being swept under the rug. It made the deaths of Veronica and Charity Bowers an explosive international story.

Pete Hoekstra: If my Democratic colleague had not asked the question — “Is there a video or an audio tape of what happened before that shootdown?” — if he had not asked that question, that first hearing might have been the end of it.

Radley Balko: Instead, it was just the beginning.

Ray Suarez (PBS NewsHour): Peru and the United States offered differing views today on the downing of a missionary plane.

Newscaster (ABC): According to senior administration officials, the Citation V surveillance plane used in the operation is owned by the Pentagon. Its crew was hired by the CIA from a private contractor.

Richard Boucher (State Department spokesperson): The father, Jim Bowers, the son, Cory Bowers, and the pilot, Kevin Donaldson, returned to the United States on Sunday. We think that the remains of the mother, Veronica Bowers, and the daughter, Charity, can be brought back to the United States today, and we’re assisting with that as well.

[Funeral organ music]

Radley Balko: The memorial service for Charity Bowers and her mom Veronica, known as Roni by those closer to her, was broadcast by a Grand Rapids, Michigan, TV station.

Jim Kramer (Bowers’ friend): Shall we pray? Dear Heavenly Father, we have come here today to honor your servant — your faithful servant — Roni Bowers, and her baby girl, Charity. We thank you, dear God, for the confidence that we have that they are with you right now in Heaven.

Radley Balko: Here’s Jim Bowers speaking at his wife and daughter’s memorial.

Jim Bowers: We were shot down right over a town of witnesses, which helped at the very beginning. And some of them were very good friends of mine. Incredibly, the town had a radio in which we were able to call for help. That’s very unusual. And the radio worked.

Radley Balko: The incident was difficult for some in the community to comprehend. As missionaries, the Bowers were deeply religious people. And Hoekstra, a Republican, was generally supportive of the drug war, as were most of the people in his conservative district.

That’s also true of Jim Bowers himself, who was torn about doing an interview with us, and ultimately declined. In an unrecorded call, Bowers emphasized to me that while he thinks the drug war has clearly gone too far in some ways, he’s opposed to legalizing or decriminalizing drugs, including marijuana. But Bowers does support ending the CIA operation that killed his wife and daughter, known as the “Air Bridge Denial Program.”

Here’s President George W. Bush describing it, as questions raged about the tragedy in Peru.

George W Bush: Our government is involved with helping — and a variety of agencies are involved — with helping our friends in South America identify airplanes that might be carrying illegal drugs. These operations have been going on for quite a while. We’ve suspended such flights until we get to the bottom of the situation to fully understand all the facts.

Radley Balko: The U.S. government restarted the operation just two years later in Colombia, but shut it down in Peru. They made minor protocol tweaks, adding supervisors to enforce rules, setting Spanish language fluency standards, and creating a dedicated communication channel. But protocols weren’t really being followed in the first place. And what’s more, Air Bridge Denial was just one part of a much broader, much more destructive U.S. policy in Latin America.

PBS NewsHour: The Latin America drug connection is where our major attention goes tonight. The State Department issued a major report on the subject today as part of a process aimed at denying U.S. aid to countries that fail to act against drug trafficking. It’s a story of politics and murder, corruption, and revolution — a story that grows more sensational with most passing recent days.

Radley Balko: Coca is a crop that’s been cultivated in Latin America for centuries. It has medicinal, nutritional, and religious uses. But of course coca is also used to make cocaine. It was a crop that had not only been a part of Andean culture dating back to pre-Colombian times, but due to Western appetites, it had become extremely lucrative for farmers in an impoverished part of the world.

And by the mid-1980s, the United States was facing twin epidemics fueled by the rise of the crack form of the drug — both in overdose deaths and in black-market violence as distributors fought over turf. So the U.S. government provided foreign aid, military training, and weapons to the Peruvian authorities to halt the cultivation of coca.

Ian Vásquez: In the 1990s in Peru, there was a concerted effort to go against the production of drugs. And what that led to, at that time Peru was the world’s largest producer of coca.

Radley Balko: That’s Ian Vásquez, vice president for international studies at the Cato Institute.

Ian Vásquez: And what that led to was, it just pushed coca production to other countries, namely to Colombia. Colombia then became the world’s largest producer of coca.

Radley Balko: This is sometimes called the “balloon effect.” When there’s enough demand for an illicit drug, someone will figure out a way to supply it. So when the U.S. has helped precipitate a crackdown on coca, heroin, or meth production in one country or region, the production just ramps up somewhere else.

Peru and Colombia are neighbors; they share the same ecosystem that’s ideal for growing the coca plant. So when the U.S. squeezed the balloon in Peru, coca production simply moved next door.

Then the U.S. government squeezed the balloon again. In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the bill funding Plan Colombia, a sweeping anti-drug operation in Latin America.

Ian Vásquez: Plan Colombia spent about $12 billion supported by the United States in fighting the drug war and trying to pacify the country. The United States did not accomplish its primary goal there, but it did spend a lot of money. It did try to repeat that kind of policy in other places with the same kinds of unfortunate results.

Radley Balko: Plan Colombia had two primary goals. The first was to end the armed conflict between the Colombian government and the narcotics-funded guerrilla group known as FARC. The second goal was to crack down on coca growing and the production of cocaine. The U.S. planned do this by giving money, weapons, and strategic assistance to the Colombian government.

Ian Vásquez: When Peru started to crack down, this led to coca production in Colombia. But it didn’t take that many more years until the crackdown in Colombia to lead to an increase in coca production in Peru.

Radley Balko: That back and forth continues to this day, with coca production now spilling into Ecuador as well.

Ian Vásquez: And that’s true with almost every aspect of the drug war. Crop substitution, drug interdiction, eradication. You can see temporary successes — if you want to call it that in the drug war — where you see production in one region go down, but it ends up popping up in another region.

Radley Balko: And so despite decades of international drug suppression efforts in individual countries, the overall supply and consumption of cocaine has remained relatively stable. In real dollars, the price per gram of the drug hasn’t changed much since the early 1990s. And to the extent that the cost does fluctuate, it’s driven far more by demand — which drugs come in and out of vogue — than it is by supply.

France24: The first ever global report on the cocaine industry paints a picture of unprecedented growth.

CGTN America: The growth of coca, the leaf used to make the illicit drug, has reached highs not seen in decades.

BBC: Now the United Nations says Colombia has broken its own record for cultivating coca, the main ingredient of cocaine.

Radley Balko: As of 2023, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia remain the largest cocaine producers on the planet. For 40 years, the United States has unleashed destructive anti-drug policies in Latin America. And for 40 years, those policies have done little to reduce the supply of cocaine.

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Crop eradication programs have poisoned farmland with pesticides, often making the soil unusable for years at a time. Those efforts have pushed coca and poppy cultivation into the rainforest, where the farming does yet more environmental damage. Here’s the publication Vice, reporting on that ecological disaster a few years ago.

Vice: It is not just the drug traffickers who are dumping toxic chemicals into the rainforest. Between 1994 and 2015, the Colombian and American militaries sprayed tons of the chemical pesticide glyphosate onto the Amazon in an attempt to destroy coca crops.

Kendra McSweeney: If the government comes along and eradicates your crop, they may be spraying glyphosate, a known carcinogen, on your family, your animals, and your neighbors. So it comes at great risk. But the needs of small farmers is often so great that they’re willing to take that risk for the economic return.

Radley Balko: These fumigation programs use highly concentrated herbicides, which have destroyed other crops, and can drift far afield from their intended targets. Much of this eradication work has been done by private contractors who operate in a legal netherworld, unaccountable to either the U.S. government or the government of the country in which they’re operating.

At the same time, every squish of the balloon disrupts the black markets where turf and market share are established and controlled with violence. So each new disruption means more death and destruction. Vásquez says that due to U.S. wealth, influence, and military might, it has often been difficult for leaders of Latin American countries to say no to these programs.

Ian Vásquez: A lot of the countries that are receiving the United States so-called aid are countries with governments that want the money, that want their politicians to declare that they’re being tough on crime and drug trafficking. And unfortunately, it’s countries like Peru, like Bolivia, or Colombia, or Central American countries that have weak governments in the sense that the institutions are weak there — the rule of law, transparency, accountability.

Radley Balko: But some Latin American countries have been pushing back. In recent years, Bolivia has attempted to reduce U.S. influence by promoting legal coca cultivation. And in 2022, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro suspended fumigation efforts and other government-enforced eradication of coca. He argued that suppression programs had failed to curb cocaine demand, while having devastating consequences on poor farmers.

In early 2025, speaking at a cabinet meeting, Petro said:

President Gustavo Petro (in Spanish): Cocaine is not worse than whisky. And what hit the United States is fentanyl. It is killing them, and that’s not done in Colombia.

Radley Balko: But like Venezuela, Colombia now faces renewed tensions with the U.S. from the Trump administration. When one of the U.S. military strikes in international waters killed a Colombian man, Petro wrote on social media, “The United States has invaded our national territory, fired a missile to kill a humble fisherman.” Trump responded by calling Petro “an illegal drug leader” and threatened military strikes in that country too.

After the break, how Washington’s counter-narcotic policies in Latin America failed the Bowers family.

[Break]

Radley Balko: Ian Vásquez remembers hearing about the death of Roni and Charity Bowers in 2001. He wasn’t surprised.

Ian Vásquez: Peru in the early 2000s was a country that was transitioning to a more open, more prosperous economy. It still, though, had a lot of problems, like it does today, in terms of weak rule of law. So that when you set up a shootdown policy, you should fully expect that some tragedy is going to happen — and that’s exactly what happened.

Radley Balko: In the days and weeks after the Bowers’ plane went down, Rep. Hoekstra began trying to piece together what went wrong.

Pete Hoekstra: There was a protocol — a protocol that the CIA was supposed to follow — something like seven to nine steps of escalation: identify the plane, verify the tail numbers, reach out, try to establish contact with the plane. If you fail to reach the pilot, to potentially fly next to the missionary plane — kind of wiggle your wings, I guess, which could be interpreted as an international signal to follow the plane.

So there were like seven to nine steps that should have been put in place, should have been conducted before there was any type of activity, aggressive activity, that would result in the potential downing of the plane.

Radley Balko: Part of the confusion was due to the unclear chain of command leading up to the decision to shoot down the plane. The crews of these surveillance teams typically consisted of former military personnel and pilots recruited by the CIA, often working as private contractors. There would also be an officer from the Peruvian military. And in this case, the unarmed surveillance plane was property of the U.S. Air Force.

When the crew on the surveillance plane decided the Bowers’ plane looked suspicious, they alerted the Peruvian Air Force pilot, who was waiting on standby. The U.S. government later claimed that its contractors had no authority and were simply advisers to the Peruvian military. But listening back to recordings of the cockpit chatter, it’s not at all clear exactly who was in charge.

U.S. Pilot 1: OK, I understand this is not our call, but this guy is at 4,500 feet. He is not taking any evasive action. I recommend we follow him. I do not recommend “Phase 3” at this time.

Peruvian Air Force pilot: It’s three phase, authorised, OK?

U.S. Pilot 2: OK. But you sure it’s bandito? Are you sure?

Peruvian Air Force pilot: Yes.

U.S. Pilot 2: It’s bad? OK.

Peruvian Air Force pilot: OK.

U.S. Pilot 2: If you sure.

Radley Balko: Subsequent investigations only underscored just how opaque U.S. overseas drug operations could be. PBS’s Jim Lehrer questioned then-Secretary of State Colin Powell about the program.

Jim Lehrer (PBS NewsHour): Is it a CIA operation?

Colin Powell: A number of government agencies are involved in it. The CIA has the lead on it, and they will be taking all the specific questions on it. But don’t read anything nefarious into the words CIA.

Radley Balko: Powell then defended Operation Air Bridge.

Colin Powell: It was a good, solid program that has been well known. People have known about it. It is not something that is dark and secret. In fact, we have credited this program with helping to reduce drug trafficking coming out of Peru, so it’s a successful program that has had this tragedy now associated with it, and we’ve got to review the entire program.

Radley Balko: Less than two weeks after the Bowers’ plane went down, a House Oversight Committee held hearings on the incident that aired on C-SPAN.

Mark Souder: The Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources is now called to order.

Radley Balko: That’s Rep. Mark Souder, a Republican from Indiana and the chair of the subcommittee that held the hearing.

Mark Souder: Just a little over a week ago, a terrible tragedy occurred that broke the heart of every American when, through a preventable mistake, a missionary, whose life had been committed to serving others on behalf of God, was killed, along with her little girl.

Radley Balko: By 2001, the crack epidemic was finally on the wane, along with the violence that came with it. The U.S. had begun what would be a historic 25-year drop in crime. But those trends were not yet apparent. So for many, the urgency of eradicating illicit drugs was still as apparent as ever.

Souder himself was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of a restrictive, militaristic drug policy. That even he was bothered by the shootdown of the Bowers’ plane — that even staunch, drug war Republicans were demanding answers — that was a big deal.

Mark Souder: From a public policy standpoint, where is the United States government to head? What will the United States’ anti-drug efforts in South America be after the Peru incident?

Radley Balko: The Bush administration first tried to blame the Peruvian military for the Bowers’ deaths. But the media, some members of Congress, and outside experts pushed back on the official government position. At the time, that was pretty rare with respect to the drug war.

Here’s Adam Isacson from the Center for International Policy, testifying before Souder’s committee.

Adam Isacson: While the Peruvian pilot pulled the trigger, he pulled the trigger of a gun provided by the United States while flying a plane provided by the United States. He was trained in these operations by the United States, and he was alerted to his target by intelligence provided by the United States.

Radley Balko: Up to that point, the Air Bridge Denial Program had enjoyed bipartisan support, as did most U.S. anti-drug policies in Latin America. And Plan Colombia had of course been signed and championed by President Clinton. But at least some congressional Democrats, like Jan Schakowsky and Elijah Cummings, lambasted the operation.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: The kind of action we saw in Peru last week amounts to an extrajudicial killing, and we in this country now have innocent blood on our hands because of it.

Rep. Elijah Cummings: The Peruvian shootdown policy would never be permitted as a domestic United States policy precisely because it goes against one of our most sacred, due process principles; namely, that all persons are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: The U.S. taxpayers are unwittingly funding a private war with private soldiers. This is a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later policy encouraged by the United States in its war on drugs.

Rep. Elijah Cummings: Certainly Veronica and Charity Bowers are not the first innocent victims of the war on drugs. Is a policy that also sacrifices core American values a prudent and acceptable course to follow?

Radley Balko: In one particularly telling moment, Rep. Cummings asked John Crow, who led the State Department’s narcotics efforts in Latin America, how many planes had been shot down through the Air Bridge Denial Program. It was an entirely reasonable question: How many times had the U.S. pressured foreign governments to shoot down civilian aircraft based on nothing more than mere suspicion of drug running?

And yet Crow couldn’t answer.

Elijah Cummings: Can somebody tell me how many airplanes have been shot down since 1995? … Shootdowns and force-downs?

John Crow: … We were not able to come up with one, or agree on the same figure. … Our figures would show that starting in 1995, aircraft were not all shot down, some forced down, but through a combination, a figure of some 50 aircraft — and that is not precise.

Elijah Cummings: … Why can’t you tell me that? … We are talking about shooting down people.

John Crow: Yeah.

Elijah Cummings: Like, dead. I mean, we are talking about using — I mean, this is some serious stuff. I am trying to figure out, if I was just a regular citizen just sitting here looking at this, and I’ve got some of my top-flight people in the drug war talking about they don’t know how many shootdowns or force-downs, I would be a little bit concerned about what’s going on.

Radley Balko: Cummings’s frustrations back then seem almost prescient today, as the Trump administration continues to elude questions about its own killings off the South American coast.

Still, this is the drug war. And so it didn’t take long for a reliable foot soldier like Souder to retreat to familiar territory.

Mark Souder: Unfortunately, many people in America are becoming convinced — falsely — that the war on drugs has not worked.

Radley Balko: Souder then deployed the sort of hyperbole and demagoguery that had long defined U.S. drug policy.

Mark Souder: And what is the alternative of those who oppose the war on drugs? Having more weed-wacked, meth-wasted, heroin-junkie crackheads driving a car headed in your direction or prowling your neighborhood? Or, perhaps even more painfully, coming home to beat you or your child? The facts are simple. When this country focuses on the war on drugs, we make progress.

Radley Balko: Rep. Schakowsky responded with a laundry list of reasons why the status quo was not working.

Jan Schakowsky: I know some of those with us today would like to put this tragedy behind us and get back to the business of the drug war. However, there are so many questionable aspects of our policy and so many unanswered questions.

Why do we have to hire private contractors to do our work in Andean countries? How much of the public’s money has been spent to hire what some have referred to as mercenaries? Where is the accountability? Who exactly are they? Do they even speak Spanish?

From what I do know, outsourcing in the Andean region is a way to avoid congressional oversight and public scrutiny. The use of private military contractors risks drawing the U.S. into regional conflicts and civil war. It is clear to me that this practice must stop.

Radley Balko: Rep. Hoekstra took a subtler tone. He wasn’t interested in overhauling the war on drugs. But because the victims were his constituents, he focused instead on the need for some level of transparency.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (at Oversight Committee hearing): The families and the American people deserve to know how this happened. I know there are certain pieces of this complex puzzle that we will never be able to explain, but there should be no part that we keep hidden.

Pete Hoekstra: And so it was pretty clear that there were people inside the agency that were ready to cover this up from day one.

Radley Balko: Looking back on that time, Hoekstra says that the government agencies involved slow-walked the investigative process.

Pete Hoekstra: Because the information, especially the information going out to the public, was so different from what actually happened, it provided cover for people to reimplement this flawed program.

Radley Balko: So the government agencies involved avoided accountability and there would be no substantial change in policy. The CIA’s inspector general report on the incident was published in 2008, but it wouldn’t be fully declassified until 2010. When it finally was made public, the details were damning.

Brian Ross (ABC News): Today, the CIA was accused of an almost 9 year long campaign to mislead and stonewall Congress and others about how and why the rules were broken.

Pete Hoekstra (at Oversight Committee hearing): If there’s ever an example of justice delayed, justice denied, this is it.

Brian Ross (ABC News): The CIA insists the entire episode was handled thoroughly and professionally and that there was no cover-up — to the outrage of the dead woman’s parents.

Gloria Luttig (Veronica Bowers’s mother): I want somebody to tell me why they killed my girl.

Pete Hoekstra: Those of us on the committee and I think a number of members of Congress knew exactly what happened. The CIA knew exactly what happened. The Justice Department should have known exactly what happened. They would have had access to the tapes and those types of things. And the calculus at some point in time that is made by the Justice Department, by the intelligence community, and by the administration at that point is, this program is more important than focusing or rehashing the mistakes that were made.

Radley Balko: The CIA inspector general tallied 15 incidents in which a plane had been shot down through the program between 1995 and 2001. The watchdog found violations of required procedures in all 15 incidents. In some cases, suspected aircraft were shot down within minutes of being sighted by the Peruvian fighter, without being properly identified, given required warnings, or given time to respond. Another congressional committee estimated that there could have been many more planes shot out of the sky — as many as 50.

More disturbing still, the report concluded that “CIA officers knew of and condoned most of these violations, fostering an environment of negligence and disregard for procedures designed to protect against the loss of innocent life that culminated in the downing of the missionary plane.”

Brian Ross (ABC News): Today the CIA said its nine-year long investigation had determined that 16 CIA employees should be disciplined, including, we learned, the woman then in charge of counternarcotics. Many of the 16 are no longer with the CIA, and one of them told us his discipline was no more than a letter of reprimand placed in his file, which he was told would be removed in one year. That’s the punishment for his role in the wrongful deaths of two innocent Americans, Diane.

Diane Sawyer: After nine years.

Brian Ross: Yes, after nine years.

Diane Sawyer: OK, thanks Brian.

Pete Hoekstra: Even after nine years, I’d say there was never really a full accountability to the individual or the organizations that precipitated these events. I’m worried that there were more. That the Bowers family is not the only family, or the only Americans, or the only innocent people that were impacted. Were there other Peruvians, were there other innocent individuals that might have been killed through this process? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that the answer would probably be yes.

Ian Vásquez: I think that a lot of times when people talk about the war on drugs, they think about going after the bad guys, the criminals who are ruthless, the mafia guys, the cartel guys, the people who are breaking the law knowingly.

Radley Balko: Ian Vásquez again.

Ian Vásquez: But the larger picture is that the drug war is not just about going after the so-called bad guys. It is much more about turning innocent, ordinary people into victims. And it’s a lot of them. It’s not just the farmers. It’s the entire populations of countries whose institutions of civil society and government are undermined.

Radley Balko: It’s now been more than two decades since the Bowers’s plane plunged into the Amazon River. But Jim Bowers expressed his forgiveness right away, back in 2001, speaking at his daughter and wife’s memorial in Michigan.

Jim Bowers: One thing I want you to know, Roni has forgiven the pilot who shot her. She’s forgiven the Peruvian government and whoever might have made their mistake. And so should I. And I have. How could I not, when God has forgiven me so.

Radley Balko: The U.S. government paid $8 million to the Bowers family and the pilot of the plane. That payout came years before the investigation and report were finally made public.

Meanwhile, according to the United Nations, global coca production reached a new high in 2023, jumping 34 percent over the year before. Colombia’s coca output drove much of the increase. Bolivia’s production has remained steady. Peru saw a slight decline, but had produced a record amount of the drug in 2021. The air in the balloon just keeps moving around.

Vásquez says the futility of drug prohibition is inescapable.

Ian Vásquez: It’s just virtually impossible to fight against an industry that — because it is prohibited, because it’s in the black market — creates astronomically high black market profits and so creates these massive incentives for people to go into the business, all the way down from ordinary farmers who produce coca to the big drug traffickers. And the structure of the industry itself, because it’s outside of the legal framework of the market, means that the profits just shoot up incredibly, especially once the drug comes into the United States.

Radley Balko: Vásquez breaks down the numbers.

Ian Vásquez: And to give you an idea of what we’re talking about. In Colombia, it can take, I don’t know, $500 to $800 to get the coca leaves and then another, I don’t know, $800 or so to produce the coca paste that then produces cocaine in Colombia. So that one kilo of cocaine produced in Colombia is maybe about $1,600. By the time it crosses the United States, the retail price of that same kilo is $160,000. So there’s this enormous markup.

Radley Balko: In 2022 the Colombian government brokered what it called a “Total Peace” agreement with the armed guerrilla groups vying for control of key cocaine trafficking routes. But it wasn’t long before the violence returned.

In January 2025, the guerrilla group ELN resumed a bloody territorial war with FARC dissidents. In less than a week, the fighting left at least 80 people dead and forced 11,000 people to flee their homes.

But Colombia is not alone. Black-market drug violence persists across Latin America.

ABC News: Authorities in Ecuador investigating a brazen attack on a public television station by an apparent armed gang as “acts of terrorism.” [gunshots]

PBS NewsHour: Here in the Honduran heart of the drug trade, the cartel has everything under their control.

NewsNation: It’s a region of Mexico where residents are always either in mourning or living in fear.

Ian Vásquez: If you look at homicide rates, the top 15 countries, in terms of homicide rates in the world, it’s not really a surprise that 12 out of those 15 are on the cocaine route from the Andes to the United States. That kind of statistic changes from year to year, depending on where the drug war is really cracking down on. But overall, those numbers stay high.

Radley Balko: This has been particularly true in Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Aggressive, militaristic drug enforcement by local authorities — nearly always prodded and often financially backed by the U.S. government — has resulted in a bloody, perpetual war between the military, police, and competing drug cartels. And those entities can often be difficult to distinguish, as cartels exert control over politicians, police, and military officials through corruption and through the threat of violence. The fighting in Mexico alone has wrought more than 460,000 homicides since 2006. That’s the year the Mexican government began warring with the cartels.

Not learning from previous mistakes, in 2007 President George W. Bush launched what was described at the time as a “Plan Colombia for Mexico.” It was a policy that would continue into the Obama administration.

Hillary Clinton: These drug cartels are now showing more and more indices of insurgency — all of a sudden car bombs show up, which wasn’t there before. So it’s looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago, where the narco-traffickers control certain parts of the country.

Radley Balko: That’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010. She’s talking about how Mexican drug traffickers had taken over the routes used by Colombian cartels in the late 1990s.

Hillary Clinton: Mexico has capacity, and they’re using that capacity. And they’ve been very willing to take advice. They’re wanting to do as much of it on their own as possible, but we stand ready to help them.

Radley Balko: Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations, Clinton demonstrated that the Obama administration had learned nothing from her husband’s own mistakes in the 1990s.

Hillary Clinton: I know that Plan Colombia was controversial. I was just in Colombia, and there were problems and there were mistakes, but it worked. … And we need to figure out what are the equivalents for Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean.

Radley Balko: The United States still budgets more than $1 billion annually on overseas drug interdiction. The U.S. also often conditions additional foreign aid on cooperation from foreign governments on drug policy.

The international drug war is also as opaque as it is bloody and destructive. Media investigations have uncovered clandestine operations involving the U.S. military, private contractors, and CIA, FBI, and DEA agents all over the world. So the real amount of money we spend on overseas drug eradication is likely quite a bit higher.

The United States has also helped fund notoriously brutal drug crackdowns like the extrajudicial executions in the Philippines. U.S. anti-opium efforts also have effectively funded and propped up the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Ian Vásquez: With much of the international operations of the United States, it’s difficult to get a handle on what’s exactly going on. How much do the United States spend internationally on the war on drugs? Well, there’s so many different agencies involved in that. There are aid agencies. There’s the Defense Department. There’s the DEA. You can’t find one budget line that says “International War on Drugs” budget.

Radley Balko: Today, the fight isn’t so much about marijuana or cocaine as it is fentanyl. And while the drugs of choice come and go, the same counterproductive policies persist.

Donald Trump: We’re talking about a tariff of 10 percent on China based on the fact that they’re sending fentanyl to Mexico and Canada.

Radley Balko: While fentanyl can be far deadlier than other illicit drugs, the incentives for producers are similar: Prohibition has no effect on demand. It only makes the payoff more lucrative for suppliers.

Ian Vásquez: Fentanyl is even more of an enormous markup. The precursor chemicals for fentanyl are about $800. And the retail value for the same amount of fentanyl in the United States is about $640,000. So, what we’re talking about is a situation where the incentives to always bring in fentanyl are going to be enormous, and any disruption, however violent, that you can cause to that illicit industry will only be seen as a small price that the business has to pay in order to get the drug to the United States.

Radley Balko: Fentanyl itself is popular because of the prohibition on other opioid drugs. Yet our government seems intent on continuing to make those same mistakes too.

Ian Vásquez: It is not true that somehow Mexicans are smuggling in fentanyl into the United States and that’s the main problem through some sort of illegal routes or whatever. We’ve looked into it here at Cato, and 90 percent of the fentanyl is coming in through regular ports of entry in the United States, and at least 86 percent of it is being brought in by Americans. It’s easy to blame Mexicans for this, but it’s something that Americans are very much involved in.

Radley Balko: But blaming Mexico, Canada, and now Venezuela is exactly what Trump is doing.

Donald Trump: Billions of dollars of drugs are pouring out of Venezuela and other countries. Look, China, what they’re doing with fentanyl is a terrible thing. It comes through Canada and it comes through Mexico, but a lot of it’s coming through Venezuela. Venezuela has been a very bad actor.

Radley Balko: Since the start of his second term, Donald Trump has issued a series of executive orders claiming the power to invade countries under the pretext of fighting drug trafficking. He has now explicitly threatened military action against Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela.

Trump has designated international drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations — likely illegally — and declared a national emergency on the U.S. southern border. He also launched those military strikes on suspected drug boats — again without evidence of a crime and in violation of U.S. and international law. And then the administration began to amass warships near Venezuela in preparation for striking military installations inside the country. But Venezuela has nothing to do with fentanyl, the current drug that’s menacing the United States.

Rand Paul: Number one, there is no fentanyl made in Venezuela, not just a little bit. There’s none being made in Venezuela. These are outboard boats that in order for them to get to Miami, would have to stop and refuel 20 times. They’re all likely going to Trinidad and Tobago, which is an island right off of the coast of Venezuela.

Radley Balko: That’s Republican Sen. Rand Paul on Piers Morgan’s show, challenging the Trump administration’s use of drug trafficking to justify both extrajudicial executions and potentially invading another country.

Related

Rand Paul Reveals Venezuela Boat Attack Was a Drone Strike

Unlike Colombia’s president, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is an authoritarian who remains in office despite having lost his country’s last presidential election. But the evidence that Maduro is actively participating in the drug trade is thin. Yet Trump seems intent to go to war with Venezuela — with or without approval from Congress.

Reporter: And Mr. President, if you are declaring war against these cartels and Congress is likely to approve of that process, why not just ask for a declaration of war?

Donald Trump: Well, I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We’re going to kill them. You know, they’re going to be like dead.

Rand Paul: That’s why when we declare war, it’s supposed to be done by Congress. It’s supposed to be thoughtful. It’s supposed to be debated, and we’re not supposed to do it willy-nilly.

Radley Balko: That’s Sen. Paul again. And here’s Paul making another important point: Drug trafficking is not an act of war.

Rand Paul: Interdicting drugs has always been a criminal activity and a criminal, anti-crime activity where we don’t just summarily execute people, we actually present evidence and convict them.

Radley Balko: More than 20 years ago, House Oversight Committee members Jan Schakowsky and Elijah Cummings demanded accountability after U.S. drug interdiction forces killed Roni and Charity Bowers. They demanded to know how such a mistake could happen, and how we could prevent the loss of innocent life going forward.

Related

License to Kill: Trump’s Extrajudicial Executions

Now, a new administration celebrates summary executions of alleged drug smugglers without a hint of due process, and it is now threatening to topple another government to prevent the U.S. from sating its appetite for illicit drugs.

At the time of our interview in 2023, former congressman Pete Hoekstra told me that the Bowers incident changed the way he looked at drug policy and how he assesses the government officials who enforce it.

Pete Hoekstra: I don’t think there’s reason to have much faith or belief in what the community is telling us about a number of different programs, whether it is a drug interdiction program, or its activities on the ground, or its activities even inside the United States.

Radley Balko: All these years later, Hoekstra said, he still thinks about the larger ramifications of the Bowers saga — and the likelihood that the Air Bridge Denial Program may have taken other innocent victims.

Pete Hoekstra: That’s one of the haunting things that is out there; I believe that there were others. The Bowers were not the only family that was affected in this way. The difference was the other folks that saw planes shot down or lives lost were not Americans.

And they didn’t land in a river where they were saved by people coming from shore. They were shot down over remote areas — nobody there to help them. There was no investigation, no visit to the crash scenes. And it was just one more statistic, and it would have been taken at face value that it was a drug smuggling plane, and not a lot of investigations into whether they were innocents.

Radley Balko: Pete Hoekstra left Congress in 2011. In November of 2024, shortly after winning reelection, Donald Trump announced that Hoekstra would be his ambassador to Canada. Hoekstra has not commented on the administration’s boat strikes in Latin America.

Next time on Collateral Damage.

Joel Berger: Alberta Spruill was a Black woman, a perfectly innocent person with no criminal record of any kind.

Derek Sells: The police on May 16, 2003, at a little past 6 a.m. broke into Ms. Spruill’s apartment. They knocked the door off its hinges. They threw in a stun grenade.

C. Virginia Fields: Created the smoke. And she was there getting ready or dressed to go to work.

Derek Sells: When the police went in instead of finding some drug den, what they found was a neat, tidy apartment of a older woman who lived alone.

Radley Balko: Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept.

It was reported and written by me, Radley Balko.

Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer, who also served as producer and editor.

Laura Flynn is our showrunner.

Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief:

The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal.

We had editing support from Maryam Saleh.

Truc Nguyen mixed our show.

Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow.

Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan.

Art direction by Fei Liu.

Illustrations by Tara Anand.

Copy editing by Nara Shin.

Social and video media by Chelsey B. Coombs.

Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance.

This series was made possible by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund.

If you want to send us a message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com

To continue to follow my work and reporting, check out my newsletter, The Watch, at radleybalko.substack.com.

Thank you for listening.

The post Episode Six: Airborne Imperialism appeared first on The Intercept.

In June 2010, Las Vegas police conducted a no-knock raid on Trevon Cole’s apartment, where he lived with his nine-months-pregnant fiancée. Cole, who occasionally sold small amounts of marijuana, rushed to the bathroom to flush a bag down the toilet. An officer followed and shot him in the head, killing him. Cole was unarmed. The officer claimed Cole made a “furtive” movement, but others present, including Cole’s fiancée, never heard any warning.

Cole had no prior criminal record, but police secured the warrant by falsely linking him to a different Trevon Cole with a criminal history in Texas. Despite the clear misidentification and Cole’s lack of threat, a coroner’s inquest cleared the officer, who had previously shot two other men, killing one. This episode of Collateral Damage, hosted by Radley Balko, examines how the courts have failed to protect the Fourth Amendment in drug cases, featuring interviews with constitutional law scholars, Cole’s fiancée, and the daughter she was carrying during the raid, now a teenager.

Transcript

Radley Balko: At the time Trevon Cole was shot and killed by a Las Vegas police officer, he and his fiancée Sequoia Pearce were sketching out plans for a life together. The couple was engaged, and she was 40 weeks pregnant with their first child.

Sequoia Pearce: We were high school sweethearts. I was 40 weeks pregnant, so my due date was any day.

Radley Balko: They had moved to Vegas from Los Angeles so Pearce could be closer to her mother. With a baby on the way, it seemed important to be close to family.

Sequoia Pearce: He was a family man. Like, he loved his mother. He was the person who got me more family-oriented — that’s what moved us to Vegas.

Radley Balko: Cole was 21 years old and worked at a “True Religion” clothing store. Pearce was just 20. 

Sequoia Pearce: Trevon was just full of life. Like, he was full of life. Everyone knew him. He was very popular. 

Radley Balko: On the night of June 11, 2010, Cole and Pearce were watching TV in their home. At around 9 p.m., their peaceful evening was abruptly interrupted.

Sequoia Pearce: We were hanging out, watching TV, laying in bed. We heard like an aggressive knock on the door. And then we heard like glass shatter. So we kind of like, felt like someone was coming in on us, and we didn’t know like if we were being robbed.

Radley Balko: The couple jumped from the bed. Cole soon realized that the men breaking into their home were the police.

Sequoia Pearce: He was like, “Babe, where, where’s my weed?” And I was like, “I don’t know.”

Radley Balko: Cole had a bag of marijuana, about 7 grams’ worth — a typical amount for personal use. At the time, in 2010, cannabis was legal in Nevada for medicinal purposes but not for recreational use. Cole wanted to get rid of his pot before the cops could find it.

Sequoia Pearce: I ran into the closet, and then he ran into the restroom.

Radley Balko: As the raid team battered down the door and made their way through the house, Cole knelt down by the toilet and tried to flush the marijuana.

Sequoia Pearce: So I was in the furthest room of the apartment. So the first officers had their guns drawn and told me to get out the closet. And then as I got out of the closet, I stepped into our bedroom. The way, the facing of where I was in the bedroom, I can see inside the restroom. So when the officer kicked the door open and said “Freeze” and when Trevon raised his hands, it was just — the guys just shot him, and then the whole house just went silent.

Radley Balko: Las Vegas Metro Police Officer Bryan Yant had shot Trevon Cole in the face. The bullet pierced Cole’s cheek before burrowing into his neck. He died at the scene.

Sequoia Pearce: After they kicked the door in and shot Trevon, they dragged me out of the house. I had on shorts and a tank top. And initially, I was sitting in front of the apartment, and one of the officers just kept staring at me. I’ll never forget this guy’s face.

Radley Balko: Pearce was shocked, angry, and confused.

Sequoia Pearce: He’s like, “I believe they did say there’s someone in the house deceased.” I’m like, “No, it’s not. No, it’s not.” I was like, “No, it’s not.”

At some point, I figured something went wrong. And then from there, I don’t know if mentally I kind of shut out because I literally — I can say, like, when my mom came to get me from the scene, I really kind of wasn’t really aware of what just had happened before my eyes.

Radley Balko: Pearce had just watched the father of her soon-to-be born daughter, shot to death, right in front of her, while he knelt beside a toilet. She didn’t understand. Why had the police raided their home? Why didn’t they knock and let someone answer the door? Why had they opened fire so quickly?

Reporter: It wasn’t long after the shooting at this apartment complex that the family of the victim started having questions. 

Sequoia Pearce [in news spot]: There was no weapons, no, like, Level 4 drugs. The only thing in there was marijuana because I knew he smoked. 

Radley Balko: It would be bad enough if this had been your typical, hyped-up, no-knock raid by overly gung ho cops relying on sketchy information. Or another example of cops misconstruing an innocent gesture for a “furtive” one, then shooting an unarmed man, as Yant claimed. That was common enough at the time, particularly in Las Vegas.

But in this case, Yant had also misled a judge to get permission for their violent raid by pointing to the criminal history of an entirely different Trevon Cole.

From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage.

I’m Radley Balko. I’m an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years. 

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeat drug addiction, but the “war” part quickly became all too literal. When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and ’90s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric, and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections. 

All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause. But once the country had dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage. 

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is Episode 5, “What Fourth Amendment? How the Killing of Trevon Cole Almost Made Prime-Time TV.”

Andre Lagomarsino: I remember first hearing about this incident because I was watching the NBA finals at the time, and a newsflash came over television about the shooting that involved Trevon Cole. 

Newscaster: Tonight, Action News is learning new details in the Metro shooting death of a suspected drug dealer last week. 

Andre Lagomarsino: Trevon Cole’s family was driving in from California. They were Googling attorneys, and somehow they came across this article where my name was in, and they reached out to us to represent them.

Radley Balko: Las Vegas area attorney Andre Lagomarsino. 

Andre Lagomarsino: And as soon as they got into town, they just came to my office, and that’s where we first met. So we not only became involved in the case and the investigation but trying to figure out, how do we deal with funeral arrangements, and how do we help the family get counseling, and how do we comfort them?

Radley Balko: Pearce spoke briefly to the press after Cole’s death. But with her baby arriving the following week, Lagomarsino stepped in as the family’s spokesperson.

News reporter: The family’s attorney tells me Trevon Cole had his hands in the air following officers instructions for several seconds before he was shot. But sources close to the investigation say that while they respect the family’s mourning, they stand by their case. 

Andre Lagomarsino: It was my second case involving the police department. I had been practicing law for about 12 years. And I thought we would get a lot of blowback for representing somebody against the police department. I quickly learned the opposite.

Radley Balko: There’s a familiar debate that unfolds after police kill an unarmed person — about whether these sorts of cases are systemic problems, or merely the fault of a few “bad apples.” That can serve as a way for police to minimize abuse and misconduct. But there are a couple important points that get lost in the discourse: First, the aphorism is “A few bad apples spoil the bunch.” The point being, when you fail to remove the rotting apples, the rot eventually takes over the entire barrel.

This brings us to the second point: Any system that lets the “bad apples” continue working — or that even rewards or promotes them — is a fundamentally broken system. And in this case, the Las Vegas police department continued to coddle an incredibly rotten apple. 

Andre Lagomarsino: We got a lot of anonymous calls, actually, from people within the department sharing information. They wouldn’t reveal their names, but they would provide information to us about Mr. Yant.

Radley Balko: Bryan Yant, the officer who shot and killed Trevon Cole.

Andre Lagomarsino: Detective Yant had a prior history of including false information and documentation that he would submit to the police department. The way we found out about that in this case was other lawyers had contacted me about information that they had discovered in their cases, which involved criminal investigations conducted by Detective Yant, where he would make statements and affidavits that weren’t true. For example, in one case, he made an allegation that somebody was verified to be in Las Vegas at the time a particular incident occurred, and travel records proved that that person was out of the country at the time.

Radley Balko: Detective Yant has denied these allegations. We reached out to him for comment, and he didn’t reply.

Yant had previously shot three other people — two of them fatally.

So in the months after Cole was killed, Lagomarsino had two lines of investigation to pursue: the policies and practices of the Las Vegas police department, and the history of Detective Yant himself. 

There was one other variable in the raid that took Cole’s life.

The week police raided his home, they were being filmed by a crew from the long-running reality TV show “Cops.”

[“Cops” theme song “Bad Boys”]

Radley Balko: “Cops” first aired in 1989; it features high-drama footage of police making arrests, chasing suspects, negotiating domestic disputes, and so on. It’s one of the longest running TV shows ever. And it has always been controversial for its unrealistic portrayals of policing and for perpetuating racial stereotypes.

Related

Not Just “Cops”: It’s Time to End the Entertainment Industry’s Anti-Black, Pro-Police Programming

The show has also been criticized for the effect it can have on the agencies that agree to be filmed — that the prospect of making the final cut can prompt officers and deputies to be more confrontational and aggressive.

[“Cops” theme song continues]

Narrator: “Cops” is filmed on location as it happens. All suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty, in a court of law.

Radley Balko: As it turned out, the “Cops” crew was on another police bust the night Cole was killed, so the actual raid on his home wasn’t filmed. But the week prior, they did record an undercover drug buy from Cole. So there was an incentive for the officers investigating Cole to follow up — and to create the sort of drama that makes for good TV.

Andre Lagomarsino: In many cases, police officers love to kick down doors with AR-15s and big guns. They don’t need the show “Cops” to be able to do that, but in this case, we believe there was extra motivation that “Cops” had originally planned to videotape this raid. So they wanted to make it as glamorous and as ratings-worthy as it could be, by using the type of raid that they did to go in and bust somebody who had just sold them a little weed.

Radley Balko: And it really wasn’t much pot at all. Over the course of three controlled purchases, Cole had sold undercover police about 2 ounces of marijuana in total. In one instance, Cole didn’t even have an ounce on hand to sell.

Sequoia Pearce: When they raided our apartment, we had 7 grams of weed. And like, I can say today, at 34 — like, I wasn’t big on like smoking, so I didn’t really know like how much weed that was — but like, that’s not a lot of weed. That’s like a sitting consumption at some point, if you have a habit. He never had large quantities, like he never had a pound in the house. He never had that.

Radley Balko: In order to get a search warrant, Detective Yant had to convince a judge that there was probable cause of a crime. And in order to get a no-knock warrant, he’d have to show that Cole was dangerous. Yant did submit a sworn affidavit claiming that Cole had a lengthy criminal history of sales, possession, and trafficking narcotics in Los Angeles and Houston.

But it turns out, that was an entirely different Trevon Cole.

Andre Lagomarsino: That statement was completely false. The Trevon Cole whom Yant was interacting with and whom he had allegedly identified had no history of sales and trafficking anywhere.

Radley Balko: There was a Trevon Cole in the police database with charges in Texas and California. And in the affidavit, Yant attributed this other man’s criminal history to the Las Vegas Trevon Cole, even though they had different ages, heights, and weights. 

Andre Lagomarsino: Detective Yant used the criminal history of a different Trevon Cole to be able to get a search warrant approved for basically a break-in of the apartment.

Radley Balko: Detective Yant later claimed that it was an accidental case of mistaken identity. Truth be told, Cole probably didn’t even need to be a dangerous kingpin in order for the cops to get a warrant. 

The legal bar for police to conduct these violent raids has been getting lower and lower for decades, and even when they fail to clear that bar, there’s rarely any accountability. 

To understand how easy it was for police to conduct the raid that ended Cole’s life, we need to take a quick detour and look at the recent evolution of the Fourth Amendment.

David Moran: The election in 1968 is pivotal. Richard Nixon becomes president. He’s running on a tough-on-crime platform.

Radley Balko: That’s David Moran. He’s the co-director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic and a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School. He also argued one of the most important cases governing the police use of no-knock raids.

David Moran: Richard Nixon becomes president, and he immediately changes the composition of the Supreme Court. He gets to make a series of appointments in his first term that changed the balance of the Supreme Court.

Radley Balko: Nixon’s appointment of William Rehnquist in particular was important. Rehnquist would later become chief justice, and under his watch, the court would begin to roll back many of the civil liberties protections it had articulated under Chief Justice Earl Warren.

But it was Nixon’s policies that really paved the way for a more aggressive, militarized form of drug policing. In 1968, Nixon ran for president on a platform of cracking down on crime, as well as on anti-war and civil rights activists.

Richard Nixon advertisement: We owe it to the decent and law-abiding citizens of America to take the offensive against the criminal forces that threaten their peace and their security, and to rebuild the respect for law across this country.

Radley Balko: His campaign attempted to paint all three groups as a public menace by declaring war on drugs — and by targeting marijuana in particular.

Richard Nixon: America’s public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage an all-out offensive.

Radley Balko: Here’s an excerpt from a 1994 interview of Nixon senior policy adviser John Ehrlichman.

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Radley Balko: One way Nixon planned to crack down on drug offenders was by chipping away at the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. Conservatives at the time — and still today — were particularly angry about the Warren Court’s expansion of the exclusionary rule. This rule states that when police conduct an illegal search, they can’t use any evidence they find in that search against you in court.

Proponents of the rule argue that because lawsuits against police officers are so difficult to win, the exclusionary rule is the only real deterrent forcing cops to adhere to the Fourth Amendment.

David Moran: The theory being that the police don’t care if money damages are assessed against the state because of a knock-and-announce or other Fourth Amendment violation. The only way to enforce the Fourth Amendment is by telling the police that they’re going to lose the thing they care about, which is the collar — the conviction — or at least the evidence that they seize will be suppressed if they violate the Fourth Amendment.

Radley Balko: The knock-and-announce concept Moran references has been a part of American jurisprudence since the country was founded. In fact, it stems from centuries of English common law. The idea is that the home should be a place of peace and sanctuary. If the police want to violate that peace, they should first be required to knock on the door, announce their presence, and give those inside a reasonable amount of time to answer and let them in peacefully.

But there have always been exceptions to the rule — special circumstances that allow the police to barge right in. If, for example, the cops determine at the scene that knocking and announcing themselves would put them or somebody in the home at risk, or that it would give a suspect time to destroy evidence, they could enter without knocking.

But the Nixon administration pushed a proposal that would allow police to get a judge’s permission ahead of time to enter a home without announcing themselves. The idea was that drug dealers didn’t deserve that sort of consideration.

Congress passed a version of Nixon’s no-knock raid into law during his presidency, though the law was ultimately repealed following a series of botched and mistaken raids.

But then in the 1980s, the Reagan administration reinvigorated the drug war. Americans were continually fed fearsome, racially coded images of people involved in the use and sale of drugs.

Ronald Reagan: This rise in crime, this growth of a hardened criminal class, has partly been the result of misplaced government priorities and a misguided social philosophy.

At the root of this philosophy lies utopian presumptions about human nature that see man as primarily a creature of his material environment. By changing this environment through expensive social programs, this philosophy holds that government can permanently change man and usher in an era of prosperity and virtue. 

Radley Balko: Though Congress never formally reauthorized the no-knock raid policy, state and federal courts allowed them anyway, and so violent entry into private homes to serve narcotics warrants became a primary tool in the drug war. 

Related

Episode Two: A Death in the Dark

The increase of violent drug raids even became a TV news trope. Police would invite camera crews to join raid teams as they busted into homes. This footage would then be broadcast to millions of Americans, first on the evening national and local news, then in reality police shows like “Cops,” and the various “SWAT” series.

News anchor: This kind of break-in is routine in Miami drug raids.

[Glass breaking]
“Police search warrant, open the door!”
[Pounding, smashing, gunshots]

Radley Balko: These raids proliferated from a few thousand per year in the late 1980s to 45,000 per year by the mid-2000s. Meanwhile, the courts steadily chipped away at the Fourth Amendment protections that were supposed to govern these kinds of police activity. The entire purpose of the knock-and-announce rule, for example, was to give residents of a home time to come to the door and let police in peacefully.

But the courts had slowly been giving police more and more authority to dispense with that rule, or allowed them to break down doors within seconds of announcing.

David Moran: So I think there was a consensus that a few eggs have to be cracked in order to get at the drug war. You can’t run an effective war without some casualties. And one of those casualties was the right to be left alone in your home unless something really bad was going on.

Radley Balko: In 2006, Moran personally argued a seminal Fourth Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court. It was called Hudson v. Michigan.

David Moran: One of the fascinating things that I learned from doing my research when I was preparing to argue Hudson was how venerable the knock-and-announce doctrine was. It came from the era of English common law, not long after the Magna Carta. It was really medieval. I found cases and references by treatise writers from the Middle Ages about how a man’s home is his castle. And the concern with the knock-and-announce rule that planted it firmly in English common law was, if the constable came by or the sheriff came by and knocked your door down, that was really a bad thing. There was no Home Depot you could go to to get your door quickly rebuilt. Your door would then be open to highwaymen and common thieves and wolves and whatever was roaming the moor. So a man’s home is his castle really is a deeply held venerable part of English common law, which we inherited.

Radley Balko: The case involved a man named Booker T. Hudson, who was convicted of drug and firearm possession. The police had entered his home without knocking, announcing their presence, or waiting for a response.

Hudson argued that, based on the exclusionary rule, the police should not have been permitted to use the incriminating evidence they found against him. The state of Michigan argued that police had violated the rule, but that the contraband they found should still be fair game. 

Moran was hopeful that the U.S. Supreme Court would make a strong ruling in defense of the exclusionary rule, which he argued was the best way to get police to comply with the knock-and-announce rule.

David Moran: And the arguments went very well. I had the strong impression that we had at least five, and probably six, of the justices. Justice O’Connor in particular had spoken out during the arguments in a way that indicated she was leaning in our direction.

After the break, a pivotal ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court.

[Break]

Radley Balko: Three weeks after oral arguments in Hudson v. Michigan, but before the court issued its decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor retired — and was replaced by Samuel Alito.

David Moran: And then very shortly after that, in a number of cases, the court ordered reargument. And what that means is that, with Justice O’Connor gone, there’s a 4-4 split, and so the case would have to be reargued in front of Justice Alito, who could make the deciding vote.

Radley Balko: Moran would have to go back to the U.S. Supreme Court a second time and argue the same case, four months later.

Chief Justice Roberts: We’ll hear reargument this morning in Hudson v. Michigan. Mr. Moran. 

David Moran [in court]: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: For centuries, the knock-and-announce rule has been a core part of the right of the people to be secure in their houses from unreasonable searches and seizures. It reflects the notion …

Radley Balko: The court’s political alignment had been reconfigured by President George W. Bush’s appointee. Alito was far more conservative than O’Connor.

David Moran: And we lost 5-4, in an opinion written by Justice Scalia. 

Radley Balko: The new majority ruled that even if police violate the knock-and-announce rule, the evidence they seize can still be used in court. The ruling didn’t change police behavior overnight, in part because the courts had already been lax in enforcing the Fourth Amendment.

Related

Episode One: Dirty Business

But in the two decades since, we’ve seen police departments, prosecutors, and even judges pay less and less attention to the knock-and-announce requirement. Because there’s no longer any real way to enforce it, it’s basically become a right that really only exists on paper. Police departments can be less cautious about corroborating information, about checking to see if there are children or other uninvolved people in a home before conducting one of these violent, volatile raids. Some departments have grown careless, cutting and pasting boilerplate language into search warrant affidavits instead of taking the time to show why an exception is justified in each particular case.

I have found numerous examples of this around the country in my own reporting.

David Moran: The Fourth Amendment itself hasn’t changed. There hasn’t been a constitutional amendment. The text is exactly the same as it was. But what we’ve seen is that the definition of “unreasonable” has changed. The court has decided that lots of things that we thought were unreasonable before are now reasonable. 

So I really don’t think the framers or 19th-century or early 20th-century Americans would think, for example, that the police using a piece of military equipment like a tank to conduct an entry into a home would have been a reasonable search and seizure. But now it is. Now, courts have held that the use of overwhelming force — the use of flash-bang grenades, entries that terrify the homeowners, maybe even cause some of them to suffer cardiac arrest — that’s all reasonable.

Radley Balko: By 2010, four years after the Hudson decision, Las Vegas Metro police officers conducting narcotics investigation had every incentive to conduct their raids as quickly as possible — to get to the illicit drugs before they could be sold or moved to another location. 

But there was also no punishment for going too fast. For getting careless or for taking shortcuts. Even if those shortcuts violated the Constitution, any incriminating evidence the officers found could still be used against their suspect. They’d still get their seizure, they’d still get their collar, they’d still get their conviction.

Andre Lagomarsino: The Fourth Amendment in Nevada has been severely degraded with the way that the drug war has been pursued.

Radley Balko: Lagomarsino took on Cole’s case hoping to hold someone accountable for his death. But as he began investigating, he learned that the killing was about much more than just one problem officer.

Andre Lagomarsino: It’s my further view that it’s a systemic issue, meaning that you have overzealous police officers providing evidence to overzealous district attorneys. A lot of those district attorneys then become rubber-stamp judges who may not look at the evidence with the same lens and perspective that a neutral judge or a judge with a criminal defense background may look at it. And so the rights of individual citizens have been degraded along with the Fourth Amendment protections that they’re supposed to protect them with.

Radley Balko: When Detective Yant shot and killed Cole, Las Vegas used a process called a coroner’s inquest to investigate deaths in police custody. It’s a somewhat antiquated system in which an appointed county coroner assembles a jury to determine whether a death was justified, excusable, or criminal. 

Lagomarsino knew the odds were stacked against him. In Clark County, such inquests had nearly always found killings by police officers to be justified. But he also had some reason to hope the inquest would rule against Yant. It wasn’t just that Cole was unarmed, or even that he wasn’t the same Trevon Cole claimed in the search warrant. It was also because Yant’s story just didn’t match the evidence. 

Yant said Cole stood up and moved as if he was drawing a weapon. But that story was inconsistent with the autopsy results, which showed that the bullet had moved downward through Cole’s body. The medical examiner concluded that Cole was likely “crouched over the toilet,” just as Sequioa Pearce had told the police.

Yant also said he was sure he saw something shiny in Cole’s hand — what he thought was a gun. After he was killed, though, the only thing in Cole’s hand was a tube of lip balm.

Andre Lagomarsino: No officers ever heard Yant say, “Put your hands up, let me see your hands.” Nobody ever heard anyone yell “gun,” even though it’s Metro policy to do so when a gun is spotted.

Radley Balko: In fact, the more information that came out about Cole’s death, the worse it began to look for the police — and for Yant in particular. 

Then, less than a month after Cole’s death, Las Vegas police killed another man outside of a Costco, a military veteran named Erik Scott. Scott, carrying a permitted gun in his holster, was asked to leave the store. Police confronted him after a Costco employee reported that he was acting erratically. 

Douglas Gillespie: In the past 34 days, we at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department have had more than 325,000 calls for service. In that time, we have had five officer-involved shootings. 

Radley Balko: Sheriff Doug Gillespe tried to reassure the public with a video statement. 

Douglas Gillespie: I need to allow the investigation to take place and the inquest process to be completed before I speak. I know some lack confidence in the coroner’s inquest process. But it is the process that we have.

Radley Balko: There were plenty of reasons to be skeptical. Clark County’s inquest system was instituted in response to public outrage after a white police officer killed a Black teenager in 1969. That killing was deemed justified. But so have nearly all of the others. 

In an investigative series published a year after Cole’s death, the Las Vegas Review-Journal found that the city’s police were responsible for a disproportionately high number of killings, and that many could have been prevented. 

Yet in the 40 years since the inquest system was implemented, just once had it found a police officer killing unjustified, and even that officer was never criminally charged.

Andre Lagomarsino: Trevon Cole’s case followed decades of shootings, decades of police misconduct that went unpunished. Of all the officer-involved shootings, nobody was ever held accountable.

Radley Balko: The inquest system is unique to Las Vegas and mirrors an antiquated system once used in England. Under the rules of the inquest, family members and attorneys can submit written questions as part of the process, but a prosecutor ultimately conducts the questioning. There’s no cross-examination and only limited follow-up. Ultimately, the prosecutor decides whether the officer in question will be charged. 

Cole’s inquest came first and lasted two days. The outcome was the same as nearly all the others.

Newscaster: Good evening, and thanks for joining us tonight. A Metro officer at the center of his third shooting was found justified in the latest coroner’s inquest. An eight-person jury said Officer Bryan Yant was within his rights to kill 21-year-old Trevon Cole while executing a search warrant back in June.

Radley Balko: A few months later, Metro police’s Use of Force board — the department’s internal disciplinary system — also cleared Yant of any wrongdoing in Cole’s death. As for Erik Scott, the inquest had ruled police were justified in killing him too.

But the department’s prolific rate of killing people combined with the county’s prolific rate of clearing police officers was starting to draw scrutiny. The county ultimately decided that the inquest system needed reform. Sheriff Gillespie pledged that he was listening — that the department was evolving.

Douglas Gillespie: We saw opportunities to improve and created the Critical Incident Review Team, CIRT. The findings of the CIRT team and the use of force board help us continue to learn from these incidents and how to improve upon our tactics, training, and decision-making in the future. We’re also making a change to how we respond to officer-involved shootings by creating a force investigation team. This team, made up of experienced homicide investigators, will only respond to officer-involved shootings and other use-of-force incidents.

Radley Balko: But then, in late 2011, another police killing. Las Vegas police shot and killed Stanley Gibson, a veteran experiencing mental illness, as he sat in his car. The U.S. Department of Justice finally stepped in and opened a six-month investigation of the department and focused specifically on the use of force.

Bernard Melekian: We went back to the year 2007, with a careful eye on the history of how the department instructed officers on use of force. 

Radley Balko: Here’s Bernard Melekian, director of the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Police Services office.

Bernard Melekian: That review has culminated in a report being distributed today. An extensive analysis that identifies 75 findings and recommendations.

Radley Balko: The report included a number of recommendations, from better training on racial profiling and deescalation, to analyzing use of force data, to being more transparent with the public. Sheriff Gillespie said the department “embraced the report.”

Douglas Gillespie: I think we have already seen the transformation taking place. I think we as a police department are being more critical of our use of force. And we are admitting when we don’t do things well.

Andre Lagomarsino: Inch by inch there is progress. And there have been somewhat reduced-officer involved shootings because of the reforms. So reforms do work, but progress takes a really long time. And it’s almost like whack-a-mole where, yes, you might stop and prevent some more officer-involved shootings, but other problems arise with unwarranted stops, detentions, arrests, and beatings.

Radley Balko: In 2013, the county replaced the coroner’s inquest system with a fact-finding review process led by the district attorney’s office. 

By most accounts, Las Vegas Metro police are less violent today than they were back in 2010, when they killed Trevon Cole. That year there were 25 officer-involved shootings. In 2023, there were only 10. But last year there was a slight uptick, despite a decline in crime. 

Progress has been slow. In 2021, the Internal Affairs Bureau released its first-ever accountability report, detailing complaints against police officers and the outcomes of internal investigations. The police had promised to make this an annual report. But the department then decided the report didn’t meet its “business needs.” And so the department hasn’t published another report since.

Andre Lagomarsino: This case happened in 2010, but even today, whether it’s a raid or just an arrest or a stop, the police department continues to stop, detain, and arrest individuals without probable cause. We have several cases in our office now that are captured on body cam, where the officers will stop, for example, motorists, who may look “shady,” in their words, or pedestrians who may look like “rappers,” in their words, and just stop, detain, search, and rough up these citizens.

Radley Balko: The Las Vegas criminal justice system has continued to routinely violate the rights of suspected drug offenders in other ways too.

In 2016, the journalism nonprofit ProPublica published a damning report. It found that since the 1990s, Vegas metro police was one of several law enforcement agencies across the country that had been using drug field test kits known to produce false positives. These false positives were then used to arrest people, confiscate property under asset forfeiture laws, obtain search warrants, and coerce people into plea bargains.

Reporter: Here is how the field drug tests work. Officers drop the substance into this small bag. If a vial changes color, that indicates the presence of an illegal drug.

Radley Balko: In 2024, NBC reported on a Quattrone Center study with Penn university revealing that nearly half of the 1.5 million annual drug-related arrests involve field tests. Of those, approximately 30,000 arrests came from false positives. 

Reporter: How significant is that number?

Ross Miller: For one thing, it’s not a number. It’s 30,000 people. That’s 30,000 times a year that the criminal justice system is getting it wrong.

Radley Balko: The really damning part is that ProPublica uncovered communications showing that in Las Vegas, city officials knew about the false positives. By 2010, the city crime lab wanted to abandon the test kits, and in 2014 it documented the problem in a report to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Yet the city continued using the tests. Between 2013 and 2015 alone, they were used to help win more than 10,000 drug convictions — 99 percent of those were through guilty pleas. 

Here’s ProPublica reporter Ryan Gabrielson, discussing the problem in an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Ryan Gabrielson: Wrongful convictions on a level we don’t know. because the Las Vegas crime lab does not retest the field test results after somebody pleads guilty — and more than two-thirds of cases are ended by guilty plea at the first hearing.

So the vast majority of drug evidence in Las Vegas never gets tested, these field tests never get rechecked even though they’re known to produce false positives.

Radley Balko: Four years later, even as the city had begun overturning some of these convictions, police told ProPublica that they were still using the faulty kits.

While the field tests weren’t a factor in Cole’s case, they highlight a broader problem: a department that views the rights of suspected drug offenders as negotiable barriers to work around rather than fundamental protections enshrined in the Constitution.

In 2011, Trevon Cole’s family sued the police department. They eventually settled with the county for $1.7 million.

And as for Detective Yant?

Andre Lagomarsino: He was moved over to the police union, where he now advises officers who are involved in officer-involved shootings.

Radley Balko: In fact, Yant’s bio on the police union website proudly notes that he was trained by the Force Science Institute, an organization profiled in the New York Times for routinely justifying police shootings and misconduct. The Justice Department has criticized the group’s theories as “lacking in both foundation and reliability.”

Most officers never fire their guns over the course of an entire career. Yet after shooting three people on duty, one of whom was unarmed, Yant now makes his living as an expert in police shootings. 

Here’s a clip from a Las Vegas police union video.

LVPPA: As you can imagine, that officer is in a very difficult predicament, in as much as the officer doesn’t believe that he used reportable force at all. So, we have use-of-force experts at PPA. We have Detective Brian Yant who has been certified by Force Science.

Andre Lagomarsino: It’s often asked why detective Yant was still allowed to be an officer after his prior shootings and his prior false statements. And nobody really has a straight answer to that. The best answer that I could ever come up with is that the police union in Las Vegas, and particularly Nevada, is extremely strong. 

They have an officer’s bill of rights, even, enshrined in the Nevada revised statutes. And so it’s my belief that the union’s power was able to allow Detective Yant to continue to be an officer, even though he had no business being a police officer.

Sequoia Pearce: It’s just crazy how you can just get away with murder on more than one occasion just because you have a badge. 

I just feel like they can do whatever they want to do. They can break all the rules and still end up winning in the end. 

Radley Balko: Incredibly, in 2022 Yant and the police union sued the Metropolitan Police Department for violating the rights of police officers who were under investigation for misconduct.

We reached out to the Metro police and the police union for comment. They’ve declined.

Sequioa Pearce doesn’t live in Las Vegas anymore. But Trevon Cole will never be far from her life. He was, of course, her fiancée. And she endured the trauma of witnessing his death. But she also sees a part of him every day.

Kalynn: I wouldn’t consider myself an activist, but I would consider myself an example.

Radley Balko: That’s the voice of Trevon Cole and Sequoia Pearce’s daughter, Kalynn. We didn’t expect to talk to her for this podcast. But while we were interviewing Pearce, Kalynn dropped by the recording studio and, with her mother’s permission, she was happy to talk about her dad — and at the time we talked, police in Illinois had just killed a woman named Sonya Massey in her home. Kalynn brought up the case.

Kalynn: OK, so I’m Kalynn and I’m 14.

Radley Balko: Hi, Kalynn, I’m Radley. Thanks for talking to us. Yeah, we were just talking about what happened to your dad. And your mom was telling us when you first heard about it, she said, I think, you were 3. I guess I’m just curious — we’ve heard lots of great things about your dad and that he was really full of life and a really kind person. How does his memory play into your life? Do you think about him often?

Kalynn: I mean, it’s not that I think about him often, it’s that I wonder very often, especially because I didn’t really get to meet him. You see pictures, people tell you stories and stuff like that. And a lot of people tell me I remind them of him. Even though I know what he looks like and things of that sort, it’s still a — I’m looking for the word. It’s still a mystery in a way.

Radley Balko: Knowing what happened to him, has that made you at all interested in learning about police abuse and cases like that, or is it just too difficult?

Kalynn: Honestly, the story about Sonya Massey, is that her name?

Radley Balko: The most recent case, yeah.

Kalynn: The most recent case. When I heard about it, it was just like it was, it was kind of, I wouldn’t say triggering for me, but it was just like, “Dang, it happened again.”

News Anchor: People who attended rallies and vigils across the country yesterday are demanding justice for Sonya Massey. The 36-year-old is dead after calling 9-1-1 for help earlier this month and getting shot by a sheriff’s deputy in her own home.

Related

Cop Who Shot Sonya Massey Lied to Make a Drug Arrest. It Didn’t Hurt His Career.

Reporter: Dozens gathered for a Justice for Sonya Massey rally after the mother of two was shot and killed by a downstate deputy earlier this month. Demonstrators coming together demanding Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill that aims to combat police misconduct, excessive force, and racial bias in law enforcement.

Kalynn: It was a similar story, but it wasn’t a similar story. And it was just — it was just really something that happens way too often.

Radley Balko: Because she was born so soon after her father was killed, Kalynn’s birthday celebrations will always be somewhat muted by her dad’s death. Here’s her mom, Sequoia Pearce.

Sequoia Pearce: I could honestly say I never really grieved because shortly after, I was a mom five days later. So I didn’t really — I beat myself up to not sink into postpartum because at that time I had newly started hearing about people having postpartum, and I just like had to force myself to like grow up.

Radley Balko: The 20-year-old Sequioa Pearce was forced to grow up fast after her fiancee’s death. Kalynn grew up without her biological dad. And we’ll never know what kind of father Trevon Cole may have been.

When we talk about the collateral damage of the drug war, it’s not just those who were killed. It’s the friends and family left behind. It’s the intergenerational trauma, and family ties hacked off before they can bloom.

Sequoia Pearce: I don’t want anyone to forget about him. But I do want people to know that there are injustices and there are real victims. We are the real victims here.

We have to figure life out, and we’re still figuring it out, after they could just do what they want to do. They can falsify things and come after the wrong person and create this character and do what they want to do. I just feel like people need to know. They need to know.

Radley Balko: Next time on Collateral Damage. 

Pilot 1: We’re trying to remain covert at this point. 

Pilot 2: See, I don’t know if this is Bandido or if it’s Amigo.

Pilot 1: I recommend we follow him. I do not recommend Phase 3 at this time.

Ian Vasquez: The drug war creates all sorts of innocent victims. 

Jan Schakowsky: We have spent billions of taxpayer dollars, employed personnel from numerous agencies around the world, and the drugs continue to flow into the United States. Are the Bowers acceptable collateral damage in this war on drugs?

Radley Balko: Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept. 

It was reported and written by me, Radley Balko.

Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer, who also served as producer and editor.

Laura Flynn is our show runner.

Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief:

The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal. 

We had editing support from Maryam Saleh.

Truc Nguyen mixed our show.

Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow. 

Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan.

Art direction by Fei Liu.

Illustrations by Tara Anand.

Copy editing by Nara Shin.

Social and video media by Chelsey B. Coombs.

Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance. 

This series was made possible by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund. 

If you want to send us a message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com

To continue to follow my work and reporting, check out my newsletter, The Watch, at radleybalko.substack.com.

Thank you for listening. 

The post Episode Five: What Fourth Amendment?  appeared first on The Intercept.

Peter McWilliams was an optimist, activist, poet, and advocate for personal freedom. His book “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country” resonated across the political spectrum. After contracting AIDS and being diagnosed with AIDS-related non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 1996, McWilliams turned to medical marijuana to manage his nausea and keep down his medication. He became a vocal advocate for medical cannabis, but in 1997, he was arrested by federal authorities for running a grow operation, despite California creating some protections for medicinal use at the time.

As a condition of his bail, McWilliams was forced to stop using marijuana, even though it played a critical role in his treatment. He later died after choking on his own vomit, while awaiting sentencing by a federal judge. This episode of Collateral Damage explores McWilliams’s life and legacy, and examines how the drug war has obstructed health care. 

Transcript

Peter McWilliams: I want to tell you about a pair of epiphanies that I had in 1996. The first happened in March of 1996 when I was diagnosed with both AIDS and cancer. I tell you this early on because I want your sympathy throughout the rest of this speech. [Laughter]

Radley Balko: That’s Peter McWilliams, a self-help author and poet, speaking at the 1998 Libertarian Party National Convention.

Peter McWilliams: When you mention AIDS or cancer, people are so afraid of their own death that they treat you very nicely.

Radley Balko: McWilliams, known for his wit and sharp commentary, was also brutally honest about his struggle with chemotherapy and AIDS treatment.

Peter McWilliams: So the nausea that was treated, that was caused by these things, ended instantly with marijuana. With one puff of marijuana.

Radley Balko: Speaking both to the crowd and a televised C-SPAN audience, McWilliams shared that medical marijuana was far more effective for him than the anti-nausea medication he had been prescribed.

Peter McWilliams: It is astonishing how well it works. And you have to understand how serious it is when you can’t keep your medication down. It’s not just that it’s uncomfortable. If you can’t keep that medication down, it’s not gonna save your life.

Radley Balko: McWilliams wasn’t just making a personal plea — he was urging his audience to challenge medical marijuana prohibition.

Julie Feldman: So it certainly pays to know someone like Peter McWilliams. 

Host: Here’s a guy who has written three bestselling books. And you know what? He published them himself.

Conan O’Brien: Please welcome Peter McWilliams. 

Todd McCormick: Peter had become a multimillionaire before he moved out of his mother’s house in Michigan. When he was in his late teens, early 20s, he wrote a book called “Come Love With Me and Be My Life: The Romantic Poetry of Peter McWilliams,” went on to sell over 3.5 million copies of a poetry book. Which is pretty incredible.

Radley Balko: But McWilliams wasn’t just a poet. He was also a technophile, a columnist, a motivational speaker, and a prolific self-help author. He was friends with the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. He wrote and directed a movie starring Bette Midler. He appeared on Conan O’Brien, Oprah, and was a repeat guest on “Larry King Live.”

Larry King: One other thing, Peter. You self-publish, right?

Peter McWilliams: Yes. 

Larry King: Very hard to be successful; not many that make bestseller lists.

Radley Balko: He thought of himself first and foremost as a humanist. And above all, Peter McWilliams was perpetually curious.

Peter McWilliams: Hundreds of suggestions. It’s a thick book. People look at it and go, “Oh, it’s thick.”

Cyndy Canty: I’ll never read it.

Peter McWilliams: I’ll never read it. But every lefthand page, as you pointed out, is a quote. One of my favorite quotes is from Mae West.

Cyndy Canty: Which is? 

Peter McWilliams: Mae West said, “Oh, I used to feel bad about what I did.” And someone said “Did you reform?” “No, I just don’t feel bad anymore.” [Laughing]

Radley Balko: The people close to McWilliams say he never aspired to be the sort of person who would give a barnstorming speech at a political convention. And as someone with such lust for life, he certainly never saw himself as a victim. Yet martyrdom came calling anyway.

In March of 1996, McWilliams was diagnosed with AIDS and with AIDS-related non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was not much of a drug user. But smoking marijuana was the only thing that eased the nausea brought on by the AIDS medication and the chemotherapy.

Marijuana allowed him to keep down the drugs that were keeping him alive. And so he became a supporter, and then a spokesperson, and then a passionate advocate for civil libertarianism.

Peter McWilliams: Our leaders whom we trust, whom we look up to, from the Democratic president to the who-knows-what-he-is drug czar, to the Republican leaders in Congress of both the House and the Senate: They have lied to us about medical marijuana. They have lied to us about the harm of marijuana. There is no more benign medicinal substance known to human beings. And we have been lied about this.

Radley Balko: Less than two years after that speech, McWilliams would be dead at the age of 50. California, where he lived, had effectively legalized marijuana for medicinal use, but the federal government had made it a priority to stop the momentum for medical marijuana from spreading to other states. So the feds began going after growers and activists in places that had approved the treatment. And that put McWilliams in their crosshairs.

Thomas Ballanco: Prior to his being arrested, he had had his checkup. He had regular checkups. His viral load had been undetectable for over a year, and his T-cell count was high. 

Well, as soon as he was prohibited from using natural cannabis, his viral load started to spike. And it went into the thousands. Then it went into the 100,000s. Not only did we see this in his blood, you could see this in his physical well-being. 

He went from, like, being active and vivacious to eventually being in a wheelchair, being exhausted all the time. Being what you think of when you think of classic AIDS patients from the early days of AIDS.

Radley Balko: Deprived of marijuana after his arrest, the nausea from chemotherapy and the AIDS drugs left McWilliams unable to keep down his medication. It also made it difficult to eat. And so the illness took over, and his body withered until it failed. America’s drug war had killed Peter McWilliams.

From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage.

I’m Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years. 

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeat drug addiction, but the “war” part quickly became all too literal. 

When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and ’90s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections.

All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause. 

But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage. 

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is Episode 4, “Criminalizing Care: The remarkable life and cruel death of Peter McWilliams.”

Peter McWilliams was born in August 1949 in Detroit, Michigan, and grew up in the nearby suburb of Allen Park. He was a shy and sensitive kid, but also creative and ambitious. He began writing poetry in his teens and published his first book of poems at the age of 17. McWilliams came out as gay in the early 1970s, and eventually moved to West Hollywood, California.

Thomas Ballanco: He would always say, “I am not a proud fag, but I am a fag.”

Radley Balko: That’s McWilliams’s old attorney Thomas Ballanco, a fellow marijuana activist who first met McWilliams in the mid-1990s at a party in the West Hollywood neighborhood of Bel Air.

Thomas Ballanco: We think of, oh, coming out, being publicly gay in this day and age, OK, that is not an uncommon thing. Peter came out at a young age in the early ’70s. And I have to emphasize what a different time that was and what that meant when you’re in Michigan and you come to the realization, “Hey, I’m a gay man.” And that, in a way that is so much more accepted and common now, really became a defining characteristic. And he did not flaunt that. He was not “Oh, I’m this and that.” But he didn’t deny that.

Radley Balko: McWilliams was at first drawn more toward self-improvement than gay activism. His sexuality was of course a huge part of his own life, and he didn’t shy away from writing about it. 

But he also looked for ways to overcome his shyness, insecurity, and other quirks that he saw as barriers to his happiness. And he wanted to share what did and didn’t work for him with others, so they could improve their own lives.

Thomas Ballanco: So much of his writing, his activism was really about liberating the individual, freeing the person inside to be who they were. He rejected the title of a gay rights activist. Because he said that wasn’t his fight. He didn’t even want to be a marijuana activist. He’s always said, ‘I’m a humanist, advocating for human beings. I don’t think everybody should be gay, but people who are gay are gay.’

Radley Balko: But McWilliams soon discovered that gay rights are inseparable from self-liberation.

Thomas Ballanco: As he began to write, like I think a lot of people who were open about their sexuality then, he got flooded with letters that never stopped. Till the day he died, he had letters on his desk of people around the country that were, “Hey, I’ve been wrestling with my sexuality. I feel like I’m gay, but I don’t know how to tell anybody. I don’t want to explain this to anybody.” 

And he answered them. He answered them all. And he engaged on that. He was a compassionate and caring person, and I think that’s what drove him to some of this activism. That he couldn’t stomach the thought — no pun intended because of the nausea — he couldn’t stomach the thought of living in a society that criminalized the consensual behaviors of adults.

Radley Balko: In 1993, McWilliams published his renowned book “Ain’t Nobody’s Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country.” Channeling the philosopher John Stuart Mill, the book was a plea for people to be left alone to pursue their own happiness, so long as they don’t harm others. 

Conan O’Brien: My next guest has written more than 30 books … 

Radley Balko: McWilliams went on Conan O’Brien’s show to talk about his new book. His wardrobe was quintessentially Peter McWilliams: baggy beige slacks, a Beavis and Butt-Head t-shirt, and a blue blazer that looked as if he’d just thrown it on after a long nap. O’Brien’s first question: What is a consensual crime?

Peter McWilliams: A consensual crime is anything they can put us in jail for that doesn’t physically harm the person or property of another. And we’re talking about things like gambling, drug use, homosexuality, prostitution, helmet laws, seatbelt laws, all of that.

Radley Balko: McWilliams went on to break down the cost of consensual crimes in terms of the thousands jailed and millions more arrested every year. O’Brien followed by asking about drug abuse specifically, and if McWilliams thought selling or using cocaine is harmless. 

Peter McWilliams: It’s as adults, it’s not harmless necessarily. But then if you look at the most harmful drug in the country, it’s definitely cigarettes. 500,000 people a year die from cigarettes. 

Conan O’Brien: Right. 

Peter McWilliams: All the illegal drugs put together, it’s less than 6,000 people a year. So in terms of actual harm, either we should be consistent, we should ban cigarettes, ban alcohol. [Crosstalk.] Or we have to let adults make their own decisions.

Radley Balko: Three years after that appearance, Williams was diagnosed with AIDS and lymphoma.

Thomas Ballanco: He lived as much of his life as he could in his bathrobe, because of his illnesses. So he was actively medicating. What was called, at that time, the combination cocktail was a cutting-edge drug but had tremendous nausea side effect. And amongst the many coping mechanisms Peter had for the ever-present nausea in his life was soaking in hot water. So he had turned his entire swimming pool into, effectively, a hot tub. So a bunch of meetings were held in his swimming pool that was 98 degrees.

Radley Balko: Right around the same time that McWilliams got sick, California voters passed Proposition 215, which began to create a legal structure around medical marijuana. The ballot measure didn’t outright legalize marijuana itself, but it did protect doctors, patients, and caregivers from state prosecution. The law was seen as fairly radical at the time — this was 1996.

Although the federal government continued to prohibit the drug, the FDA had already recognized the medical benefits of cannabis for a decade. Here’s Jacob Sullum, a senior editor at Reason magazine and the author of the book “Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use.” 

Jacob Sullum: Back in the ’80s, the Food and Drug Administration approved a synthetic form of THC, which is the main active ingredient in marijuana, as a treatment, initially, for the side effects of cancer chemotherapy. And then later they approved another use, which is for AIDS wasting syndrome. And this was established through the kind of controlled clinical trials that the FDA demands.

It recognized that marijuana is effective at relieving nausea, restoring appetite, enhancing appetite, which is something people have recognized for a long time. But that was validated in a very systematic way in order to get FDA approval for what was Marinol at the time, and now we have generic versions of that. So how can you maintain that the main active ingredient in marijuana does have recognized medical uses, but marijuana does not have recognized medical uses? It didn’t really make sense.

Radley Balko: And patients like McWilliams ran into a problem with Marinol. It didn’t work quickly enough for them to keep their medication down. Here’s Ballanco again.

Thomas Ballanco: He would take his combination cocktail dose. I think it was five times a day, he had to take this handful of pills that work together. It was what was termed low-level chemotherapy. When it hit his stomach, somewhere along the way, it would create nausea. And if he vomited, he would lose at least a portion of that dose. But it was so strong that he couldn’t just take another dose.

Let’s say he took a dose; 15 minutes later, he vomits. He’s absorbed some of that, but who knows how much? He couldn’t just take another one. So when he vomited, he lost the benefit of that dose. So what he found was when he was taking the oral antiemetics, to include Marinol, which was the pharmaceutical THC, the delayed onset didn’t help him. 

He takes the drugs, he feels nauseous, he takes another drug to make him not nauseous — too late. In the time between that taking effect, he’s already thrown up. Whereas, if he smokes cannabis as he’s taking it, it’s an almost immediate impact. He feels a little nauseous, he smokes a little more, it settles his stomach.

Radley Balko: For McWilliams, only smoking marijuana allowed him to fully digest the medicine that was keeping him alive.

Thomas Ballanco: So that was the pattern he had settled into for about two years, living with AIDS and cancer, effectively.

Jacob Sullum: For somebody who’s severely nauseated and vomiting all the time, if you have to swallow a capsule and keep it down, that in itself is a challenge.

When you consume it orally, THC orally, it gets processed through the liver, which produces byproducts that change the psychoactive experience, and some people find more disturbing than smoked marijuana or vaporized marijuana.

Third, dose control is much harder when you swallow a capsule, and you may have to wait an hour or more for the effects to come on. If it turns out it was too much, it’s too late. And if it turns out it’s too little, in order to adjust the dose it takes a lot longer than with a product that’s either smoked or vaporized and inhaled. So you have much better dose control, and you have much faster action.

Radley Balko: McWilliams quickly became an advocate and then a financial supporter of legalization groups and the rush of cultivators, dispensaries, and other entrepreneurs that popped up in the wake of California’s medical marijuana initiative. That work eventually led him to Todd McCormick, an activist and a pot-growing guru.

Todd McCormick: My name is Todd McCormick. I’m 53 years old. I’m an author, and I’m the owner of a company called Authentic Genetics. I provide cannabis seeds around the world.

Radley Balko: McCormick was diagnosed with cancer nine different times between the ages of 2 and 10, and then again at the age of 15. After one chemotherapy session, his mother passed him a joint, which immediately helped him feel better. This was 1979, years before medicinal marijuana was legal.

Todd McCormick: I was using medical cannabis when I was 9 years old, and I was asked to talk to another kid who was also going through the same methotrexate chemotherapy that I was on and wasn’t having as good of an effect with it. And when we were walking to the hospital room where the kid was in, I asked my doctor — he was holding my hand, I remember he was so much taller than me — and I said, “You want me to lie to him and not tell him I’m smoking marijuana, right?” And he stopped me, he says, “I never told you to lie.” I said, “Well, you don’t want me telling him I smoke marijuana, right? And if we don’t tell him, that’s basically lying by omission.”

And I always felt like this is screwed up. Like that kid looked pale and bald. I had color in my skin and hair on my head. And it just felt wrong. And at that point on, I felt like other people were suffering because they didn’t have access to something that was helping me. And as I got older, it bothered me more, it bothered me more, it bothered me more. And I decided to try to do something about it. And I’ve been a cannabis activist for the last almost 30 years.

Radley Balko: In the mid-1990s, McCormick was living in Amsterdam, where he was editor of a magazine called Hemp Life. The magazine caught McWilliams’s eye, so he asked McCormick for a meeting. McCormick then flew out to Los Angeles.

Todd McCormick: We met, just really hit it off, got along really well. He’s from Michigan, I’m from Rhode Island, we both had kind of an East Coast vibe. He was just a really open and upfront person. 

He offered me a quarter-million dollars as a book advance. I took it, and yeah, as they say, the rest becomes history. But it was one of those LA moments where you have a meeting and your life is turned upside down in about two seconds.

Radley Balko: McCormick briefly moved into McWilliams’s home, and the two started talking about how to proselytize the benefits of medical cannabis.

Todd McCormick: We were sitting in his living room, going through the boxes, he saw me with these little packs of seeds that had a thousand seeds in each pack, and asked me how much a seed was worth. I told him about $10. And he realized that each little package of seeds in front of me was worth 5 to 10 grand, roughly. 

I had probably 50 to 70 packages of seeds. And he, at that point, revisited his offer to me. And when I said yes, he drove me directly down — well, I drove — but he had me drive him right directly to the bank, put money in my account, and it was like a handshake deal. He wanted me to do a website, he wanted me to do a grow book, he wanted me to go around and teach people how to cultivate cannabis at lectures, and he also wanted me to make a documentary about growing cannabis.

Radley Balko: With McWilliams’s money, McCormick bought his own place, a grand building in a tony neighborhood in the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains that they called “Liberty Castle.”

Todd McCormick: I found a home in Bel Air on Stone Canyon that we referred to as “The Castle.” It was like a five-storied, castle-styled mansion that was fully gated. It was a little storybook.

Radley Balko: The problem for activists like McCormick and McWilliams was that their advocacy was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Prop 215.

Todd McCormick: It didn’t really legalize anything, unfortunately. It created a medical necessity defense that you could present if you were arrested by the state. It did not protect you from any type of federal prosecution, which unfortunately I found out after being busted by the feds.

Radley Balko: McCormick, like most people, didn’t understand these legal intricacies at the time. He treated the law as it had been portrayed in the media — as if it had legalized cannabis for medical use. So he lived his life as if what he was doing was legal: openly and brazenly. And that presented a direct threat to the federal government’s war on the drug.

That war began during the Nixon administration, which demonized marijuana users, lumping them in with anti-war protesters, hippies, and the civil rights movement all as existential threats to the “silent majority” of white, suburban voters. 

The administration categorized the drug under Schedule I, the class of drugs that the government says are highly addictive and have no medicinal value. That made pot more tightly controlled than cocaine, amphetamines, and opium.

The focus on pot continued during the Reagan administration, which, like Nixon, saw marijuana users and advocates as part of a subversive counterculture. 

Ronald Reagan: Leading medical researchers are coming to the conclusion that marijuana, pot, grass, whatever you want to call it, is probably the most dangerous drug in the United States, and we haven’t even begun to find out all of the ill effects, but they are permanent ill effects.

Radley Balko: And despite Bill Clinton’s infamous line . . . 

Bill Clinton: I didn’t inhale, and never tried it again.

Radley Balko: His administration continued the policies of his predecessors.

By the mid-1990s, polls showed a growing portion of the public started to realize that pot wasn’t the dangerous gateway drug politicians portrayed it to be. Momentum was building to legalize the drug for medicinal purposes. California and Arizona went first, as voters passed ballot initiatives in 1996.

But the Clinton administration saw these referendums as a direct attack on the authority and supremacy of the federal government. The administration made clear that despite the will of voters, it planned to aggressively enforce the federal prohibition on marijuana — starting with threats to prosecute doctors in the state who recommended the drug.

Jacob Sullum: This was seen as an intolerable threat to the prohibition regime, not just by conservative Republicans, but by supposedly liberal Democrats. So the Clinton administration said, “We have to do something about this. This cannot be allowed. And we can’t have doctors recommending marijuana to their patients who then have some way to actually get the marijuana and use it to relieve their symptoms. This is intolerable.”

Radley Balko: The month after the two ballot initiatives passed, the Clinton administration held a well-publicized press conference, covered by C-SPAN, to denounce the voters of both states.

Donna Shalala: We have a problem. Increasing numbers of Americans believe that marijuana is not harmful. 

Radley Balko: Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. 

Donna Shalala: In California and in Arizona, voters sent very confusing messages to the teenagers in those states, and to young people all across the country. And let me make it very clear. This administration is opposed to the legalization of marijuana.

Radley Balko: Shalala was joined by Attorney General Janet Reno.

Janet Reno: Despite these initiatives, we want to make clear that federal law still applies, and federal officials will continue to apply the law as it has always done, on a case-by-case basis.

Barry McCaffrey: This is not medicine. This is a Cheech and Chong show.

Radley Balko: And here’s President Clinton’s drug czar, Barry McCaffrey.

Barry McCaffrey: Clearly the only thing that’s not under debate is whether federal law is still operative. It’s unaffected by these proposals.

Radley Balko: Clinton administration officials went out of their way to emphasize that there was a scientific process for approving drugs, and that federal agencies like the FDA and USDA had looked into medical marijuana and simply found no beneficial use for it.

Alan Leshner: Let me be clear. There is not an existing body of scientific evidence to suggest that smoked marijuana is a viable, effective medication.

Radley Balko: Alan Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the time, echoed the same talking point.

Alan Leshner: The scientific community gave up the study of marijuana as a potential medication in the 1980s. We at [National Institutes of Health] have received only one proposal in the last 10 years to examine smoked marijuana as a potential medication, and that failed peer review. So there is not a body of evidence to suggest that this is a viable medication.

Radley Balko: But this narrative pushed by Clinton administration officials isn’t exactly what happened.

After the break, we’ll dig deeper into the history of stigmatizing and criminalizing marijuana — and how Peter McWilliams found himself in the middle of that fight.

[Break]

Radley Balko: Pot has been used for medicinal purposes going back thousands of years. But in 1937, it was subjected to a heavy tax, due in part to racist fears that Black men used the drug to seduce white women, and also its association with Mexican, South Asian, and West Indian immigrants.

Sullum says the tax was burdensome enough to all but eradicate any legal market for the drug, despite the vocal objections from groups like the American Medical Association.

Jacob Sullum: AMA at that point in the late ’30s was saying, “Look, we think this still has medical use, you shouldn’t make it impossible to use for medical purposes or to research for medical purposes.” Congress pretty much dismissed those concerns.

Radley Balko: Over the next few decades, a number of studies touted medicinal benefits of the drug, but they were dismissed by Harry Anslinger, head of the agency that would later become the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA.

The Supreme Court struck down the marijuana tax in 1969. That opened a potential window for marijuana to go mainstream once again. But the Nixon administration responded with the Controlled Substances Act, which imposed a federal prohibition on a host of drugs that it classified based on their medicinal value and potential for abuse. Giving marijuana a Schedule I status cemented a firm stigma on the drug. Nixon would later be heard on one of the infamous White House tapes discussing the strategy.

Richard Nixon: I want a goddamn strong statement on marijuana. Can I get that out of this son-of-a-bitch Domestic Council?

H. R. “Bob” Haldeman: Sure.

Richard Nixon: I mean, one on marijuana that just tears the ass out of them …

Radley Balko: It’s pretty hard to make out, but Nixon says: “I want a goddamn strong statement on marijuana. … I mean, one on marijuana that just tears the ass out of them.” He adds a moment later, “I want to hit it, against legalizing and all that sort of thing.”

Richard Nixon: I want to hit it, against legalizing and all that sort of thing.

Radley Balko: Nixon’s decision to give cannabis Schedule I status made it all but impossible to do any medical research on the potential benefits of the drug.

Jacob Sullum: Marijuana’s Schedule I status made it relatively hard to research compared to other drugs. Secondly, there were a series of bureaucratic hoops you had to jump through, historically, in order to do research on marijuana specifically. And that didn’t even necessarily apply to other drugs that were used illegally as intoxicants. You had to go through several different approval processes. 

Another barrier was that, for many years, the only legal source of marijuana for research was this one contractor at the University of Mississippi that worked for the federal government, worked for the National Institute on Drug Abuse. And they produced the only source of marijuana that could legally be used in research. The fact that this was available through the National Institute on Drug Abuse tells you something, because it wasn’t an organization that was interested in researching the positive uses of marijuana; it wasn’t interested in looking into its medical utility. The research was focused on abuse. 

And even if you did manage to get approval for a medical study, you would have to be getting marijuana from this one source, which was not very high quality. There wasn’t much variety. The quality was not very high. And it was hard to get to begin with, because you had to go jump through all these hoops to get it approved.

People chanting: Stop arresting patients for medical marijuana! Stop arresting patients … 

Radley Balko: The 1996 ballot initiatives were an aggressive move by voters to break through the stalemate. Advocates expected to face government resistance — and they were right. The Arizona state legislature passed a law that effectively nullified that state’s ballot initiative.

And as some Californians moved cautiously forward, the Clinton administration began threatening doctors who prescribed medical marijuana. They began filing lawsuits against pot clubs, and going after operations. In one instance, the DEA staged a pre-dawn raid of a San Francisco pot club, confiscating about 2.5 pounds of pot. And in another, armed DEA agents seized 164 plants from a medical marijuana shop in northern California.

The decision to enforce federal law over the will of state voters was on its face undemocratic. And the choice to use such overwhelming force was wholly unnecessary. 

These weren’t kingpins fighting bloody street wars over turf. They were licensed businesses, operating openly under state law. The raids were intimidation: to send a message to these businesses, and California voters, that the federal government would resist any challenge to its authority.

Despite the implicit threat, citizens continued to make themselves heard. In 1998, medical marijuana ballot measures passed in Washington state, Oregon, Alaska, Nevada, and D.C. And in Arizona, voters overrode the legislature and approved medical pot for a second time.

Barry McCaffrey: This is not an issue of medical use of marijuana. We said it’s disguised as a — it’s a hoax proposition.

Radley Balko: But Clinton officials like drug czar McCaffrey insisted that the medical marijuana initiatives were just a ruse to get the drug legalized outright. 

Barry McCaffrey: And you may rest assured that we see this as a direct threat to the U.S. national drug strategy. We’re going to try and move on it in a balanced and sound way.

Jacob Sullum: The fact that they went to such lengths to try to stop medical use of marijuana tells you how terrified they were of this as a precedent. And I would say that they were right — that ultimately it proved to be the case, that allowing medical marijuana was an important first step toward broader legalization. That is the way it played out ultimately. So they were right to be worried.

Radley Balko: In California in particular, it became relatively easy to get a medical marijuana card, and some took advantage of that lenient policy to use the drug recreationally. But there were also plenty of sick people who actually needed it.

And Peter McWilliams was one of them.

Peter McWilliams: And so this was my first epiphany, was over here, watching my normal run to the bathroom, with one puff of marijuana, turn into a meandering raid on the kitchen. [Laughter and applause] And so the one epiphany was over here, and I said, “I am not going to rest until medical marijuana is available to every sick person who needs it in the United States.” [Applause] 

Radley Balko: McWilliams by that point was a minor celebrity, known for his poetry and his numerous books on computers, meditation, and self-help. He had also started working with Todd McCormick, who had become one of the world’s leading experts on cultivating pot. 

McCormick had a seed collection well into the thousands. He had been breeding them to create strains to treat specific ailments, and — as McCormick himself would admit — for recreational use as well.

Todd McCormick: I was just home growing. I had a lot of money and a big house, and I was just really growing at my own home. I was looking at doing research. I’m interested in cannabinoids and terpenes and the combinations. And what I was looking at doing is trying to go through my seed collection and build up what would be a living library, like I have now, of valuable and selected varieties.

Radley Balko: McCormick was also a key organizer behind a number of initiatives to inch the drug closer toward legalization. He and McWilliams became fierce advocates for cannabis rights at about the time that the federal government was asserting its power. And that made them prime targets.

Tom Ballanco first met them both at a birthday party for a mutual friend.

Thomas Ballanco: I happened to be in LA for Jack’s 50th birthday party. He invited me over to Todd McCormick’s house. The directions to get there were: “Go down Sunset, turn on Stone Canyon Boulevard, it’s the first big gray castle on your left.” So only in Bel Air do you need big and gray to identify which castle we’re talking about.

But I walked in, there’s two giant plants right there at the gate. I’m like, “Wow, somebody is really going after it.” There was a sign that said “Party on the third floor.” Got in the elevator. There’s another plant in the elevator. Got up to the top, bunch of people, there’s Jack and we’re talking, celebrating his birthday. 

And at some point, he’s like, “Come here, I want to show you something.” Takes me out onto the porch. And at that point, it was the most cannabis I had ever seen in one place. Thousands of plants — like there wasn’t surface area in this yard that didn’t have a plant or clones or something growing on it. And he’s like, “This is all legal because of Prop 215.” And I said, “Well, I’m glad you’re giving me that advice and I’m not giving you the advice.” But I was amazed. Not disconcerted, but, I will say, a little bit shocked. 

One of the party guests there was Peter McWilliams, and he was very happy to share his role in all this, that he and Todd were partners, and they were gonna revolutionize patients’ access to cannabis.

Todd McCormick: There was no drugs or guns, or it’s not like I had pot for sale or anything like that. I was just extravagantly growing the seeds I had at my house.

Radley Balko: Todd McCormick again.

Todd McCormick: I was buying soil by the pallet. I had a lot of resources. I had a staff of five working for me, helping keep the house clean and organized and gardening. And it wasn’t really a big deal. I mean, it sounds like, “Oh, you had all these thousands of marijuana plants growing in your house.” It was just like flowers everywhere and planting seeds, and it’s really all it was. And because I was going through what’s called a “sex and selection” phase of it, I would have thrown away 90 percent of those plants because like out of a pack of 10 seeds, I was only looking for one plant. So nine of the plants would have been discarded, and the one plant would have been kept. 

Radley Balko: McCormick says he never had any intention to sell the plants. But he thinks a local dispensary owner with a personal beef said otherwise and began working with the feds to set him and McWilliams up for arrest.

Radley Balko: The federal raid came on July 29, 1997.

Todd McCormick: I was just home, one of my friends showed up, and I had to go to Home Depot to pick up some stuff. When he and I left to go down the street, I was pulled over by a police car, and they brought me to the little fire station across from the Bel Air gates, where there were a lot of police cars. They proceeded to use about 90 officers, raided my home. I had no guns, no drugs, no illegal income, my taxes were paid. I mean, there was nothing there other than flowers growing in my backyard and in my basement and various places. 

But they raided me, and I will never cooperate. They brought me down. The next morning, I was charged with manufacturing of marijuana, and held on a million-dollar bond, which was eventually lowered to half a million dollars and posted by the actor Woody Harrelson.

Radley Balko: McWilliams himself didn’t grow pot. So the federal government came up with a creative way to go after him. They said by paying McCormick to write a book about growing marijuana, McWilliams was actually funding the cultivation of illegal drugs.

Todd McCormick: Peter had given me my book advance, and had basically enabled me to be able to rent my house, buy my food, get the tools I need — just like any production company would with anybody. If you hire a rock star to produce an album and you give them an advance, there’s a chance he’s going to spend it on, you know, girls and drugs and all sorts of stuff that’s beyond your control. Doesn’t mean that the music production company should be prosecuted for the rock stars’ activities.

But in this situation, in a sense, that’s exactly what happened. I took my money. I rented a big house in Bel Air. I started growing cannabis thinking it was legal, then got busted. And Peter was prosecuted for providing me with the money that I used to rent my house and buy my food and buy my soil and growing equipment. And it was pretty much that.

They called him a drug kingpin because of him financing me. But it wasn’t the situation at all. I mean, Peter had never made a dollar off of selling cannabis or any drug in his life. He was a multimillionaire from selling books, and that’s what he did really well. But they were looking for examples more than they were looking for justice. So they came after Peter and I pretty hard.

Radley Balko: The media had dubbed McCormick the “Pot Prince of Bel Air.” The feds raided Peter McWilliams’s home later that year. The police took the bulk of McWilliams’s files, computer, and papers. They confiscated his notes, notebooks, research, and many of his books.

Thomas Ballanco: This is a prolific author who — if there’s a manic part to manic depression — when he was creative, could be working on a dozen different projects. So the disruption that occurs when feds come in and start throwing around papers, unplugging hard drives, taking your computer, was really devastating to him as much as the incarceration. I think the aftermath was probably a pallet worth of file boxes of papers and outlines of books. To take that away from an author is a tremendous thing. You can’t just blink that, “Oh, yeah, I wrote it. I can remember it.” No way. So it was a dramatic impact on not just his personal but his professional life.

Radley Balko: Facing federal conspiracy charges for his funding of McCormick’s marijuana operation, McWilliams spent about a week in jail. Unable to access marijuana while he was there, he wasn’t able to keep down his medication. He quickly began to deteriorate. That’s when Thomas Ballanco first signed on to be his attorney.

Thomas Ballanco: The person I saw in the jail after just three days of incarceration looked entirely different from the person I had met on two previous occasions — the guy who had a full, lively complexion, was happy, looked alive, even though I knew he was literally fighting for his life against these diseases. 

In prison, his eyes were sunken. He was gaunt. His complexion had turned to white. And this is just only a few days of lock-up, so that first foray into federal lock-up was a harbinger of what would become his future.

Radley Balko: McWilliams’s bail was first set at $1 million, then lowered to $250,000. And though he had made a lot of money from his books, he also spent extravagantly, both on himself and on the people close to him.

Todd McCormick: There were times when Peter was a multimillionaire — like when I met him. But then, there was post-bust Peter, depressed. Peter spent more money quicker than anyone I’ve ever seen spend money in my life. By about 1999, I would say ’98, he was probably, I wouldn’t say broke because that wouldn’t be it, but he had used his resources not too wisely.

Radley Balko: McWilliams didn’t have bail money, and he didn’t want to pay out a hefty 10 percent sum for a bond.

Thomas Ballanco: Despite the money he had, he didn’t have $50,000 he wanted to just throw away to a bail bondsman to get out of jail. He did have properties. Now, he bought those properties. In the name of his mother was the house he lived in, and he had on the same street in the Hollywood Hills, a house that belonged to his brother. Peter bought them both, but he titled them to his family members. 

Now, in the time since, I’ve had a lot of clients who put properties in the names of their family members because they’re trying to hide assets that they might have gotten from ill-gotten gains. 

These were Peter’s legitimately gotten gains, but it was his way of literally sharing the wealth, leaving some legacy to his family. And his mother and his brother were both willing to put these homes up. So Peter, instead of doing the $50,000 to the bail bondsman, had his mother’s house and brother’s house put up as security for his bond.

Radley Balko: That decision would prove catastrophic. It essentially forced McWilliams to choose between his family’s livelihood and his own life. Because one of the conditions of McWilliams’s bail was that he could not use any illicit drugs, including medical marijuana. A violation would risk not only going back to jail to await trial, but forfeiting his mother and brother’s homes.

Thomas Ballanco: If he doesn’t use cannabis, his life is threatened. If he does use cannabis, his mother’s and brother’s homes are threatened.

Radley Balko: McWilliams ultimately chose his family. And without the ability to use medical cannabis to help keep his medicine down and stimulate his appetite, McWilliams’s health continued to suffer.

Todd McCormick: Peter McWilliams’s condition worsened incredible after he got arrested. I mean, Peter was dealing with AIDS and cancer simultaneously, so he was not in very good shape. His mood deteriorated, his health deteriorated, his ability to make money, write books — all of it fell away. I mean, it was devastating.

Radley Balko: As McWilliams’s health declined, so too did his odds of beating the charges against him.

Because Prop 215 was a state law, the federal courts refused to let federal juries hear about it. This meant defense attorneys were barred from utilizing the most likely defenses. For example, they couldn’t tell juries that medical marijuana was effectively legal under state law. They couldn’t say that a defendant needed the drug for medical reasons. And they couldn’t say that a defendant had mistakenly thought or was erroneously told by a lawyer that Prop 215 meant they couldn’t be prosecuted.

Thomas Ballanco: You can’t mention “medical” and “marijuana” in the same sentence. You can’t refer to Proposition 215. And you can’t use medical necessity as a defense. 

Todd McCormick: I was blown away. When I learned that I could not present a medical necessity defense in federal court, I also learned I could not present what’s called advice of counsel. Because prior to planting all those plants in my Bel Air mansion, I went and spoke to a lawyer and said, “What are my rights?” And he basically explained interstate and intrastate commerce and how they’re different, and if I did not distribute any of the cannabis, that I would be OK.

So I thought, under advice of counsel, that I would be legal if I didn’t let any of the cannabis go beyond my gate, so to speak. But because the government can come in with intent to distribute, that’s what I was charged with. Because they can crawl into your head and charge you with your intentions even if they’re not true. 

Jacob Sullum: Under federal law still, there is no legitimate use of marijuana except in federally approved research. There’s no legitimate medical use, there’s no legitimate recreational use. So when people were being arrested for producing or supplying medical marijuana in states where that was legal and being charged under federal law — legally, it was completely irrelevant that the state had decided to allow this. And that’s why and when people were tried on federal charges, they were not allowed to say this was for medical use.

Another aspect to that is typically the juries also did not know what penalties people were facing. So if you have medical marijuana providers who grew a large enough number of plants, they could be facing mandatory minimum sentences, five-year sentences, 10 year sentences.

Radley Balko: McWilliams and McCormick began to see the writing on the wall. They were guilty of violating federal law. And their most persuasive defenses — at least the defenses that would be most likely to sway a jury — would be prohibited in court. So they began to negotiate with prosecutors. Here’s McCormick.

Todd McCormick: Two deals were: Accept a guilty verdict, and your right to appeal. You get to keep your right to appeal, but if you lose your appeal, you come in and do the five years. But, you can stay out on bond pending your appeal.

Or you can waive your right to appeal, which at the time was not an option for me, because I believed in the appellate system and I thought the judge was wrong. So I wanted to fight my appeal. So you want to fight your appeal, that’s great. You can stay out of bond, pending your appeal, but if you lose your appeal, you come in and do the entire five years.

If you want to waive your appeal, you can go in before the judge and they can give you anywhere from zero to 60 months, depending on the judge. So you’re gonna put the leniency into the judge. I had no faith in Judge George King, none at all, after watching him and his decisions for three years, none at all. So I chose to keep my appellate rights, to stay out on bond for five years, and to roll the dice and hope I win my appeal so that I could go back and present my defense and go to trial.

Radley Balko: There’s some disagreement between McCormick and Ballanco about how Peter McWilliams approached his own plea negotiations back in 1999. Here’s what Ballanco recalls and he was acting as Peter’s attorney at the time.

Thomas Ballanco: Peter had been emphatic that we need to go to trial on this case. Now, this was a federal case, so that involved 10-year mandatory minimums. It could have gone higher than that. He thought it was important to do that.

Todd McCormick, on the other hand, felt like the risk was very high. They were offering a five-year prison term that might be better than the risk of 10 or even 20 years incarceration. Nobody wants to do a day in jail. These are difficult decisions for anyone. 

To complicate matters, the feds made it — all the offers were considered global. Which is to say, they’d only extend the offer if both Peter and Todd accepted. So Peter didn’t want to be in the position where he forced Todd to go to trial. Todd, at the same time, didn’t want to make Peter do time in jail when Peter didn’t want to. So these were ongoing negotiations.

Radley Balko: But according to McCormick, McWilliams had resigned himself to a conviction.

Todd McCormick: Peter accepted the deal that he would waive the right to appeal, and he would allow the judge to sentence him from anywhere from zero to 60 months because Peter thought the judge might be compassionate. I thought that was crazy.

Radley Balko: In the end, it wouldn’t matter. McWilliams would die before the case got that far.

As his lawyers negotiated with federal prosecutors, a fire broke out in McWilliams’s home. It destroyed any of his work that hadn’t already been confiscated by the federal government. The fire also destroyed the heater in McWilliams’s pool, so he began spending more time in his bath to seek relief from his nausea.

McWilliams was facing years in prison. He was sick and getting sicker. He couldn’t use the one medicine that seemed to boost his health. And to top it all off, he was now living in a fire-damaged home. 

The system was breaking him.

Thomas Ballanco: So he was running his bath — maybe he had taken Marinol, maybe he had taken the GHB, whatever it was — on his way to the bath, he had passed out against the bathroom door, so that he was in a sitting-up position, unconscious, invariably. Because any time that passes, if Peter, you know, got more than four hours in his existence, he’s going to be vomiting.

So he ends up vomiting while he’s in this sitting-up position passed out against his bathroom door. It has nowhere to go but gurgles back into his lungs. So he ended up asphyxiating and drowning in his own vomit — which is just a bittersweet description of, you know, he’s denied the medicine that controls his nausea. Yes, there were complications. Yes, there were other things going on. But ultimately, the mechanism of his death is vomit.

Radley Balko: Todd McCormick was in prison at the time. The feds had seized on a traffic ticket, revoked his bond, and locked him up.

Todd McCormick: I was in Terminal Island federal prison when Peter McWilliams died. I got the news from probably my mom, when I called that day and said, “How you doing?”

And I was devastated. I thought very highly of Peter. Peter had mood swings, and, you know, sometimes he would be your best friend, sometimes he could be your worst enemy. But most of the time, Peter was a very compassionate and empathetic person that cared a lot for other people. When I heard that he passed away, it was really heavy on me.

Before I went to prison, Peter and I were talking about writing “Death 101,” and how to deal with death, because death is imminently part of all of our lives. A lot of times people don’t face it because they don’t want to face their own ending. But I made the comment, or I made the argument that it was a key to unlocking your life’s happiness, because when you realize the party is going to come to an end, you can just enjoy it.

Nobody was with him when Peter died. But his mother did find a poem next to his bed, that was a poem about death. I believe that Peter, being the sophisticated mind that he was, would never write a suicide note. But he would write a poem. And it basically said, when I go, let me be. And I thought it was really beautiful.

Radley Balko: McWilliams’s life, advocacy, and death made national news, across the political spectrum. William F. Buckley — the father of modern conservatism — was friends with McWilliams and eulogized him in the pages of National Review. Peter McWilliams touched a lot of people. Online memorials and eulogies continued in the years after his death.

Paul Stanford: And he died because of marijuana prohibition.

Julia Rose: Please remember Peter McWilliams and in his words, “While alive, live.”

Radley Balko: It has been a quarter-century since Peter McWilliams died. Recreational marijuana is now legal in more than 20 states, and medical marijuana is legal in at least a dozen more. The federal government largely leaves the states alone to enforce their own laws.

Thomas Ballanco: Marijuana legalization would not have happened without the AIDS epidemic and the dramatic emphasis from the AIDS and gay community about the medicinal properties, the real world, this actually helps. This is a medicine that helps, for people who have no place else to turn.

Todd McCormick: It was people that were suffering. I mean, if it wasn’t for cancer patients like myself and AIDS patients like a lot of my friends who had absolutely nothing to lose, I don’t think we would have seen the push as hard as we did, because people like me were spearheads. There wasn’t many of us that were trying to fight this battle at the time because people were afraid of being locked up.

Thomas Ballanco: And Peter wasn’t an activist for this but finding himself at the epicenter. He was gay. He had AIDS. He lived in West Hollywood. And he was an entrepreneur. So he really set about after Prop 215 passed and said in California, medical patients can assert a defense of medical necessity in criminal trials. That’s all it said. Huge change. And Peter said, “We’ve got to make this medicine available to anybody who wants it.” Peter was at the forefront of, how do we get sick people this medicine now that the law says we can do it?

Todd McCormick: That whole case was beneficial to the movement in the way that it got people talking.

Thomas Ballanco: And it’s easy to look back and say, “Oh, well, they should have done this, or they should have done that.” But what Peter and Todd were acting from was a sense of urgency. These were both patients. Both of their lives had been dramatically improved from the use of medical cannabis, clandestinely at first. These were people suffering with medical conditions that got recommended by a physician, “Hey, you know, I’ve read, I heard marijuana can actually help in a situation like this.” So they were evangelists, if you will, trying to spread that news. 

Related

Oregon’s Decriminalization Vote Might Be Biggest Step Yet to Ending War on Drugs

Radley Balko: Ultimately, Peter McWilliams’s legacy was to usher in a kinder, more compassionate, more humane approach to drug prohibition. Those who knew him say that would have pleased him, though he’d have been disappointed that it took so long. But if he had lived, they say, he’d also still be fighting. He’d have continued fighting until drug prohibition itself was completely gone.

Thomas Ballanco: If Peter stood for anything, it was liberation of the individual. Be who you are, be yourself, don’t hurt other people, but enjoy your life. Enjoy your being. And I miss that. I miss that about him. I am ashamed that I couldn’t stop the government from squelching out that light, because it was a light and it was a truth. We suffer from the loss of truth like that.

Radley Balko: Tom Ballanco shared an anecdote with us that really illustrates the cruel, often absurd consequences that these policies inflicted on their victims. It takes place late in the government’s case against McWilliams and McCormick, as the two arrive in court for a hearing.

Thomas Ballanco: And so we’re shuffling into the courtroom. And Peter and Todd had been talking, and Peter at that point was in a wheelchair. And normally I wheel him in like, you know, I’m a mafia lawyer, wheeling in my client. But at this point, because Todd and Peter were talking, Todd took the handle to the wheelchair, and he was wheeling him through the door, and I was walking behind him with the other lawyers. 

As the door opened, it was these swinging doors, it like blew Todd’s hair off the back of his neck as it was swinging open. And it revealed this six-inch scar he has on the back of his neck from a surgery he had when he was like 9 years old. 

And I’m like, these are our wounded. The feds had put in point a guy in a wheelchair and a guy who had the five vertebrae in his neck fused when he was 9 years old. That’s who’s leading point on this effort. The lawyers are all behind him. So were they activists? Yeah, but they were still patients. They’re still wounded people. And they’re still facing the full force of the U.S. government, and it just should not be that way. These are policy discussions. They shouldn’t be forced on individual human beings. And these lives should have been spared. Todd’s still alive, but he didn’t need to spend five years of his life in federal prison. Peter certainly didn’t need to die.

Radley Balko: We reached out to Peter McWilliams’s brother Michael, hoping to interview him for this episode. 

He politely declined, but he did share a touching written tribute that he said we could use. He wrote: 

“Peter was an extraordinary person whose creativity flowed in so many different directions. He was different things to different people: A poet; a self-help guru; a computer expert; a survivor of depression; a self-published author, publicist and businessman. … And yes, a crusader on the side of the angels in the war on drugs.

So please don’t be offended when I say that I believe my brother’s enlistment in the drug war not only hastened the end of his life, but overshadowed his legacy as a writer. 

Peter will always be remembered by me as a humane gay artist rather than a casualty in the futile war on drugs.”

Next time on Collateral Damage.

Sequoia Pierce: We were hanging out watching TV, laying in bed, and we heard like an aggressive knock on the door. And then we heard like glass shatter.

I ran into the closet. And then he ran into the restroom.

I really kind of wasn’t really aware of what just had happened before my eyes.

Andre Lagomarsino: The Fourth Amendment in Nevada has been severely degraded with the way that the drug war has been pursued.

Radley Balko: Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept. 

It was reported and written by me, Radley Balko.

Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer, who also served as producer and editor.

Laura Flynn is our showrunner.

Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief.

The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal.

We had editing support from Maryam Saleh. 

Truc Nguyen mixed our show. 

Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow. 

Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan.

Art direction by Fei Liu.

Illustrations by Tara Anand.

Copy editing by Nara Shin.

Social and video media by Chelsey B. Coombs.

Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance. 

This series was made possible by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund. 

If you want to send us a message email us at podcasts@theintercept.com

To continue to follow my work and reporting, check out my newsletter, The Watch, at radleybalko.substack.com.

Thank you for listening.

The post Episode Four: Criminalizing Care appeared first on The Intercept.

When LeBron Gaither was 17, he got into an altercation with a staff member at his school that resulted in assault charges. As Gaither faced the possibility of a criminal record, a Kentucky State Police detective offered him a deal: Charges would go away if Gaither agreed to become a drug informant. At the time, such an agreement was illegal without consent from Gaither’s parents or guardian. But Gaither agreed. In 1996, Gaither’s body was found in the woods. Gaither had helped police build a case against a local drug dealer, and a grand jury member had tipped off the dealer that Gaither had testified against him. An autopsy revealed Gaither had been tortured before he was murdered. This episode revisits Gaither’s case and others in which police were reckless and careless with the lives of those they pressured to become informants.

Transcript

Radley Balko: On a Monday morning in July 1996, police officers escorted LeBron Gaither through the courthouse in Marion County, Kentucky. It was an odd place for the 18-year-old to be. LeBron wasn’t in court to answer for some crime he had committed. Instead, he’d come to court to tell a grand jury about a cocaine purchase he had helped arrange.

The following day, July 16, LeBron was back in court, this time in neighboring Taylor County. Again, he told a grand jury about a drug sale that he had helped arrange.

LeBron, it turns out, had been working as a confidential informant for the Kentucky State Police. But even for an informant, his appearance in court was unusual. 

Informants almost never testify in front of grand juries. Their identities are supposed to be kept secret. Until that week, no one other than a few police officers knew LeBron was working with the cops —not even his own family.

Shawn Gaither: We were never even told that he was going to even attempt to be an informant, or they were going to use him as an informant.

Radley Balko: That’s Shawn Gaither, LeBron’s older brother.

Shawn Gaither: We as a family would have absolutely told him, no, you’re not doing this.

Radley Balko: In fact, LeBron Gaither had been working with the police for almost a year. And it was a lopsided arrangement.

It all began when he had an altercation with an administrator that resulted in the school calling the police. In exchange for declining to charge him with assault, the cops asked if he’d become an informant instead. It would be dangerous work. 

LeBron hadn’t yet turned 18, and no one in law enforcement talked to his parents before recruiting him.

Shawn Gaither: I think he just wasn’t educated enough to know the danger that he was truly putting himself in, nor do I think that those dangers were explained to him.

Radley Balko: The single most important responsibility police have when dealing with informants is to make sure their cover isn’t blown. It’s why courts defer to police when they rely on an informant’s word to obtain search and arrest warrants without ever identifying the informant by name.

Yet that week in July, the police marched LeBron through two courthouses and had him testify in front of two separate grand juries, with no effort to conceal his face or his identity. One of the Taylor County jurors recognized LeBron. She tipped off her friend Jason Noel, a drug dealer who was already facing charges. Noel knew LeBron, and, as you might imagine, he was angry.

The very next day, LeBron Gaither’s police contacts picked him up, outfitted him with a recorder and a transmitter, and set him up to make yet another drug purchase. It was Wednesday, July 17, 1996. The target this time: Jason Noel.

Shawn Gaither: They were going to set up one more drug buy that was going to end in a bust. He was supposed to walk up to Jason’s car. Apparently, law enforcement was around the area, but in undercover vehicles. And the minute that he had the drugs in hand, his words were supposed to be “This looks good.” And law enforcement was going to swarm in, arrest him, arrest Jason and anybody else that was in the car. 

When my brother leaned into the car, there was a gentleman in the back seat that he didn’t know was in the back seat. Jason told him to come around to the passenger side, get in, so that they could do the transaction. My brother did. And then the car drove off.

Radley Balko: The police tried to follow the car but eventually lost track of it. They never saw LeBron Gaither alive again.

Sarah Stillman: To be an informant is a very, very dangerous thing to do.

Alexandra Natapoff: Exposing the identity of an informant in a public courtroom — colloquially known as “burning an informant” — in other words, revealing their identity and then using them again, was such an obvious breach of care, was such an obvious part of informant use rules.

Radley Balko: From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage.  

I’m Radley Balko. I’m an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years. In this series we’ve been telling the stories of people who needlessly died in the war on drugs. LeBron Gaither is one of them. LeBron didn’t sell, buy or use drugs before he became an informant. He just wanted a way to stay out of legal trouble. He trusted the police to protect him. And he’s not the only one.

Sarah Stillman: Kids are being used as informants. People with serious addictions are being used as informants. People with mental health and disability issues are being used in ways that strike me as grossly and patently dangerous and often results in injury or death.

Alexandra Natapoff: Sometimes people are shocked at how cavalier our criminal system is about the lives and the well-being of informants, and they say, “How can this be? How do we permit this?” One of the answers to that question is that the law permits it.

Radley Balko: The modern war on drugs dates back to the Nixon administration, half a century ago. In that time, the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

Confidential informants like LeBron Gaither are seen by our criminal justice system as expendable. The police are permitted to use vague, unenforceable promises to lure them into dangerous situations they aren’t prepared to handle, sometimes with money, but often with the assurance of clearing their records.

They rarely end up better off than they were before when they started working with police. They’re asked to interact with dangerous people, but without weapons or training. And with no real oversight, police can dangle promises of a clean record in exchange for cooperation, then repeatedly renege on their word until the informant agrees to help with additional cases. And because this work is all done in secret, their stories are rarely told.

This is Episode Three, “Blown Cover: The Preventable Murder of LeBron Gaither.”

Shawn Gaither: So I am Shawn Gaither. My relationship to LeBron is, I’m his oldest brother. Wherever I went, he was with me. We loved to play basketball as kids. We had a lot of good friends. We pretty much spent most of our childhood together. Where there was one, there was the other.

Radley Balko: The Gaither brothers were big sports fans, especially football. They went to church together and leaned on one another during a childhood that at times could be difficult.

Shawn Gaither: We lived in New York for several years and then we moved to Kentucky when I was 7. And so when we moved to Kentucky, my mom decided that she didn’t really want to come to Kentucky. So my grandmother took custody of us, and she raised us as if we were her own kids. 

So our grandmother had us until we were 15 and 14. And when mom came back, she got custody of us.

Radley Balko: The Gaithers’ mother arrived in Kentucky during a challenging time for any kid: their adolescence. 

She settled one county over from where they lived with their grandmother. But Shawn Gaither didn’t want to move. It would have meant leaving his friends and his school. So he decided to stay behind and live with his aunt. 

He and LeBron remained close, and in the years that followed, he saw his brother struggle with the challenges of living with an addicted parent. When LeBron was in high school, he had an altercation with a faculty member that would put him in the hands of the cops — and ultimately lead to his death.

Shawn Gaither: So the story we got was that one day, the assistant principal, [Charles] Lampley, was going around talking to all the classes about students disrespecting teachers and how the school was going to handle that going forward.

My understanding through his teacher and his classmates — when the assistant principal was talking, my brother raised his hand and said, “I got a question.” And based on what I know is that, his question was, “Well, what happens when teachers are disrespectful towards students, and the student’s not being disrespectful?”

There’s a couple of stories that happened after that. Allegedly, he got up and was told to go to the office by the assistant principal and that he would talk to him about it later.

The first story was that when he walked past the assistant principal, he shoved him. The assistant principal fell and ended up breaking his hip. 

And then the second story we got was that when he went to leave the classroom, he said something. The assistant principal stepped in front of him, but tripped over my brother’s feet and fell. 

So to know exactly what happened, it would be listening to third and fourth parties to try to figure out what exactly happened. Ultimately, the assistant principal did break his hip. There’s no denying that.

Radley Balko: As Shawn Gaither notes, accounts of the incident differ. The Louisville Courier Journal reported LeBron Gaither punched the assistant principal in the jaw, causing him to fall and break his hip.

Shawn Gaither: They apparently took him to the police station that day. And whatever conversations happened at the police station happened. To this day, I still don’t know what those conversations were. Obviously, it led to what he ultimately started doing for the law enforcement.

Radley Balko: LeBron was expelled from school following the alleged assault. He was later arrested for brandishing a gun during a dispute. 

Sarah Stillman: Kids can be caught up in something that happened on the spur of the moment, and they’re facing a drug charge. And then on the spot, they suddenly have this way out of it.

Radley Balko: That’s Sarah Stillman, a staff writer at the New Yorker who’s written at length about how young people are baited into working as informants in the war on drugs.

Sarah Stillman: And so I could imagine, to anyone, that would be very appealing. But especially if you’re a young person who doesn’t fully understand the legal system and you think that there’s a way out for you, the cops are providing you a way out, and so you take it.

Radley Balko: For her award-winning 2012 investigation in the New Yorker, Stillman interviewed more than 70 people, many of whom had once worked as informants themselves.

Sarah Stillman: In many of the interviews I did, people had very good reasons that they felt vulnerable and that they were willing to take dangerous deals, which included a young transgender woman who feared all the really scary things that could happen to her if she was incarcerated and put in a male facility where she did not identify as a male.

I think about kids who feared that they weren’t going to graduate high school and their whole life was going to be derailed by what could have been a minor drug charge, but they were told that if they didn’t do this, that they could face really serious repercussions.

Radley Balko: LeBron Gaither was facing assault charges.

Shawn Gaither: They told him he was going to do 20 years in prison for assaulting a principal. Now, being that he was, I’m assuming 16 at the time, 16, maybe getting ready to turn 17. I don’t know how you could tell a kid that they’re going to do that amount of time when there’s conflicting stories of what actually took place.

Radley Balko: Just a quick aside here: Not all of the details that Shawn Gaither recalls from his brother’s case match up with police, court, and media records. That’s entirely understandable. The events in this case happened nearly 30 years ago, and human memory is fallible. 

We also know that police can be deceptive about how they work with informants, and the secrecy and lack of oversight make it hard to verify police reports.

Shawn says police made his brother promises they could never have kept, like arranging a scholarship so he could play college football. But he also admits that police have denied that LeBron was ever threatened with 20 years in prison or that they made any such promises to his brother.

What is clear is that police first approached LeBron after the altercation at his school, that they asked him to consider working as an informant after he turned 18, and that he agreed. It’s also undisputed that he was paid for that work.

Fred Capps: You recall when it was that you started working more closely with LeBron? 

Danny Burton: Wasn’t long after his 18th birthday that we got together. 

Radley Balko: That’s Detective Danny Burton, testifying at the murder trial of Jason Noel in 1999. We’ll play excerpts from his trial throughout this episode, and apologies if the 25-year-old recording is a little scratchy.

Here Detective Burton describes how he first began using LeBron to make drug busts.

Fred Capps: So you dealt with him as a paid informant.

Danny Burton: That’s correct. 

Fred Capps: On the same basis as you stated earlier, there was state police policy to pay informants $100 for felony cases they assisted with, and $50 for misdemeanor cases they assisted with?

Danny Burton: Yes. 

Radley Balko: In the roughly 10 months LeBron worked as a paid informant, he earned more than $3,000. If the pay Burton described is accurate, it means LeBron worked at least 30 cases, and possibly as many as 60.

Shawn Gaither: My brother went into this completely green. He had no history of buying drugs.

Radley Balko: Looking back, Shawn says there were at least some clues about what was going on.

Shawn Gaither: I remember the day my grandma called me and said, “Do you know who this gentleman is that your brother keeps getting in the car with, that drives a red Dodge Viper?” I’m like, “I have no clue who that is.” I remember a week or so after that, he and I had a conversation, and I asked, I said, “Who is this guy?” He goes, “Oh, it’s just somebody I know.”

Radley Balko: The red Dodge coming by the house was actually a Stealth, not a Viper. The police had seized it from an alleged drug offender. Detective Burton got to drive it as his work car. 

Danny Burton: I would get with LeBron. We would get together. I would pick him up. If he was going to a certain area, I would get him as close as I could without trying to expose myself. And he would exit my vehicle and walk, or he would go to a payphone and call individuals that would be doing business. And he would tell them where he would be. They would come to him. He would get into a vehicle with them, do the transaction. And then he would come up with a reason that he needed to be at a mini mart or a prearranged place where he knew I would be and get close as he could and then he would walk to me when the transaction was over with.

Radley Balko: On the afternoon of July 17, Burton ran through the latest plan with LeBron. This time, the target of the sting — Jason Noel — knew LeBron was working with the cops. That’s thanks to the tip from his friend who happened to be on the grand jury.

John Niland: Now, in the two and a half, or almost three years at that point of work that you had done in undercover enforcement, did you ever had an informant testify before a grand jury before? 

Danny Burton: No. 

John Niland: And the reason that, in fact, it was something that you thought was a bad idea. Would you agree?

Danny Burton: I didn’t like the idea. 

John Niland: And the reason that it is not a good idea is because the cover of an undercover informant then is blown at that point, or possibly.

Danny Burton: Everyone on the grand jury knows who it is, yes. 

John Niland: And everyone in the grand jury and then perhaps everyone who is in the courthouse that may be involved in any type of drug activity.

Danny Burton: There’s always the possibility of whoever’s in the courthouse could see and find out, yes.

Radley Balko: It wasn’t Detective Burton’s decision to have LeBron testify. But it was up to him and his team whether to put LeBron back out in the streets the very next day. And if he knew the risk there was real — that LeBron’s cover had been blown — that decision put LeBron in quite a bit more danger than usual.

The bust was supposed to happen at a grocery store called Nolley’s. Here’s Detective Tim Simpson describing the plan.

Tim Simpson: Mr. Noel was to bring some cocaine, approximately half ounce, to meet Mr. Gaither at Nolley’s Food Mart on 70. 

Fred Capps: And on behalf of the state police, in your mind, as you were assisting in the preparation of that — how is that to go down or to occur there at the food mart? 

Tim Simpson: It was going to be a, what we refer to as a “buy bust.” Mr. Gaither was to ask to see the dope. Once it was shown to him, he was going to give us a signal to come in and arrest Mr. Noel on the scene.

Radley Balko: LeBron was outfitted with a transmitter, hidden inside a fake pager clipped to his side. Keep in mind that this was 1996. Cellphones were rare, and pagers were pretty common.

LeBron and his handlers agreed on a signal he’d give after he’d completed the purchase. He’d say the phrase “This looks good,” which would signal to officers to confront and arrest Noel once he had dropped LeBron off.

The police also had a plan to block Noel’s car if it appeared he was trying to escape. But it all escalated too quickly. As soon as LeBron got in the front seat and closed the door, Noel’s car sped away.  

The police gave chase for a bit but lost sight of the car around 3 p.m. They also lost signal from the transmitter. Jason Noel drove LeBron to a farm owned by his uncle. And they weren’t alone.

The account of what happened next was detailed in court by several of Noel’s accomplices. This is Lamont Battee, whose nickname is Smoke. He was in the backseat of Noel’s car when they picked up LeBron.

Lamont Battee: We all got out of the car, you know, we was talking to LeBron, and he had a pager or something. I said, “Let me see that, man.” Ya know, it’s a funny-looking pager. I’ve never seen one like it before.

Radley Balko: Suspecting it was fake and some sort of wire, Jason Noel asked LeBron for the phone number of his pager. 

Gregory Scott Lyons: Jason was, he was, I couldn’t say he was mad, he was a little angry. 

Radley Balko: That’s Gregory Scott Lyons, another friend of Noel’s who arrived at the farm shortly after LeBron.

Gregory Scott Lyons: He was angry at LeBron. 

Fred Capps: How do you know that? 

Gregory Scott Lyons: ’Cause you could just tell the way he was acting when he kept on trying to get into the fight with Smoke and LeBron.

Fred Capps: What was he saying to LeBron? 

Gregory Scott Lyons: He told him something that — some woman had told him that he had narced on him.

Radley Balko: There was some arguing, and then LeBron and Battee broke out into a fistfight about a completely separate issue. Then everyone but LeBron and Noel walked to a car to leave. As they did, they heard a gunshot.

Here’s Lyons testifying at Noel’s trial.

Fred Capps: And as you were leaving, you heard a shot?

Gregory Scott Lyons: Yes, sir, I did. 

Fred Capps: Does that mean you were in your car?

Gregory Scott Lyons: I was right to my car. My back was turned, and I was headed to my car, and I was just about to get in my car. 

Fred Capps: You heard a shot? 

Gregory Scott Lyons: Yes, sir, I did. 

Fred Capps: What did you do about that? 

Gregory Scott Lyons: I turned around.

Fred Capps: And? 

Gregory Scott Lyons: And I heard LeBron say, why’d you shoot me? 

Radley Balko: Lyons and the others then drove away, leaving Noel and LeBron alone. Meanwhile, after losing signal on the transmitter, LeBron’s handlers with the Kentucky State Police split up and combed the area, searching for Noel’s car or for some sign of LeBron.

Shawn Gaither: This is tough for me because one of the statements that he was instructed to make, that if anything was looking bad, he was supposed to say, “I wish my brother was here.” And that was going to be their cue to rush in and stop the transaction. 

Radley Balko: We’ll never know whether LeBron was calling out for his brother in the moments before he died. Police would later say they never heard LeBron use that phrase over the wire. If he did, it would have been after he was out of range.

Sarah Stillman: To think of this child, this kid, this young person saying that, and no one being there at the other end of the line to hear him or stop the dangerous operation that was already ensuing, and to think of him being brutally tortured and killed as a result when this is the deal that he’d struck — just, that’s always going to stay with me.

Radley Balko: Sarah Stillman says the situation LeBron found himself in was entirely foreseeable, given the way informants are generally treated.

Sarah Stillman: This is a shockingly underregulated space. Young people or just people in general wind up in dangerous situations that spiral out of control and don’t know how to get out of it because they’re operating with forces that have tremendous power over them, specifically law enforcement. Police could choose to do the work themselves, but instead, they outsource it to vulnerable people who are often on the hook in some way, including to kids, to teenagers.

Radley Balko: After the break, the police search for LeBron and Jason Noel. 

[Break]

Radley Balko: The police wouldn’t track down Jason Noel’s car until later that evening. They stopped him. LeBron was nowhere to be found. They questioned Noel, and eventually arrested him. According to court records, when LeBron’s body was found, he appeared to have been tortured.

Shawn Gaither: I was working at McDonald’s. I’ll never forget it. Just like any other day, I got a phone call around 4 o’clock. I was gonna get off work. It was my grandma, and she said, “Hey, I’m hearing that something happened to your brother.” I said, “Well, he’s got a lot of friends over there that somebody would have contacted me by now.” 

We as his family had no knowledge of him being a drug informant until after the detectives came and spoke to us at my aunt’s house.

Radley Balko: The incident at the school, the money, and the alleged promises likely all induced LeBron Gaither to work with police. But he may also have been motivated by some other very personal reasons.

Shawn Gaither: My brother was in pain because of what my mom was doing. There was no secret: Mom was into drugs. And we find out later through some hearings that he wanted to get back — and this is their words — he wanted to “get back at the people that were selling drugs that was causing his mom to be the way she was.”

Radley Balko: Shawn also says their mother wouldn’t have supported LeBron’s decision to work with the police.

Shawn Gaither: She would have much rather him dealt with the consequences of having to go to court and deal with the outcome of whatever that was before she would ever want her son to be a drug informant.

Radley Balko: Jason Noel was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 25 years to life for the murder of LeBron Gaither. Three other men at the farm that day received sentences between 5 and 8 years. The grand jury member who tipped off Noel received 15 years on various charges. But the police officers who put LeBron in danger, who blew his cover even though they should have known better — they were never punished.

Shawn Gaither: This was just pretty much poor police work, is what it boiled down to.

Radley Balko: The Gaither family sued the Kentucky State Police, arguing that LeBron’s handlers had a duty to protect him and that they were negligent in their failure to do so.

Shawn Gaither: Our attorney, that was one of his very first questions, is: When did this become protocol that we would bring drug informants in front of people in a full courtroom to testify against someone that they bought drugs off of, in order to get prosecution? It’s not done. That basically was the premise of all of our issues, is that they put him out there to be identified — which ultimately led to his death.

Radley Balko: But LeBron Gaither isn’t the only victim of the informant system because the informant system was never designed with the interest or safety informants in mind. It’s a tool whose sole purpose is to help police accumulate arrests.

Alexandra Natapoff: A key aspect of understanding how the informant market works and how American law permits informants to be used, to be created, to be rewarded, to be pressured, is to recognize that the market is almost entirely unregulated.

Radley Balko: Alexandra Natapoff is a Harvard Law professor, criminal justice expert, and author of the book: “Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice.”

Alexandra Natapoff: American law imposes, I want to say, almost no constraints — and that’s putting it generously on police and prosecutors — when they decide to pressure someone into becoming an informant or promise rewards to someone becoming an informant. And the law itself provides almost no guard rails or oversight to that process. We, in effect, confer enormous, nearly unfettered and often highly secretive discretion on police, and then on prosecutors in the decisions about how to create and reward an informant.

Radley Balko: Natapoff says police have always used informants, especially in organized crime cases. But it became far more common in the modern war on drugs. As with many drug war policies, police began using informants because drug crimes are consensual — meaning there’s no unwilling “victim” to report them.

So in order to enforce these laws, the police have to help break them. They have to become part of a drug transaction, either undercover or through the use of informants.

Alexandra Natapoff: Informant use is one of those great, terrible examples, maybe one of the most pithy examples, of how the American criminal system dehumanizes the people who pass through it. 

People become instruments. And it’s so visible in the informant market because we can see exactly what it is that the government is using people for, risking their well-being for, even risking their lives. And then we see police and prosecutors behave in conformity with this idea that people are disposable, that they have become tools in an investigation of crime, that their own well-being, that their own lives are not something that the state needs to protect.

Radley Balko: Natopoff says that for most law enforcement agencies, there are no rules as to what police and prosecutors can demand or offer. The agreements with informants are often vague, and there are no requirements to keep track of how, or how many drug informants are used.

Alexandra Natapoff: This culture of secrecy is one of the great destructive aspects of informant use more generally. American law is very poorly designed in order to combat it because American law and constitutional criminal procedure in particular is a little bit old school on this front — because it assumes that there’s going to be a trial. 

And if in fact there were a trial in all these informant cases, then we would learn, actually, the identity of the informant. We would learn, theoretically, the rewards that they were given, how many cases they operated in previously, what their histories and backgrounds were. 

In those rare cases where defendants go to trial, they are entitled to all kinds of disclosure about witnesses that are used against them. And the two big problems with this model, are the small problem, which is — unfortunately in the realm of informants — we have also too often seen that the government does not actually, in fact, disclose the information that it is constitutionally obligated to disclose. They don’t actually tell us everything they know about their informants. Sometimes police don’t tell prosecutors about informants so that that information will not be disclosed. There are all kinds of workarounds for our transparency rules.

Radley Balko: But according to Natapoff there’s an even bigger issue that makes the just use of informants practically impossible. 

Alexandra Natapoff: We almost never go to trial. We almost never trigger the mechanism that is designed to produce accountability, transparency, and information about the informants the government is using.

And because we permit all these deals and arrangements essentially to take place off the record in ways that will never show up at a trial and never be tested in a courtroom, we have consigned ourselves, as it were, to this enormous secretive world of deals, of violence, of crime, of vulnerability that the public will almost never learn about.

Radley Balko: According to Natapoff, the problem is that our entire criminal legal system is structured not on guilt, innocence, or accountability, but on gaining leverage and cutting deals. 

Alexandra Natapoff: Ninety-five percent of all criminal convictions in this country are the result not of a trial, not of a testing of evidence, but of a deal, of a plea.  

Radley Balko: And an informant’s agreement is essentially a plea bargain, but without judicial supervision.

Alexandra Natapoff: We use all kinds of terms for informants — cooperators, snitches, confidential informants, compensated criminal witnesses — but it boils down to one core feature, which is the deal. That we have authorized the government through the criminal system to barter and negotiate over guilt in exchange for information. And we don’t regulate that deal. 

We, in effect, have created an enormous deregulated marketplace for guilt and information in which the government can pressure almost anyone or reward almost anyone for anything it wants in exchange for almost anything that it is willing to offer.

Radley Balko: In the case of LeBron Gaither, the deal was a little money, along with alleged promises for leniency in his own case, or maybe a college scholarship, in exchange for extremely dangerous undercover work. 

Shawn Gaither: There’s no training for this. They don’t understand the rules of going to buy drugs from someone and the dangers that they put themselves in and things like that. Even though they’re wearing devices, none of that really matters. They don’t pack weapons to protect themselves. They are at the mercy of the people that are supposed to be watching over them.

Sarah Stillman: It was amazing to me how many police forces relied upon people in unbelievably vulnerable situations to do a lot of their most difficult policing. And many cops said to me straight up, like, “We deeply need these folks to do the work we’re doing.”

Radley Balko: Journalist Sarah Stillman has looked into how young people like LeBron Gaither end up in informant roles they’re clearly unprepared for.

Sarah Stillman: Almost every case I’ve looked at involving an informant, the person is operating under a lot of constraints and pressures that tend to mean, I don’t think there is such a thing as informed consent when you’re fearing the risks of entering a criminal legal system that so routinely subjects people to physical and sexual violence when incarcerated; when you’re dealing with people who have addictions; when you’re dealing with people who have mental health distress.

I don’t really have an easy time imagining a landscape where even with more regulation, people could really enter into this dangerous, difficult work and be sufficiently protected.

Radley Balko: In one case, Stillman wrote about a 26-year-old Washington state man named Jeremy McLean who started using pain medication after hurting his back on a construction job. He agreed to become an informant after he was arrested for selling just eight methadone pills.

Sarah Stillman: And Jeremy was put into a situation where he thought he’d be done with it if he did a few deals. And then he did another deal and another deal and another deal. And it’s a small town. It kept getting more and more and more unsafe — until finally he was killed.

Radley Balko: Stillman also wrote about Shelly Hilliard, a 19-year-old in Detroit who was caught smoking marijuana, then pressured into informing on a drug dealer.

Sarah Stillman: Shelly was really, really terrified of going to jail, especially as a young trans woman. And so she agreed to do this thing she knew was dangerous and didn’t want to do, but felt like she kind of had to do.

She called the dealer back, but they couldn’t really arrest the guy on the drug dealing charges because they didn’t find him with drugs but he had a bunch of cash on him. Due to civil asset forfeiture, the cops were able to just take his cash and basically not account for it and just seize it and that was that — and I believe actually disclosed to him who had set him up, which was Shelly. And soon thereafter, he was enraged that he’d lost all this money and very brutally murdered Shelly.

Radley Balko: But it was the 2008 murder of Rachel Hoffman in Florida that generated media coverage, public anger, backlash, and eventual calls for reforming how police use young informants. Hoffman was young, white, and pretty. Her death resonated with portions of the country that had been oblivious to deaths like LeBron’s. Note the tone in this report on her case from ABC News’ “20/20.”

Newscaster 1: She could be anyone’s daughter, even yours. Just out of college and caught with marijuana.

Newscaster 2: But she did not get a slap on the wrist or jail time; she got an offer from the police.

Sarah Stillman: Rachel Hoffman was a 23-year-old recent college graduate in Tallahassee.

Radley Balko: Police searched Hoffman’s apartment after receiving a complaint of a marijuana smell and suspicious activity from her unit. She allowed them to search.

Police Chief Dennis Jones: We found roughly a quarter pound of marijuana. It was present during a search warrant.

Reporter: If you were to hold that, how much would that be?

Police Chief Dennis Jones: A baggie.

Radley Balko: The police claimed they also found a handful of Valium and ecstasy. ABC’s “20/20” pressed the police chief to specify just how much.  

Police Chief Dennis Jones: I think there were six pills.

Reporter: Six pills. 

Police Chief Dennis Jones: Yes. 

Reporter: Is that a lot?

Police Chief Dennis Jones: It’s not a lot, but it’s it’s enough to make it a felony.

Host: Under Florida law, Rachel Hoffman’s six pills and the baggie of marijuana might have meant four years in state prison.

Liza Patty: She was really scared. They told her that she could go to jail for four or five years. When you’re 23, that’s that’s an eternity. 

Sarah Stillman: And when she got caught, the police basically said, “You can go away to prison for a long time, or you can become an informant, come to work for us.” She agrees, thinking, like, she actually thought, “Oh, maybe this will be an interesting adventure.” She wanted to like write a book about it.

Radley Balko: If that sounds naive, that’s exactly the point. Police rely on young people remaining oblivious to the risk of what they’re asking them to do.

Sarah Stillman: The police set her up with a wire and asked her to go buy a large stash of cocaine, I believe some ecstasy pills, and a handgun.

Host: Rachel called her mother on Passover to tell her she was going to be involved in a police sting.

Margie Weiss: And I said, “Are you kidding me? Don’t do it. And I’ll have to call your dad ’cause this is wrong. This is very wrong.” And she said, “Mom, I don’t want you telling anybody. I don’t want you to tell dad. I don’t want you to tell my lawyer. I don’t want you to tell the drug court because I’m getting all my changes dropped so I can get out of drug court earlier.”

Sarah Stillman: And so she goes along to that deal, and the police said, don’t worry, we’ll be tracking, we’ll keep tabs and everything, make sure that you’re safe. Instead, the police lose track of her. She gets there. One of the guys sees the wire in her purse — and shoots and kills her. So this thing that she thought was going to be a simple way out for her wound up being, basically, a death sentence.

Radley Balko: The outcry following Rachel Hoffman’s death did actually lead to some change. In 2009, the Florida Legislature passed “Rachel’s Law,” which set some basic guidelines for the use of confidential informants. Among them: Informants have to be told a reduction in their charges isn’t guaranteed, and they have the right to consult with an attorney. Police working with informants have to be specifically trained. And law enforcement agencies must develop written policies for working with informants.

But these would seem to be pretty ground-level regulations. A few other states have followed suit. Some have passed laws saying minors can’t be used as informants without parental permission. 

Alexandra Natapoff: I do think there are some spaces of hope, and they come because we’ve started to see some pushback: legislative pushback, popular pushback, journalistic pushback. 

When I first started writing about this issue, when I first published my book, it’s called “Snitching,” back in 2009, there was not very much reform on the ground. And by the time I published the second edition of the book, just a couple of years ago, more than half of all states had either considered or passed reform in this space.

Radley Balko: Natapoff says more significant reform will only come once the general public understands the larger context in which informants are used. First, despite the fact that their claims are used to obtain volatile search and arrest warrants, informants aren’t particularly reliable. They tend to either be career criminals themselves, desperate people in dire predicaments, or both. Then, there’s the matter of who these operations tend to target.

Alexandra Natapoff: So there’s this mythology and the justification for using informants — that we use informants who are little fish to get big fish. And that’s why we need to “accept” this deal with the devil, as it were, because it’s the only way we can work our way up the criminal food chain. But it is a myth. In fact, we often reward big fish for turning in a bunch of little fish.

We reward arrest, we reward bulk. We reward, as it were, productivity, which is not the same as rewarding public safety, which is not the same as rewarding going after the most culpable. And so we’ve seen in the war on drugs in particular that the use of informants to generate low-level arrests — even bad arrests, as we’ve seen in some of the wrongful conviction cases. It’s an incentive for police and prosecutors to bulk up their numbers and sometimes even get additional funding and support for their work. That’s a terrible incentive. It’s an incentive to use the worst tools to get the worst outcomes.

Radley Balko: As with much of the criminal justice system, there are also racial disparities. For example, we know that though the rates of drug use and sales among Black and white people are roughly proportionate to the population, police disproportionately arrest low-level drug dealers and users who are Black. And to bust Black dealers, there’s an assumption among police that you need Black informants.

Shawn Gaither now works as a law enforcement officer himself, as director of the Nelson County, Kentucky, 911 call center. But he too thinks these racial blinders are a big part of the reason why his brother was murdered.

Shawn Gaither: I think they saw an opportunity for someone that was in the Black community to be a drug informant because everybody they went after was Black. Jason was the only white guy that we ever found out about that was not Black. All the other people in Lebanon and in Campbellsville that he had bought drugs from were Black, every single one of them. So I believe they were targeting a specific demographic.

Radley Balko: According to Sarah Stillman, despite police promises that informant work can steer lives back on track, it tends to have the opposite effect.

Sarah Stillman: I saw people who were promised, this could be a path to get out of criminality. Instead, it’s kind of asking a young person to do the literal opposite.

I definitely talked to families where their loved one is struggling with an addiction. They are trying to get out of it. They are trying to break that pattern. And then they’re literally being sent into the same communities and situations that caused them to be immersed in their addiction.

So they’re going back into a drug house. They’re going back into a social situation of the people who are selling to them. So understandably, that’s not the easiest way to break an addiction, to be sent back into a situation that’s both dangerous and drug-infused.

Radley Balko: Over time, the ongoing use of informants can also make communities less trustful of police, which makes it harder to solve crimes in those communities, and thus makes them less safe.

[“Stop Snitching” song plays] 

Stop snitching. 

Stop snitching. 

Stop snitching. …

Radley Balko: The “Stop Snitching” movement — which entered mainstream popular culture in the last two decades — began in part because of how police were using informants.

Alexandra Natapoff: One of the first times I ever really met informant use, the first time I really grappled with it, was when I was working in Baltimore and as part of the community-based lawyering program that I was in, I was teaching classes in afterschool sessions and in church basements. And I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of young people in Baltimore through these classes. In one of these sessions, one of the kids asked me — or I guess I should say one of the kids told me — “So police let drug dealers stay on the corner ’cause they’re snitching. Is that legal? I mean, can police do that?”

When I got over the shock of having a 12-year-old explain to me how the criminal system worked on the ground, I explained to him that, yes, actually, police do have discretion to permit a person committing crimes like drug dealing to remain at large if they’re providing information. And this child and his friends in the class, they were disgusted. They said, “Well, the police aren’t doing their jobs, and all you have to do is snitch and you can keep on dealing.” And it really struck me from their questions and their knowledge and their responses that they had gotten the message that justice was for sale.

[“Stop Snitching” song plays] 

Radley Balko: As we mentioned earlier, informants have long served as an important tool in police investigations. But the war on drugs has turned out to be a particularly poor fit for the tactic.

Sarah Stillman: There’s certainly situations where an informant probably can make a difference. And there’s probably a lot of white-collar crimes, for instance, where the tapes of informants have made a really big difference to being able to obtain accountability. But I would argue in the drug war, I’m not seeing the cost-benefit analysis really making sense for our societal well-being. Law enforcement uses this as such a consistent tool that allows them also to have other people do the most dangerous parts of their job.

Radley Balko: It took over 20 years for LeBron Gaither’s family to be compensated for his death. Despite blowing his cover and failing to protect him, the state fought their lawsuit all the way to the Kentucky Supreme Court.

Shawn Gaither: This thing dragged on for years, years on years. And then finally, somebody said, you know what? You were wrong, and you owe this family this.

Radley Balko: In the end, LeBron’s family only received about $300,000. That’s a paltry sum given how badly police erred in this case. And of course, that money won’t bring LeBron back.

Shawn Gaither: We’ll never know what he could have done, what he would’ve became. So honestly and truly, the money for me wasn’t even — I could have cared less if there [wasn’t] money that came out of it. And so I think he took what he thought was the easy road out. And not knowing that the road he engaged in was way more difficult than what he probably would experience if he had played this thing out in court.

Radley Balko: As I mentioned, Shawn Gaither now works in a police agency himself. He’s friends and colleagues with other police officers, and when we spoke to him, he was quick to differentiate most everyday cops from the officers who put his brother in peril. Still, when it comes to his own son, the lessons he learned from LeBron’s death live on.

Shawn Gaither: So my son got in trouble. When he first turned 21, he had some marijuana in his car. And the first thing that popped in my mind was, “Don’t say a word. I am on my way.” Because I refused to allow him to put himself in a situation over some marijuana that my brother was in. And so my advice to him was, “Don’t say a word. Don’t answer no questions. You ask for your attorney. I will contact the attorney. We are on our way.”

Radley Balko: Next time on Collateral Damage. 

Tom Ballanco: One of the party guests there was Peter McWilliams. And he was very happy to share his role in all this, that he and Todd were partners, and they were gonna revolutionize patients’ access to cannabis.

Peter McWilliams: Watching my normal run to the bathroom, with one puff of marijuana, turn into a meandering raid on the kitchen. 

Donna Shalala: We have a problem. Increasing numbers of Americans believe that marijuana is not harmful. 

Barry McCaffrey: This is not medicine. This is a Cheech and Chong show.

Peter McWilliams: I am not going to rest until medical marijuana is available to every sick person who needs it in the United States.

Radley Balko: Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept. 

It was reported and written by me, Radley Balko.

Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer, who also served as producer and editor.

Laura Flynn is our showrunner.

Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief.

The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal.

We had editing support from Maryam Saleh. 

Truc Nguyen mixed our show. 

Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow. 

Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan.

Art direction by Fei Liu.

Illustrations by Tara Anand.

Copy editing by Nara Shin.

Social and video media by Chelsey B. Coombs.

Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance. 

This series was made possible by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund. 

If you want to send us a message email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

To continue to follow my work and reporting, check out my newsletter, The Watch, at radleybalko.substack.com.

Thank you for listening.

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In January 2008, Ryan Frederick, a 28-year-old who worked the night shift at a Coca-Cola plant in Chesapeake, Virginia, found himself at the center of a tragedy. Just days after his home had been burglarized, Frederick was jolted awake by the sound of his dogs barking and someone breaking through his front door. Grabbing his handgun, he cautiously approached the noise. A lower panel of the door had been shattered, and an arm was reaching through, fumbling for the handle. Frederick fired. The arm belonged to Detective Jarrod Shivers, who died from the gunshot wound. Frederick was arrested and initially charged with capital murder, with prosecutors even considering the death penalty. This episode revisits the night that changed Frederick’s life forever and ended Shivers’s. We hear from Frederick himself as well as veteran narcotics officer Neill Franklin.

Transcript

Ryan Frederick: My name is Ryan Frederick. 45 years old now. Born and raised in an area of Chesapeake, Virginia, called South Norfolk. Grew up with a pretty simple normal childhood. Had a mom and dad, sister, grandma and grandpa close by. Kind of small town, blue collar. Really happy childhood.

Radley Balko: At the age of 28, life was going pretty well for Ryan Frederick.

Ryan Frederick: Everything was good. I was engaged to be married with a girl I had been with for about four or five years. I worked as a merchandiser for Coca-Cola. And that was a great job for me, because I was a morning guy. Typically would wake up around 3, get to the first store between 3:30 and 4:30 fill the shelves with the product, move on to the next store. Pretty easy job. Great benefits. It was a great job for someone in their young 20s, had potential future promotions throughout the whole company, could transfer anywhere in the country or world for that matter. You know, I could have worked there for another 20, 30 years. It would have been a job I would have probably retired from.

Radley Balko: He had also taken up gardening. 

Ryan Frederick: I had got some banana trees from my grandfather’s house when he had passed, and I cloned them and had them growing in buckets in the backyard.

I had a big dream, but it probably was silly. I was going to clone Japanese maples and start a business selling trees.

Radley Balko: And for a while, Frederick also grew cannabis. He was a shy guy who had lost his parents at an early age. So to relax, he smoked pot. And after discovering his green thumb, he thought it would be less risky to grow his pot himself.

Ryan Frederick: Yeah, at the time, I did smoke marijuana and had, I don’t remember how many plants, just a few plants. Nothing major. I didn’t want to have to deal with going to find people to buy it. And I just figured it would have been easier just mind my own business, deal with my own stuff.

Radley Balko: But over the course of just a few days, the drug war would come crashing down on him — and change at least two lives forever.

Ryan Frederick: I didn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t digest that. I was like, “What?” He was like, “You just killed a police officer.”

Radley Balko: From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage.

I’m Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years. 

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeat drug addiction, but the “war” part quickly became all too literal.

When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and ’90s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections. 

All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause. But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage.

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is Episode 2, A Death in the Dark: The story of Ryan Frederick and Detective Jarrod Shivers.

Ryan Frederick: It was either a Monday or Tuesday. I’d come home from work. I had a fenced-in yard, and my privacy fence had been bashed in. It didn’t look right. Someone had come in and done that.

Radley Balko: It was January 2008. Ryan Frederick had just come home after working his shift at the Coca-Cola plant to discover that someone had broken into his home.

Ryan Frederick: And then I went in my garage where I had those plants growing. There was all but like two of them stolen, door kicked in.

Radley Balko: Those plants were marijuana — eight in total, according to Frederick. 

At the time, it was still illegal to grow pot in Virginia for any reason. Possession of the drug was a misdemeanor, punishable by 30 days in jail and up to $500 for a first offense. So for obvious reasons, Frederick didn’t report the robbery. He told only his fiancée.

Ryan Frederick: So the break-in happened, my fiancée comes home. She comes unglued, livid, like, “Get this crap out of here, I told you this should have never been in here,” blah blah blah.

Radley Balko: Until then, Frederick says his fiancée had been more worried about the police than about thieves breaking in to steal the plants. But the burglary unnerved her.

Ryan Frederick: So I gather everything up, except for a banana tree. Take it and dispose of it, get rid of it up the road. All right, I’m done. I’m on board with her. I’m like, if this is gonna be the result of it, I don’t need that. I would rather go pay for it if I’m gonna do it than chance somebody coming in here and, you know, frazzling her. It gives you a really, really, really, really uneasy feeling when you’ve seen your home broken into.

Radley Balko: Three days later, on the night of January 17, another break-in. This time, Frederick was home when it happened.

Ryan Frederick: It was a Thursday evening. I go lay down, probably around 7:45ish, 8 o’clock. Everything’s pretty typical day: Went to work, come home, grab the locks, fiancée said she was going to the game, I said I’d probably be in bed. So I went home, had dinner, went to sleep.

And then, abruptly startled out of my sleep, I hear this big bang, crashing sound, and then I hear, like, wood breaking, like a tree, and I’m like, “What?” And then my dogs are just, like, barking out of control in a way that I’ve never heard them bark. So I’m already a little bit uneasy because we just had a break-in. So I’m like, “What the world is going on?” So I grab my gun and I started heading down the hallway. 

Radley Balko: It was a few hours past dusk, so it was dark outside.

Ryan Frederick: So I’m going down, and I’m hearing these dogs, and I’m walking around the corner down the hall, and as I pass the end of the hallway, I can see in the door — it’s a four-panel door, two long panels at the bottom and two smaller square ones up top — someone had busted one of the bottom panels out of the door. And all I could see was blue jeans and a black jacket. 

Now, that person that was standing there, I could see he was reaching down, reaching up for the deadbolt. I could kinda see that there was one other person behind him. So I was like in total freak panic mode at that point. And I’m like, “Oh my god.” 

So I’m thinking in my head, this guy that’s broke in my house a couple days ago, he left a couple things and maybe he didn’t get it all ’cause I’m coming home and ran in and scared him off. He’s back. And he’s got somebody with him. 

So, as that hand was going for that deadbolt, I shot for his hand. His arm quickly came back out of that door. 

Radley Balko: Frederick couldn’t find his cordless phone to call 911. But he suspected a neighbor must have witnessed the break-in and called the police.  

Ryan Frederick: It felt like five minutes had passed, but I don’t know that it was. And I finally saw cop cars, and I was like, “Oh, thank God.” So I opened the door at that point, and I’m getting ready to come out, and there’s like what seemed like 50 cops with all their guns drawn on me.

So I get down onto the ground, and he cuffs me. And he asked me, he said, “Do you know what you just did?” And I was like, “Not, not really. I don’t know what’s going on.” And he was like, “You just killed a police officer.” 

Radley Balko: The arm he’d shot at belonged to Detective Jarrod Shivers. Like the other cops, Shivers was dressed in dark clothing with police demarcations that weren’t visible to Frederick. He could only see a dimly-lit sleeve reaching through the door panel. He assumed he had just shot a burglar. Already in handcuffs, Frederick says the officers then took their anger out on him.

Ryan Frederick: It was one elbow to the back of the head to the next elbow until I was just [dragged] two doors down. And they finally stopped and took me to a police car. Then I got in the back of the police car. And a gentleman was asking me questions, and telling me that I just killed a police officer and wanted me to tell him what happened.

But a whirlwind of emotions had come through me, and I was very sick and started throwing up in the back of his cop car when he told me. ’Cause I’m like, “No, no, no, what? Like, I went from sleeping, and 15 minutes later, you’re telling me I killed a cop.” And I just, I, I don’t know how to register that.

Radley Balko: Just a week earlier, Frederick was engaged, working a job he loved, and gardening in his spare time. In the span of just a few days, he’d been burglarized, then woke up a few nights later to find someone breaking into his home once again.

Now he was sitting in the back of a police car, being interrogated about killing a cop. It was in this chaotic moment that it first hit him: The break-in and the raid on his home must have been connected.

Ryan Frederick: He’s asking me these questions. And I’m trying to walk him through it. ’Cause I’m like, “Hold on dude. We gotta go back a couple days before I tell you this.” First of all, trying to tell him, “Listen, you’ve got to understand there was a break-in three days ago.” And he was like, “Listen, we already know about that break-in.” 

And he asked me what was growing in the garage. And I said, “I got a banana tree.” And he said, “What’s in the garage? We know you got a lot of marijuana in the garage. Where is it?” And I’m like, “I don’t have any. I got a banana tree.”

Radley Balko: It was a fleeting moment in the midst of a tense exchange. But for Frederick, it was revelatory. How could the police have known about the break-in?

Ryan Frederick: Afterwards, when I replayed every single second of that night over and over and over and over again in my head, it occurred to me that he said he knew about the break-in, but I never reported it. And that was the beginning of starting to realize that this isn’t as honest as it always seems in the movies.

Radley Balko: Frederick was taken to the Chesapeake jail. He would soon be charged with capital murder — the intentional killing of a police officer. Within days, a prosecutor announced that the state was considering seeking the death penalty.

I first heard about Ryan Frederick shortly after the police raid on his home in 2008. I had been writing about aggressive drug raids for long enough that readers had started sending me stories about these incidents as they happened. This one seemed particularly bad. It was a marijuana raid, but the police had only found some young Japanese maple trees.

In most cases, when a drug raid goes wrong, it’s the target of the raid who pays the price. But not always. 

Detective Jarrod Shivers is one of dozens of law enforcement agents who have been killed while serving a search warrant for drugs. In most of the deaths, like Shivers’s, it could have been prevented with less aggressive tactics. But as with the other fatal raids before and after this one, instead of reckoning with the failed policies that culminated in Shivers’s death, Virginia police and prosecutors came after Ryan Frederick. 

Ryan Frederick: I never would have known that it can be as dirty of a justice system as it is.

That prosecutor is looking at it like a football game. He’s not looking at it like right and wrong. It’s a win or loss. And that’s what you are. You’re a winner or loss to the guy.

Radley Balko: As weeks and months passed, it became increasingly clear that the state’s prosecution of Frederick was as much about a vindictive effort to distract from the mistakes of police officers — mistakes that cost them the life of one of their own — as it was about justice.

Ryan Frederick: I have a lot of animosity towards the police force and the prosecution for doing things so dirty and unethical, but doing it with such ease and so much comfortability of doing this, I wonder how long — How many times do they do it and don’t get caught?

Radley Balko: Early on, police and prosecutors claimed that Frederick was a hardened, arrogant drug dealer — that he had boasted about killing Shivers and even mocked Shivers’s widow.

But friends and neighbors Frederick described him to me as a slight, shy man — almost meek. He was small, 5-foot-7, and just 120 pounds. He was friendly and warm. His neighbors liked him. Frederick had no prior criminal record besides traffic violations, and there’s no evidence he ever sold marijuana.

According to the state of Virginia, this modest guy — recently engaged and working a job he loved — chose to confront a heavily armed team of raiding cops with only a handgun. They claimed Frederick did this, even though there was nothing incriminating in his home. They claimed that he intentionally killed a police officer, and then boasted about it at the city jail. It just didn’t add up.

Even early on, Frederick’s own story seemed far more plausible. That story was he had no idea that the men breaking into his home were police. The previous break-in only gave credence to his claim of self-defense. And the more we learned as Frederick’s trial unfolded, the more his story seemed like the accurate one.

As he sat in his jail cell, Frederick tried to piece together how growing a few pot plants for his own use had led to the police taking a battering ram to his door. As far as he knew, only four other people had known about the plants: his best friend, his fiancée, his fiancée’s sister, and her boyfriend. Frederick concluded quickly that the boyfriend must have given him up.

Ryan Frederick: So Steven Wright was the boyfriend of my fiancée’s sister, Stephanie’s boyfriend. And I hadn’t seen him in eight months or so. Apparently, he had gotten in some credit card fraud trouble and went to the police, and said, “Look, I know this guy. He’s got this big operation. It’s there right now. Let’s forget these credit card charges, and I’ll take you there.”

Radley Balko: Steven Wright had turned him in to get out of his own legal trouble. He’d later say that the police implied he’d receive leniency for implicating Frederick. We reached out to Wright for comment but have not received a response as of this recording. 

According to Frederick, Wright had asked to buy some marijuana from him. Frederick says he declined and told Wright he didn’t sell the drug. It was only for his own use. But in court, Wright claimed he had bought marijuana from Frederick 40 to 50 times. When he testified at Frederick’s trial, Wright had been in jail for months. Yet days after that testimony, he was released on bond. But that was only the beginning.

As I continued to report on the case, I got a tip that there was another informant involved — a man named Renaldo Turnbull Jr. Turnbull told me that he had been working as a police informant for months, and that it was he and Wright who broke into Frederick’s home.

He also confirmed that they had broken into the home for the specific purpose of retrieving the pot plants, so that the police would have probable cause to obtain a search warrant. Indeed, the search warrant application was based solely on information provided by an unnamed informant. It also said that the informant had been inside the apartment within 72 hours prior to the affidavit.

But it wasn’t just this incident. Turnbull said he and Wright had broken into several more homes to obtain the evidence the police needed to get warrants against other people too. He said they’d break in, steal drugs, turn over some of the drugs to law enforcement, and keep some of them for themselves. That, of course, would break a number of laws. 

Turnbull said police knew that they were keeping those drugs, and that both men were promised leniency on their own criminal charges in exchange for their cooperation. Chesapeake police denied Turnbull’s allegations and claimed he wasn’t even an informant for the Frederick case.

At a pre-trial hearing, after vehemently denying it during an arraignment, prosecutors ended up conceding that a police informant was involved in the first break-in. But they claimed that they had no knowledge of it at the time, and didn’t learn until months later that their informants were breaking into homes to obtain evidence.

But that isn’t what Turnbull told me. And at Frederick’s trial, his attorneys played a recording of Frederick’s conversation with a police officer shortly after the raid on his home. 

When Frederick said his house had been burglarized, the officer responded, “We know that.” Later, the officer said again, “First off, we know your house had been broken into, OK?”

Neill Franklin: It is not acceptable to have your informant either commit a crime, like breaking into someone’s home, to get evidence to bring to you, to use for you obtaining a search warrant.

Radley Balko: That’s Neill Franklin.

Neill Franklin: I’m a 34-year police veteran. So I spent 23 years with the Maryland State Police, and most of that time was either in narcotics investigation, criminal investigation, or training for the Maryland State Police. 

Radley Balko: During his career, Franklin worked with nine different drug task forces in the mid-Atlantic area.

Neill Franklin: So when it comes to using informants in drug cases, generally speaking, they’re unreliable.

Radley Balko: Especially if they’re in legal trouble. And especially if they have a relationship with the target of the investigation.

Neill Franklin: You want to stay away from an informant that might have personal interest in the case. And if that’s the case with Frederick and this informant, that’s a very, very poor decision on part of the investigators and the police officers who were managing this case.

Radley Balko: Which isn’t to say it doesn’t happen. Because the identities of informants are typically kept secret — even from judges and defense attorneys — it’s all too easy for police to use informants in ways that skirt or violate laws. It’s a long-recurring theme in the war on drugs. So the way Frederick was targeted, as unethical as it sounds, it isn’t very unusual. Later, during his trial, Frederick says the police tried to sanitize the investigation.

Ryan Frederick: Their story was, well, Steven Rene Wright, the informant, told us somebody broke in — but didn’t tell us it was him. And what do you do when the police are telling you a lie? And how much are you going to argue with the people that make the law?

Radley Balko: But even setting aside how the warrant was obtained, there’s also the question of why police decided to serve it after dark, and with a violent, forced-entry raid.

Ryan Frederick: I feel bad about what happened with that guy, but my actions were something that I stand on my sword with. If you come into my house in the middle of the night, I am not going to guarantee either one of us get out of there.

Radley Balko: That’s one of the many problems with no-knock raids, Franklin says.

Neill Franklin: This is what we use more than anything else, unfortunately, as you’ll see. It’s when we, the police, can serve a search warrant without knocking, without announcing ourselves. We can literally just breach your door, come in, and start searching, secure the premises, secure the people. 

Radley Balko: I’ve been reporting on these raids for 20 years. It continues to baffle me why police use such violent, volatile tactics for such low-level offenses. The police obtained a no-knock warrant in the raid that killed Breonna Taylor. But there’s a long list of other, less well-known victims. People like David Hooks in East Dublin, Georgia; Eurie Stamps in Framingham, Massachusetts; Ismael Mena in Denver; and Jose Guerena in Tucson. 

Neill Franklin: We’re tearing your door off the hinges. Many times we use things like flash-bang grenades. We’re armed to the teeth. We have semi-automatic rifles and pistols. We have all types of equipment with us, and they’re very violent, very loud.

And we typically do these during hours of darkness. We really have to have good policy and protocol in place, number one, for using a no-knock raid because they are dangerous. And sometimes, unfortunately, they turn deadly.

Radley Balko: Police have always had the power to break into a home without knocking in the case of an emergency — so when somebody’s life is in danger. But the use of a pre-planned no-knock raid as a tool of the drug war was first suggested during Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. Congress eventually passed a bill authorizing these tactics for federal narcotics officers, but then repealed it a few years later after a series of botched raids terrorized innocent people and made national news. Yet the tactic reemerged and eventually spread around the country as the drug war escalated in the 1980s.

Neill Franklin: Now, the thing with a no-knock warrant, it is the element of surprise. So why would you need the element of surprise? Number one, to ensure that the property that you’re seeking, that you’re trying to seize, is not destroyed or disposed of, or altered in any kind of way. So it has to be done quickly. The other thing is, if there’s evidence, if there’s the intelligence, the history of violence with the people who are inside — say, for instance, the resident or the building — then yes, again, you need the element of surprise. 

Radley Balko: None of those conditions was present in Ryan Frederick’s case.

Neill Franklin: In this particular case, Frederick’s case, if they’re looking for marijuana plants, number one, they’re not going to be easily destroyed. It’s just not going to happen. I don’t know a toilet large enough that you can flush ’em down.

As far as I know, from what I’ve read about this case, there’s no evidence or intelligence regarding him using violence or possibly using violence. They should have served this warrant during the daytime. It’s safer for everyone. You’re giving the person time to come to the door peacefully. It’s in daylight. You’ll have a better search. It’s easier to find what you’re looking for.

We have an individual here who was employed. He worked at a place where you had to go in at a certain time for your shift. We’re not talking about someone who doesn’t have a job. There’s routine here. It wouldn’t have taken much to establish where he worked, what time he had to be at work, what was his shift, when does he leave, when does he get home, who else is in the home.

Radley Balko: These are simple details that a basic investigation should have discovered. And if the Chesapeake Police Department had done that legwork, they’d likely have discovered that Ryan Frederick was not a major drug dealer. They had no evidence that he had ever sold drugs to anyone.

The police never attempted a “controlled buy” — that’s police jargon for a drug purchase done in coordination with law enforcement. And it’s pretty standard practice before busting a drug dealer. There were also no complaints from neighbors. Some even testified in Frederick’s defense at trial. And despite claiming to have surveilled Frederick, the officers testified that they never witnessed a drug sale. That isn’t uncommon either. There are just way too many incentives prodding police officers to take shortcuts in these cases. 

If narcotics officers think there may be a large drug supply somewhere, they’ll want to get to it quickly, before it’s moved. Some serve more than 10 warrants per week. That previous year, Shivers’s unit had served at least 50. With that many cases, there often just isn’t enough time to conduct a thorough investigation. It’s just easier for police to default to using overwhelming force on every warrant.

The results this time were predictably tragic. And Detective Shivers is far from the only member of law enforcement to suffer the consequences.

Denver7: The news is tracking a developing story. A man is dead and an officer wounded after police bust into a home in Northglenn to make a drug raid.

KAGS: As officers tried to enter the house, Magee picked up an AR-10 semi-automatic rifle from his bedroom and fired at officers, killing Deputy Adam Sowders.

WBAL: Using a no-knock warrant, Baltimore County Police raided a house on Roberts Avenue. 36-year-old officer Jason Schneider was killed.

Neill Franklin: So when someone comes breaking into their home, forcefully, in the middle of the night, waking them up — they’re not going to think that it is the police. They’re going to think that they’re getting robbed. They’re going to think that this is a home invasion by some criminal or criminal group. And they’re going to try to protect themselves, waking up out of a dead sleep, grabbing their firearm or knife or whatever it may be to confront the person coming into their home, who they believe is a criminal. That’s dangerous for them. It’s dangerous for the police.

Ryan Frederick: I don’t blame them for shooting back.

Radley Balko: Ryan Frederick says he was nearly killed that night, when one officer returned fire, though the police deny this. But that’s not what upsets him.

Ryan Frederick: I don’t blame that officer. I blame his boss for putting him in that situation and for allowing that situation to occur.

Neill Franklin: How many times did you have a violent person somewhere, barricaded somewhere, where you had to use a SWAT team? Probably zero in a month for a department like Chesapeake. Very, very seldom for many of these police departments out here that have SWAT teams.

Radley Balko: After he retired, Neill Franklin spent 10 years as executive director of an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, as in drug prohibition. The group has since changed its name to Law Enforcement Action Partnership, still abbreviated LEAP. In his current role, Franklin travels the country, giving talks about how we need to end the war on drugs and develop policies for safer communities, beyond just the criminal justice system.

I asked him why law enforcement agencies would put their officers like Jarrod Shivers in such dangerous situations if it isn’t necessary. 

Neill Franklin: One of the reasons that the police use these SWAT teams making these dynamic entries for these low-level drug cases, they have to use things that we the public pay for them to have. 

Radley Balko: A “dynamic entry” is when police use speed and the element of surprise to forcibly enter a location and quickly take control of it.

Neill Franklin: Having a SWAT team with the weaponry, with the gear, with the vehicles having that specialized assignment — it’s expensive. It costs a lot of money. You have to train. Training is time, and time is money. 

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These are actually training opportunities for them. And every time they use one of these SWAT teams, they can say, “Hey, we’ve used this SWAT team over the past month. We’ve used them 18, 19, 20, 30 times. So as you can see, we need this SWAT team. You have to fund this SWAT team. You can see how many times we use it.” But how many times did you really need it? 

Radley Balko: The National Tactical Officers Association — the training and professional organization for SWAT teams — advises against conducting dynamic entries for drug warrants. They believe that approach should be reserved for situations like active shooters or dangerous fugitives. But if you are going to use these sorts of tactics, you should use a well-trained, full-time SWAT team. 

Neill Franklin: If it’s a proper SWAT team, that’s what they do. They train all the time. Like military units. And they’re really good at what they do, regarding these dynamic entries.

But, unfortunately, we do have a lot of drug units that have gotten some training — how to do this, how to do that, different things here and there, which can be very problematic.

Radley Balko: The worst scenario is to send narcotics officers who lack the proper training to deploy these tactics on volatile, dangerous raids. But that’s partly what happened in this case. Jarrod Shivers had just 3 weeks of basic SWAT training. 

The actual SWAT team didn’t arrive on scene until 20 minutes after Ryan Frederick was arrested. That’s also what happened in the raid that ended the life of Breonna Taylor, and many, many others.

CBS: CBS Investigators exclusive. The city of Chicago is getting forced back to federal court over its failure to put a stop to bad police raids.

RT: The police released over 70 rounds in a matter of about 7 seconds.

Fox 26 Houston: The Galveston police chief is on administrative leave tonight amid an internal investigation into a botched SWAT raid.

ABC 7 Chicago: Chicago police officers stormed into Anjanette Young’s home on February 22 2019, attempting to execute a search warrant. But records show the officers had the wrong home …

Neill Franklin: Unfortunately, we’re measuring the effect of our policing by using numbers. We’re measuring output and not outcomes. So, for instance, how many arrests have you made this week? How many search warrants have you written this month? How many have you served this month? 

So it’s a numbers game and it’s easier to not do the intelligence, to not take the time to gather the intelligence, to not do the proper recon. It’s just easier to kind of like have these what I call “cookie-cutter search warrants” to where you can just pump them out. And we just plug in a name here, plug in this there, plug in that there, a sentence here, whatever. It’s the same thing with serving them. And the more that we serve, it raises your value level in government. “Oh, we’re busy. We’re serving these searches, and we’re doing our job. We’re going after these people selling drugs. Look at how many search warrants we served.”

And so you develop a system where you can serve as many of them as you can within a period of time. Just use the same dynamic entry over and over again, no matter how serious the violator or how low-level or high-level it is.

Radley Balko: To the Chesapeake Police Department, Ryan Frederick was supposed to be just another checkmark. Another arrest. Another quantity of confiscated pot. But the moment the bullet Frederick fired went through Detective Shivers’s arm and into his chest, Frederick became a much, much bigger deal. He became a cop killer. Convicting him became a matter of defending Shivers’s honor, the department’s integrity, and his legacy for the family he left behind.

Coming up next, the trial. 

Break

Ryan Frederick: The trial was mind-blowing.

Radley Balko: At trial, the state tried to make Frederick seem like a monster, with claims that defied all credulity. In his opening statement, for example, prosecutor James Willett described Frederick as “stoned out of his mind” and “in an angry, blind rage.” Two descriptions which just about anyone who has ever smoked marijuana will tell you are laughably contradictory.

Ryan Frederick: They made me out to be like, the devil, like, psychotic. Like, just ready to take on the world and shoot everybody. Cowboy wild wild West.

Radley Balko: We reached out to prosecutor Willett for comment but we have not received a response as of this recording. 

Because he spent 23 hours of each day in his cell, Frederick put on weight while he was in jail. His slight frame ballooned to 180 pounds. For this, prosecutors and one local newspaper columnist ridiculed him. During the trial, one prosecutor made him stand up so the jury could see his chubby profile, then asked, “You’re not exactly wasting away from regret and remorse now are you?”

The state also called jailhouse informants to the witness stand, who claimed Frederick had boasted about killing Shivers. They said he even disparaged Shivers’s widow.

Ryan Frederick: My lawyer comes up to me and he’s like, “Do you know any of these inmates?” And I’m like, “No.” And he was like, OK. So [the prosecutor’s] got nine inmates that are coming to testify against me with great stories. So I’m kind of feeling like, OK, this isn’t right because they’re cheating to prosecute me.

These inmates, they start bringing them in — Lamont Malone was one — let them testify about me that I was bragging about killing [Shivers] and bragging about doing that to his family. And then the other one, Jamal Skeeter. He was telling everybody that I was bragging about it.

Just really sick, cruel things, like, some really terrible things to say. And I get it, because the justice system has become “If you can help me, I can help you.”

Radley Balko: Skeeter in particular was known to be untrustworthy. Mid-trial, one local prosecutor spoke up to say that he and other colleagues in Southeast Virginia had stopped using Skeeter in any of their cases.

Prosecutors never publicly criticize a state’s witness in the middle of a trial, especially a trial for the murder of a police officer. That one did so in this case is a testament to just how preposterous the effort to convict Frederick had become.

Ryan Frederick: I don’t know what compelled him to do that. He did not have to. My lawyer was blown away. And he said, he couldn’t sit well with himself knowing what he knew and how unreliable this guy was after the statement that he gave.

Radley Balko: One narcotics officer told the jury that the handful of plants Wright and Turnbull took from Frederick’s garage would have brought in an estimated $64,000 per year in sales. The implication was that only a dealer would have that amount of pot. It was an absurd exaggeration, especially given that this particular alleged big-time drug dealer got up at 4 a.m. every morning to deliver Coca-Cola.

But the really outrageous thing about the prosecution continuing to call witnesses painting Frederick as some callous, drug-slinging killer is that they had ample evidence that this was false — starting with Frederick’s recorded conversations with police on the night of the raid — first in a squad car, and then at the Chesapeake jail.

In one of those videos, when Frederick was told in the squad car that he shot a police officer, he panicked and vomited. When he was later told at the jail that Shivers had died, Frederick started to shake. He screamed and vomited again, and then began hysterically crying. After the police left the room, Frederick curled up into a ball on the floor and wept.

Ryan Frederick: And at that point I, I lost it. It was just like, shit, man. Fuck. Man, I, I don’t even know what just freakin happened. Oh my God. And, like, I took a dude’s life. There ain’t no words that I can say to make anyone feel better about losing someone. And there ain’t no words that somebody can make me feel better about taking someone.

And I said from day one that I don’t want the story to be anything but what it is. But in that interrogation video, when they told me that he truly did pass, I was just sick about it, throwing up, throwing up, throwing up.

Radley Balko: We tried to get that interview footage for this podcast, but local officials refused to hand it over. I personally watched the videos at the time of Frederick’s trial and even posted them on my website and that of the magazine I was working for at the time. Other contemporary media accounts are consistent with Frederick’s description of the interrogation. 

The videos clearly showed a guy who was terrified and felt horribly about what he had done. And that’s precisely why prosecutors didn’t want the jury to see them. The state fought like hell to keep those videos out of the courtroom, calling them “self-serving.”

Ryan Frederick: I don’t know truly why they didn’t want it in. I can only assume that it made me look more human and less villain. Because someone could see, you know, authentic human react — like what’s going down real time. Like, this is what it is. You can’t doctor this. This is the story for what it is. It’s not your side. It’s not his side. It is the story. And the story doesn’t change. 

Radley Balko: The police detective who interrogated Frederick on the night of the raid also said Frederick was lucid, coherent, and responsive, and that his eyes weren’t bloodshot or dilated. In other words, not only did Frederick not kill Shivers in a blind pot-induced rage, he likely wasn’t even high. Frederick’s defense team expected that detective to testify, but were told that, coincidentally, he’d been sent out of state for training and wouldn’t be back until after the trial. 

Fortunately, the state wasn’t able to keep this evidence away from the jury. The trial judge ruled that the interrogation tapes could be played in court and ordered the detective back to Virginia to testify.

Despite those rulings, Frederick’s defense team had a major challenge in front of them. How do you convince a jury to sympathize with a pot smoker who had just killed a police officer?

Ryan Frederick: My attorney spoke with me in detail about that. He said it was one of the more difficult cases he’d ever had to defend because he had to walk a fine line on defending me, but not tarnishing the officer’s name.

Neill Franklin: We look at crimes against police officers in this country different than what we do when we look at crimes against the average person. And I mean, psychologically, I get it, I understand it. When you have a team of police officers working and one of their team members is killed or severely wounded, then, yeah, the emotions come into play and it’s all hands on deck, we’re going to do whatever we can to catch this person. Then once we catch them, we’re going to make sure they’re prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Radley Balko: At one point, the prosecution even called Detective Shivers’s widow to testify. Families of murder victims often testify at sentencing, but there’s no reason for them to testify during the guilt phase of a trial unless they have some knowledge of what happened. Given that this case boiled down to whether Frederick should have known the people breaking into his home were police, there’s little Shivers’s wife could have added. The aim was clearly to elicit the jury’s sympathy and to stoke anger toward Frederick.

In the end, the state’s aggressive and questionable tactics appear to have backfired. The jury did find Frederick guilty, but not of capital murder. Instead, they convicted him on the less serious charge of manslaughter. That difference suggests that they believed Frederick’s defense — that his actions that night may have been reckless, but they believed him when he said he didn’t know the man he shot was a police officer. Frederick was sentenced to 10 years in prison. And for killing a cop in the United States, that’s a pretty light sentence.

Neill Franklin: If Mr. Frederick was of a different hue, a different color, I think we would be seeing different results. My color? Probably be in jail for a long time.

Radley Balko: Frederick spent more than eight years behind bars. He was released in 2016.

WAVY TV 10: And happening today, the man convicted of shooting and killing a detective is set to be released from jail. You may remember, Ryan Frederick shot and killed Detective Jarrod Shivers back in 2008 in Chesapeake during a drug raid.

Radley Balko: Ryan Frederick is one of just a handful of people to have killed a police officer and lived to see the outside of a prison cell. As with anyone with a felony record though, life as a free man hasn’t been easy for him.

Ryan Frederick: The hardest adjustment was finding a job. No one will touch me. The even bigger hurdle amongst all hurdles that I’ve had — and I fight it still to this day — I can’t rent a house unless I want to go into a drug-infested, crime-infested neighborhood. 

I have yet to get pulled over. But the moment that a cop does get behind me, I am sweating profusely. I am shaky. If I’m on the phone, I’m telling somebody I got to get off the phone, there’s a cop behind me. And I’m not even on like talking with hands, just through Bluetooth. I am a wreck. I’m scared of them.

I know that, in my eyes, the way that the justice system and the police system works: If I get pulled over, and I get the right cop, I won’t go home.

Radley Balko: And despite the years in prison, the lingering trauma, and having to let go of the life he’d envisioned for himself back then, Frederick is still quick to point out that the ultimate victims of this story, the people who suffered the most dire consequences, are Detective Shivers and his family.

Ryan Frederick: When I say, what a waste, it’s not even about me. It’s a waste of a good man that lost his life. I don’t know that he was a good man to everybody. But to some people, he was a good man. And I don’t know him from anybody. But that was a guy that — somebody smiled when they saw him.

Radley Balko: Detective Shivers is dead because marijuana was illegal in Virginia, because anyone who used illegal drugs was considered a valid target, and because a police department’s narcotics officers had to justify their jobs. They had to generate arrests and confiscations. 

But 13 years after Shivers’s death, recreational marijuana was legalized in Virginia in 2021. Yet the war on pot continues in other states — as does the collateral damage. As we were researching this episode, a 16-year-old boy was shot and killed during a pre-dawn drug raid in Mobile, Alabama.

WKRG: The shooting early Monday morning at Sheringham Drive left 16-year-old Randall Adjessom dead after an officer shot him for reportedly pointing a laser-sighted gun to police. Councilman William Carroll said the police conduct was not acceptable.

William Carroll: The 16-year-old kid that was killed yesterday, wasn’t even the kid that we were looking for. That makes this 1,000 times worse. On a marijuana warrant? Come on, you know all the states right now making marijuana legal.

Radley Balko: The police were looking for the boy’s brother, who was suspected of selling pot but wasn’t home at the time. The kid who was killed had grabbed a gun when he woke to the sound of armed men breaking into his home.

WKRG: Randall’s mother told WKRG News 5 off-camera that she seen the body camera footage and sent a statement in response. “My son was murdered by two officers.”

Ryan Frederick: They implement these tactics, but over what? Something that we now say, “Oh, well, we were wrong.” It’s not gonna make you jump off the building. It’s not gonna make, you know, the world go cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Now, we were wrong, but what about all these people that lost their life fighting for your falsified agenda? Like, it’s sad. It’s a waste, man. It’s a big waste.

Radley Balko: Defenders of aggressive, dynamic entry tactics say they’re necessary for the safety of police officers. But that’s hard to fathom. These raids create volatility and confrontation where there was none before. Kicking down doors in the middle of the night elicits a primal fight-or-flight response. And when you’re in your own home, flight isn’t an option. So fight is all that’s left.

Officer Shivers is just one name on the list of police officers killed in these raids over the years. There’s Adam Sowders and Chuck Dinwiddie in Texas, FBI agent Samuel Hicks, and Joseph Whitehead in Georgia.

And then there’s Ron Jones and the story that started my career in journalism. Back in 2001, Cory Maye, a 21-year-old Black man, lived in a duplex with his girlfriend and infant daughter in Prentiss, Mississippi. The man who lived next to him was suspected of selling drugs. But when police served their warrant on the neighbor, they raided both sides of the duplex. Maye, who had no prior criminal record, shot and killed a police officer during the raid. He then immediately surrendered.

Here’s Neill Franklin again. 

Neill Franklin: I had a good friend, Ed Toatley, who was killed making a drug buy that went wrong back in the year 2000. I knew other police officers who were killed while working undercover or even just out on patrol engaging people who were out there selling drugs.

The reason it’s dangerous for police officers out there in the streets today is about the illicit drug trade. And again, a big reason for us being hated in many communities the way that we are today, is about enforcing these drug laws. And after spending trillions, trillions of dollars over the past few decades in prohibition drug laws, enforcing these laws — trillions at the federal, state, and local levels for cops, courtrooms, and prisons. Look at the addiction rates. Look at the overdose death rates. They continue to go up. They’re very high. So we’ve solved nothing there.

Radley Balko: There are a couple codas to this story: The Chesapeake Police Department did finally order its own investigation into the raid on Ryan Frederick’s home. But that investigation didn’t focus on allegations that police informants were breaking into homes to obtain probable cause. It also didn’t question the volatile tactics for low-level offenses that got Detective Shivers killed. In fact, the investigation only recommended that officers get new tactical vests.

And 16 years after the raid, public officials also continue to stifle any discussion about the case. We submitted an open records request for the audio and video of the police interrogations of Ryan Frederick. Those are the videos where Frederick sobs and vomits upon learning that Detective Shivers had died. We wanted listeners to hear for themselves just how far from the truth the prosecutors’ efforts to portray Frederick as some rage-driven killer really were.

The videos had already been played in open court. They had even been previously released to the press. A local TV station had posted them, as had a local blog, and I had personally posted them on my own blog and to the website of the magazine where I worked at the time. But because the posts were made in a format that is now obsolete, those videos no longer work.

Both the Chesapeake Police Department and the office of Commonwealth’s attorney rejected our request. The attorney’s office told us the videos do exist, but we would not be permitted to access them. This is absurd. Frederick was convicted in 2008 and released in 2016. There is no pending litigation related to his case. And again, the interviews have already been released to the public.

In a conversation with our legal counsel, the Commonwealth’s attorney said he was refusing our request because he didn’t want to “reopen old wounds” or upset Detective Shivers’s family. He also demanded to know how we intended to use the video, and said he was concerned that we might edit or “splice” the interviews in a misleading way. 

Virginia open records law grants law enforcement agencies broad discretion to refuse these requests. And while it’s certainly understandable why he wouldn’t want to provide more grief for Shivers’s family, those concerns are not enough to refuse such a request, especially for records that have already been made public. Moreover, state officials can’t put restrictions on journalists’ legitimate open records requests. Unfortunately, Virginia law also makes it extremely difficult to challenge a denial. So even ridiculous denials end up being the final word.

It has now been over 16 years since Shivers’s death, eight years since Frederick was released, and over three years since recreational marijuana was legalized in Virginia. The war on marijuana is pretty much over in that state, but government officials still aren’t ready to talk about how it was fought.

Radley Balko: Next time on Collateral Damage. 

Sarah Stillman: Police could choose to do the work themselves but instead they outsource it to vulnerable people who are often on the hook in some way, including to kids, to teenagers. 

Shawn Gaither: They were gonna set up one more drug buy that was gonna end in a bust.

There’s no training for this. They don’t pack weapons to protect themselves. They are at the mercy of the people that are supposed to be watching over them.

Radley Balko: Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept. 

It was reported and written by me, Radley Balko.

Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer, who also served as producer and editor.

Laura Flynn is our showrunner.

Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief.

The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal.

We had editing support from Maryam Saleh. 

Truc Nguyen mixed our show. 

Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow. 

Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan.

Art direction by Fei Liu.

Illustrations by Tara Anand.

Copy editing by Nara Shin.

Social and video media by Chelsey B. Coombs.

Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance. 

This series was made possible by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund. 

Thank you for listening.

The post Episode Two: A Death in the Dark appeared first on The Intercept.

In 2006, a 92-year-old Atlanta woman was gunned down in her own home by police during a drug raid. The police initially claimed the woman was a marijuana dealer who fired a gun at them. The story might have ended there. But an informant bravely came forward to set the record straight. Subsequent investigations and reports revealed that the police had raided the wrong home, killed an innocent woman, then planted marijuana in her basement to cover up their mistake.

In the ensuing months, we’d learn that the Atlanta Police Department’s narcotics unit routinely conducted mistaken raids on terrified people. The problem was driven by perverse federal, state, and local financial incentives that pushed cops to take shortcuts in procuring warrants for drug raids in order to boost their arrest and seizure statistics. Most of those incentives are still in place today.

The raids haven’t stopped. And neither have the deaths.

Transcript

Radley Balko: It’s November 22, 2006, the day before Thanksgiving. Alex White, a hustler and small-time drug dealer sits in the back of an Atlanta Police Department squad car.

As the car stops in front of The Varsity — a burger joint in downtown Atlanta — White rolls down the window, grabs the exterior handle, and pops open the door. Then he runs. The officers abandon their car in the middle of the street and give chase. 

White rushes into the burger spot and exits out the back. The officers follow. White eventually loses them long enough to duck behind a gas station. He then makes this remarkable phone call to 911.

Operator: [Unintelligible] How can I help you? 

Alex White: Yes, yes. I have two, two cops chasing me. They, they, they on the dirty side. I have two undercover police officers chasing me. One of ’em name is Detective — 

Operator: Are they chasing you now? 

Alex White: Yes. I just jumped out the car with ’em. See, I’m working with —

Operator: OK. Are you wanted?

Alex White: Huh? 

Operator: Are you wanted, sir?

Alex White: No, no, ma’am. No, ma’am. I’m not wanted at all. You —

Operator: OK. So you’re calling the police to the police …

Radley Balko: Alex White was calling 911 on the police officers who had detained him. His years as a narcotics informant had just taken a dangerous turn. And he was scared.

Operator: OK, sir, hold on. I can send you an officer. What’s your location? There’s nothing — 

Alex White: I can’t tell you that. I can’t tell you that. 

Operator: OK, sir. This is the police. We send officers out when you dial 911. 

Alex White: OK. OK. 

Operator: You want to talk to someone at a precinct? 

Alex White: I’m waiting on the ATF, I mean, I’m on North Avenue, waiting on ATF to come pick me up.

Operator: You waiting for ATF? 

Radley Balko: White’s work as an informant usually went like this: In exchange for a small payout, he would tip the cops off to other drug dealers. According to White, the police let him continue to sell drugs, as long as he cut them in. He’d also occasionally go undercover to buy drugs on behalf of law enforcement. He’s said the cops had him buy illegal guns too. He’d done these jobs for several police agencies, including the Atlanta Police Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, or ATF — a federal agency. 

During this panicked call, White told the dispatcher he was waiting for the ATF to come rescue him — to rescue him from the Atlanta Police.

Alex White: I don’t know who on whose side, man. They playing dirty.

Operator: [Crosstalk] Do you want to talk to someone at the precinct? 

Alex White: [Crosstalk] You see what happened yesterday that was on the news, yeah, they involved me in there, I had nothing to do with it. … They keep talking in code, saying they had to take me down there, then once I told them ATF was on the way to pick me up.

Radley Balko: White referenced seeing a news report he had seen on TV, and how the police who picked him up were speaking in code. It made him nervous enough to flee.

Alex White: I jumped out of the car. So they around here looking for me right now. [Unintelligible]

Operator: OK. The most I can do is send a police officer to come pick you up, sir. I don’t know what else you think I can do. 

Alex White: All right, cool. 

Radley Balko: The dispatcher was pretty confused, and who could blame her? White himself was still trying to figure out what was going on, and who, if anyone, he could trust. The previous evening, White had received an urgent phone call from one of his handlers at the Atlanta Police Department. They needed him to lie for them. That wasn’t unusual. White had lied for the cops before. 

But this time, Atlanta narcotics detectives wanted White to say he had bought drugs from a house at 933 Neal Street, in a rough section of Atlanta called “The Bluff.” The detective offered to pay White more than the $30 they usually gave him. So he agreed. But later, White saw a breaking news story on TV that would change his mind — and eventually his life.

Alan Dreher: It was a very tragic and unfortunate incident. 

News reporter: That’s how Assistant Police Chief Alan Dreher describes the botched drug raid that left a 92-year-old woman dead and three officers with non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. Police say those shots were fired by the elderly victim, Kathryn Johnston.

Radley Balko: The same narcotics officers who were asking White to lie had raided that same house on Neal Street. 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston lived inside. When Johnston heard the officers break open the burglar bars on her front door, she rose from her bed and grabbed the revolver she kept in her nightstand.

News reporter: Investigators say 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston fired a handgun at officers who entered her home November 21, using a no-knock warrant, injuring three officers. The officers responded by opening fire, killing Johnston. Angry relatives called for justice. 

Sarah Dozier: They shot her down like a dog! She is 92 years old! 

Radley Balko: After the officers forced open her door, Johnston fired a single shot that hit no one. The officers responded with a swarm of 39 bullets screaming through Johnston’s living room. They shot her five or six times.

Three cops were struck too — but by shrapnel from bullets fired by their fellow officers. They would eventually call an ambulance for those wounded colleagues. 

They would not call an ambulance for Kathryn Johnston.

News reporter: Neighbors of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston are devastated.

Neighbor: It’s insane. I’ve been crying all night for this lady, man, her family.

News reporter: Atlanta police say there was an undercover drug buy at Johnston’s Neal Street home. People who live nearby say no way. 

Neighbor: Never. Never. This is a 92-year-old lady that lives by herself. She don’t know no young folks like that. 

Radley Balko: The police had acted on a bad tip — one they hadn’t bothered to corroborate. Upon realizing their mistake — that Kathryn Johnston was no drug dealer — the officers decided to cover it all up. They left Johnston to bleed to death on the floor of her own home, while one officer planted marijuana in her basement. 

When the informant Alex White saw the report about Johnston’s death on TV, he made the connection and quickly decided he wanted no part in concealing the killing of an innocent elderly woman. In the days that followed, Alex White — petty thief, two-bit drug dealer, hustler, snitch — would come forward with allegations that would posthumously vindicate Kathryn Johnston. They would also bring down the Atlanta police department’s entire narcotics division. 

Alex White: I think justice was served, and it couldn’t have came at a better time. I’m glad that the truth came out, and I got to clear my name out of all this.

News reporter: After five months of living in a hotel room and looking over his shoulder for those who might do him harm, professional informant Alex White is ready to fight publicly against police practices, which drew him into the center of the deadly Neal Street shooting investigation. 

Radley Balko: White’s story would launch an investigation that sent shockwaves throughout the country. It exposed widespread corruption and abuses in the Atlanta Police Department, and resulted in the disbanding of the agency’s entire narcotics division. The incident would prove damning not just for Atlanta police, but the city’s courts, prosecutors, and its political leadership.

When the raid on Kathryn Johnston’s house happened, I was just a few years into my career in journalism. I had been covering the rise of violent drug raids on my blog and as a freelance reporter. Kathryn Johnston’s death had every red flag. The idea that this 92-year-old woman was dealing drugs and knowingly took on a team of police officers — well, I guess it was possible. But even at that point in my career, it was clear to me that something had gone terribly wrong. 

I started to write about what seemed to be holes in the police account of what happened. The story quickly made national headlines. Then, slowly, we started to learn that, sure enough, things really didn’t happen the way the police had claimed.

News reporter: There are a lot of questions police have yet to answer.

Markel Hutchins (speaking to the news): Assistant Police Chief Alan Dreher, I think, really insulted and offended this family by saying that proper procedure was followed. What kind of proper procedure would lead to the death of a 92-year-old woman in her own home?

Radley Balko: The Kathryn Johnston case embodies the worst excesses of the war on drugs. It has militarized and aggressive policing. Abuse of informants. A no-knock “dynamic entry” raid. Rampant police corruption. Perverse incentives and well-intentioned policies with horrific unintended consequences. Her killing is a case study in how the drug war is fought. 

Her death illustrates the disregard the drug war nurtures in police for the very people that they claim to be serving, and the people politicians claim to be protecting when they pass and enforce these laws in the first place.

From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage. 

I’m Radley Balko. I’m an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years. 

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeating drug addiction, but the “war” part of that metaphor quickly became all too literal.

When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and 90s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric, and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections. 

All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause. But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage.

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This podcast will look at people who died because of the war on drugs, but didn’t need to. We’ll tell the stories of completely innocent people caught in the drug war crossfire. We’ll also look at the unnecessary deaths of small-time users and offenders, and of people who legitimately used illicit drugs as medication. We’ll look at cops who were needlessly killed. And we’ll look into the thousands of people U.S. drug policy has unnecessarily killed in other countries. 

The legacy of the drug war now rests in the hands of Donald Trump, whose administration has wasted no time expanding law enforcement power with little regard for the human cost. 

This is Episode One: Dirty Business: The Atlanta narcotics unit’s deadly raid on Kathryn Johnston.

Markel Hutchins: Ms. Johnston was clearly a person that was full of life. She was vivacious. Although she was 92 years old, she was not someone that was broken down.

Radley Balko: That’s Rev. Markel Hutchins, a civil rights activist who became a spokesperson for Kathryn Johnston’s family after her death. Today, he’s the head of MovementForward Inc., a civil rights group in Atlanta.

Markel Hutchins: She didn’t have a lot of illness. She’d not been in the hospital. She wasn’t sick. She would dance and like music. 

Radley Balko: Johnston had no children and was fiercely independent. Even in her 90s, she did her own cooking and cleaning. 

Markel Hutchins: Ms. Johnston would regularly work at the daycare. And she was not some meek little woman that needed somebody to protect her, somebody to care for her, anything like that. She was full of life, which is what made Kathryn Johnston’s death so tragic.

Radley Balko: In 1989, Johnston moved into a small, yellow brick house on Neal Street owned by her niece. The house was in a neighborhood known as The Bluff, named for the narrow streets that run up and down its hills. It’s a historically Black part of town, where graduates of Morehouse and Spelman colleges bought houses and made lives for themselves in the late 1800s. But The Bluff and adjacent neighborhoods hit hard times in the 1970s as the city’s wealth fled to the suburbs. 

News archive: The Atlanta Planning Department has warned that if this trend continues, it’s just a matter of time until Atlanta will become an island of Negroes surrounded by a sea of white suburbanites.

Radley Balko: Then, in the late 1980s, the city cleared an adjacent Black neighborhood to make way for a football stadium and a convention hall. Despite promises of a spillover economic benefit, the development only served as a barrier between those Black neighborhoods and downtown. Poverty, blight, and crime festered. 

Markel Hutchins: The community that Kathryn Johnston lived in was a community that had for decades been under-resourced and under-supported and under-invested in.

Radley Balko: Four years after Johnston’s death, the website NeighborhoodScout.com ranked The Bluff as the fifth most dangerous neighborhood in the United States. Locals joked that “BLUFF” was actually an acronym for “Better Leave, You Fucking Fool.”

Markel Hutchins: Quite frankly, it was a community that was and still is suffering with the vestiges of drugs and despair and poverty and lack of opportunity. So with those things come crime and violence.

Radley Balko: Because of the crime in her neighborhood, Kathryn Johnston took precautions to keep herself safe. She typically only came to the door to meet visitors if they called ahead and she knew they were coming. She installed security bars on the front door. And Johnston’s niece, Sarah Dozier, gave her aunt an additional bit of protection: a .38 revolver.

Markel Hutchins: We were riding along in Ms. Dozier’s Mercedes Benz. And I asked, I said, “Did Ms. Johnston have a gun?” And Ms. Dozier said, “You’re damn right she had a gun.” She said, “She had a gun because I gave it to her.” And I said, “What kind of gun was it?” And Ms. Dozier opened her glove compartment and she showed me a .38. And she said, “She had one just like this. I gave her one just like mine.”

Radley Balko: Tragically, the measures Johnston had taken to protect herself would ultimately contribute to her death: The burglar bars delayed police just long enough to allow her to retrieve her gun. 

Markel Hutchins: Ms. Johnston did not actually shoot at the police. Ms. Johnston shot at the eave of the house. She shot up in an effort to scare those who were trying to break in her home, which is a clear indication of what kind of person she was. She was not eager to shoot anyone. She simply wanted to stop who she thought was burglars from breaking down her door and entering into her home.

Radley Balko: The cover-up started almost immediately. The police first claimed they killed Johnston in self-defense.

Alan Dreher: Once the door was forced, the female inside began shooting at the police officers.

Radley Balko: That’s Atlanta PD’s assistant chief at the time, Alan Dreher. The police chief happened to be out of town, so Dreher became the face of the department at press conferences as reporters started asking questions.

Alan Dreher: Investigator Junior was shot three times. Once in the bulletproof vest in his chest, once to the side of his face, and once in the leg. Investigator Smith received one gunshot wound to his left leg. And Investigator Bond received a gunshot wound to his left arm.

Radley Balko: It turned out that the cops weren’t hit by Johnston; instead, they were injured by shrapnel from their own bullets. That was probably the biggest fallacy about what happened during the incident. But the planning for the raid — or lack thereof — was riddled with shortcuts, lies, and insufficient oversight. These would turn out to be problems not just unique to this case, but systemic patterns within the Atlanta Police Department, and indeed in too many narcotics divisions around the country.

We’re going to tell you this story in two ways. First, we’ll give you the story as told by the officers who killed Kathryn Johnston. Then we’ll tell you what really happened. 

So, here’s the police version of events. 

And I should note here that if it weren’t for informant Alex White’s refusal to go along with the cover-up, this is the narrative that may well still be accepted as fact today.

At some point on November 21, police claimed, Alex White called one of his APD handlers to report a large supply of cocaine at 933 Neal Street. The officer met up with White and took him to the house, where White then bought some cocaine from a Black man named “Sam.” 

Alan Dreher: The narcotics were purchased from a male inside that residence.

Radley Balko: While he was there, White saw a gun, and he noticed security cameras on the outside of the house, a possible sign of a sophisticated drug operation. The police then obtained a no-knock search warrant and raided the home. 

News reporter: District Attorney Paul Howard says no-knock warrants are common, especially in suspected drug cases.

Paul Howard: Under certain circumstances, policemen are given the opportunity to go into a residence without announcing themselves. And the reason that that happens is because in many places where drugs are found, the drug dealers or the drug possessers would flush or destroy drugs before the police would get a chance to obtain them.

Radley Balko: As the front door flew open, someone appeared with a gun, fired, and struck three officers. The other officers then opened fire, killing the assailant, who happened to be an elderly Black woman. The police then searched the home and found a substantial supply of marijuana in the basement. 

Alan Dreher: Anytime we get information or a tip that someone is selling drugs out of a residence, we certainly want to make sure we investigate that thoroughly and investigate it.

Radley Balko: Other than the age and gender of the suspect, this narrative sounds like a typical drug raid: The cops got a tip. They investigated. They performed a drug buy using an informant. They raided. The suspect opened fire. The cops fired back. 

Drugs and violence go hand in hand, we’re told. A discerning listener might figure, OK, maybe a detail or two was exaggerated, or got confused in the chaos. But overall, the story makes sense. It matches the narrative we’ve heard hundreds of times, over and over.

But in reality, there was no call from Alex White. There was no cocaine purchase. There was no one named Sam. There were no surveillance cameras. And the police officers did not fire their weapons in self-defense. There was also no marijuana “found” in the basement. 

The entire story was fiction.

Markel Hutchins: On the evening that Kathryn Johnston was killed, I was sitting on the couch watching the evening news with my then-girlfriend and her son. I got a call shortly after the news broke from a young man who had been active in the community as a community activist. And this young man named Tony reached out to me and said there’d been this tragedy that happened in his community, and he thought that it was something that I needed to respond to. 

One of the clips that they showed on the news about Ms. Johnston’s death that evening was of her family members that were on the scene. They’d gotten there and Ms. Johnston’s niece, whose name is Sarah Dozier, was irate, cursing and screaming.

News reporter: Sarah Dozier made clear last night that she is holding the Atlanta Police Department responsible for her aunt’s death. 

Sarah Dozier: There are no drugs in that house. And they realize now they done the wrong house. And they killed her. Now they didn’t have to shoot that old lady down like a dog. They didn’t have to do that. It’s one old woman in that house. I’m as mad as hell, and somebody is going to answer to that. 

Markel Hutchins: So I literally went to the scene that night, and when I arrived, I encountered and met the lady that I’d seen. And after several conversations, I met with other members of the family on the scene that night.

And Ms. Dozier said to me, first thing, I’ll never forget this, I said, “Miss, Miss Dozier, let me pray with you.” And she said, “I don’t need no goddamn prayer. I need somebody” — that is, in her words — “gonna kick ass and take names.” And pardon my language, but that’s exactly what she said to me.

And I’d never heard anybody refuse prayer. And I’d been preaching my entire adult life — a long time. And I never heard anyone speak that way. But that was Ms. Dozier’s response. It was certainly understandable, knowing what we now know about what actually happened to Ms. Johnston. Her family had every right to be as angry and as irate as they were.

Radley Balko: Over the next several years, multiple investigations would uncover what really happened. And we’ll get into the true story of Kathryn Johnston’s killing in a little bit. But first let’s take a step back and take stock of what was going on at the Atlanta Police Department — what the Department of Justice would later describe as a “culture of misconduct.”

Cristina Beamud: One of the things that if you talk about systemic problems is whether officers in general feel as if they have to follow the rules. And I submit that in Atlanta, at the time of Kathryn Johnston, they were not.

Radley Balko: That’s Cristina Beamud. In the wake of Kathryn Johnston’s death, Atlanta created a civilian review board for the police department. Beamud was its first director. Beamud also held similar positions in Boston, Cambridge, Eugene, and Miami. Over the course of her career, she says she’s seen some familiar patterns.

Cristina Beamud: Where this type of misconduct reaches this level and creates such a problem, a city needs to look at not only just the actors, but at the systems that created the bad situation that allowed for this to happen. And indeed, that rarely happens.

Radley Balko: In the aftermath of Johnston’s death, the FBI conducted an investigation of the Atlanta Police Department. One of the problematic policies they honed in on was quotas.

In Atlanta, there was a quasi-official quota for narcotics cops known as “9 and 2.” The FBI’s report described “a rule that required narcotics officers to obtain at least two narcotics search warrants and make nine narcotics related arrests per month. Some officers indicated that their performance appraisals were tied directly to the nine and two requirement.”

So, if an officer didn’t meet the quota, they risked being removed from a highly desired position. Some were threatened with a transfer to work at the airport — not a sought-after assignment.

This pressure to produce numbers went straight up the chain of command. Narcotics officers say that supervisors were also held accountable for their subordinates meeting quotas, and were aware that officers were taking shortcuts and lying on affidavits to meet them. APD supervisors themselves disputed those allegations.

Markel Hutchins: Quotas in law enforcement are very, very bad. They lead to very dangerous sets of circumstances. And we saw that as a contributing factor to Kathryn Johnston’s death. The narcotics unit, they got out of control and out of hand, because they were in fact trying to make drug arrests.

Radley Balko: The quotas were so critical to job evaluations that supervisors encouraged officers who had met their monthly quotas to give their surplus cases to another officer who may have been running short. 

The problem is, the officer on the receiving end of the handoff then swore to a court that they had conducted an investigation that they hadn’t done, that they had witnessed a drug buy they had never seen, that they had worked with an informant to whom they’d never spoken. And that, of course, is illegal.

There was a very predictable reason why the department was so obsessed with numbers. And it’s not just an Atlanta thing. It’s money.

There were — and still are — a lot of federal dollars tied specifically to drug policing. Grants and funding are generally contingent on raw arrest and seizure numbers. Not on crime rates, addiction rates, or other criteria. The most well known of these are called Byrne grants. Since the late ’80s, a portion of these federal grants go to police departments specifically for fighting the drug war. Whether or not you get funding heavily depends on how many arrests and drug seizures you make.

There’s another program called High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas. To qualify for this grant, you have to arrest a lot of people on drug charges. Once the federal government classifies you as a high–intensity drug trafficking area, you get more funding. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. And even if you accept that drug prohibition is a legitimate function of government, this just isn’t a successful way to stop people from using drugs.

Markel Hutchins: I think that anytime resources are tied to arrest, it leads to an environment where corruption is more likely and perhaps even probable and not just possible. I don’t think we should ever tie arrests and resources, particularly from the federal government.

Radley Balko: If you watch a lot of police movies and TV shows, you’re probably familiar with the pattern in which police bust small-time drug offenders, then flip them to move up the supply chain. But the sort of investigation that brings down a major drug distributor takes a lot more time, and typically results in fewer arrests.

The perverse thing about these grants is that because they’re tied to raw arrest numbers, officers are incentivized to go after low-level offenders. Because there are more of them. And they need the numbers.

And that’s exactly what Kathryn Johnston’s case shows was happening in Atlanta. 

Coming up: The real story behind what happened.

Break

Radley Balko: So let’s get back to November 21, 2006. Here’s the true story of what happened to Kathryn Johnston. At around 2 p.m., three APD narcotics officers were looking to make some busts in Northwest Atlanta. They decided to check out an apartment complex known for drug activity. Two of them — Gregg Junnier and Arthur Tesler — searched some vacant apartments. They found nothing. But a third officer named Jason Smith went into a grove of trees behind the apartments, where drug dealers occasionally hid their stashes. He found several bags of pot.

Later that afternoon, an informant called Detective Smith to tell him someone was selling crack in front of a neighborhood store about a mile away. Three officers drove to the site and saw a known drug dealer named Fabian Sheats standing outside. 

Detective Smith slipped around back and planted one of the baggies of pot he’d just found. Meanwhile, Detective Tesler grabbed Sheats by the throat and slammed his head into a fence. The officers then detained Sheats and told him that, given his record, they’d make sure he’d go to prison for a long time unless he could tell them where they could find some drugs.

To get the officers off his back, Sheats played along. He led them to 933 Neal Street. It was a distinctive house due to the disability ramp installed in front.

Normally, the next step in a narcotics investigation would be for the officers to have an informant attempt to purchase drugs from the house. This could then be used as justification to obtain a warrant. 

So at around 5 p.m., they called Alex White to see if he could make a controlled drug buy. These officers had used White frequently in the past. White told them he was available, but he didn’t have transportation. The officers were impatient. They were afraid that if they waited too long, someone might move the stash of cocaine — a stash Sheats had said was substantial. So instead, they fabricated the drug buy in their sworn affidavit.

Here’s APD Assistant Chief Alan Dreher reciting the “official” details shortly after the raid.

Alan Dreher: Late yesterday afternoon, we made an undercover purchase of narcotics from 933 Neal Street. As a result of that narcotic purchase, members of the narcotics team obtained a search warrant for that same address.

Radley Balko: This was all false. There was no “purchase of narcotics.” They had obtained the warrant under false pretenses.

Because drug crimes are consensual crimes — which is to say that all parties participate in the crime voluntarily — there’s typically no victim to report them to police, the way there is with a rape or a robbery. 

This means that law enforcement officers have to generate leads. And the most common way they generate leads is by working with informants. Informants are often addicts or involved in the drug trade themselves. Or they’re people who agree to work with police to get leniency on their own criminal charges. 

As you might expect, such people aren’t always the most reliable sources of information. So the information police do get is often dirty. In this case, the unreliable informant was Fabian Sheats, the drug dealer who police say provided them with Kathryn Johnston’s address.

News reporter: An investigative source tells Channel 2 that police officers told a magistrate judge that a man named Sam sold drugs from Kathryn Johnston’s house to their informant, a man later identified as Fabian Sheats. But Sheats later claimed he was pressured after the fact to go along with the officer’s story.

Radley Balko: Some time between 5 and 6:30 p.m. on the day Kathryn Johnston was killed, Detective Jason Smith called a magistrate to let her know he had just filed an electronic affidavit to request a no-knock search warrant. A search warrant affidavit is a sworn statement. Everything an officer asserts in it is considered to be under oath. Yet just about everything in Smith’s affidavit was false.

Smith claimed to have contacted a registered informant, patted him down, then sent him to 933 Neal Street, where the informant bought $50 worth of crack cocaine from a Black man named Sam. Smith claimed the informant told him there were security cameras in front of the house, which justified a no-knock raid. 

It was all a lie. There was no drug buy. The police never had an informant purchase crack, and there was no Black man named Sam. 

Even the most basic and perfunctory surveillance, which most police departments are required to do, would have revealed that there were no security cameras either. According to court records obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the magistrate signed the warrant four minutes after she received it.

Cristina Beamud: Not only was the acquisition of the search warrant flawed and the police officers lacking discipline, it was the response to the situation that showed the police lack of discipline.

Radley Balko: At 6:30 p.m., the raid team met in the parking lot outside of a fire station. Smith briefed eight other officers. Dusk had settled into darkness. 

A conscientious officer might have picked up on subtle clues suggesting that this was not the site of a major drug operation — for example, the disability ramp.

Instead, Smith advised the officers to avoid walking up the ramp so the noise of their feet treading on the hollow structure wouldn’t alert anyone inside. As the officers prepared to force entry, they had difficulty getting through the burglar bars on Johnston’s door. 

This gave Johnston time to hear them, retrieve her revolver, and fire off the warning shot just as the door opened. The officers returned fire with 39 bullets. 

At some point, the officers had to realize that they made a huge mistake — that this elderly woman was not some major drug distributor. At some point, they had to realize that they’d just taken an innocent life. And at that point, they had a decision to make.

Do they call an ambulance for her? Do they cop to their mistake and deal with the consequences? Or do they try to cover it all up?

And so as Johnston lay bleeding in her living room, the officers did not call an ambulance to save her. Instead, Officer Smith retrieved three of the remaining bags of marijuana he’d found in the woods earlier that day, and he planted them in Kathryn Johnston’s basement. 

A couple of hours later that evening, Rev. Markel Hutchins walked up to the crowd of angry family and neighbors gathered in front of the house, alongside TV cameras and news vans. 

Markel Hutchins: Ms. Dozier said to me, “I need somebody that’s going to do something to bring the killers of my aunt to justice.” And she said, “If you want to do something for my family, you go over there and talk to that media.” She said, “They’ve made me look like a fool, and I’ll never speak to them again. My family will never speak to them again. Go over there and talk to them.” So I addressed the media that night.

Markel Hutchins (speaking to the media): There should have been better investigative work done on the front side so that we didn’t have this kind of tragedy on the back side.

News reporter: Rev. Markel Hutchins says he’s heard from people in the community that there was drug activity in the neighborhood, but not at Johnston’s home.

Markel Hutchins: That was the first time that I ever met a member of the Johnston family. And that’s how I became involved in the case.

Radley Balko: Meanwhile, the narcotics officers went about their cover-up. At various times, Officers Smith, Junnier, and Tesler called Alex White and asked if he’d be willing to lie for them. Junnier offered White $150 to just leave town.

Detective Tesler drafted a report about the nonexistent drug buy from Johnston’s home. But he and his narcotics team had yet to work out the details, so he left portions of the report blank. That should have been an early red flag that something was wrong. 

Instead, their police lieutenant helped them draft a new report. Then, they destroyed the first draft. 

In the meantime, White was learning about Johnston’s death on TV. 

News reporter: Officers got a judge to sign a search warrant, and a narcotics team went to the home. The chief says as they arrived at the door, they screamed “Police.” 

Alan Dreher: They managed to force the door open, and once the door was opened, they were fired upon by the elderly female inside, by Ms. Johnston.

Radley Balko: White started having second thoughts. Since White was also an informant for the ATF, he called his handler at that agency to seek some advice. They met in person to discuss the situation. The ATF agent was alarmed. He told White that the situation was serious, and not to take any calls from Junnier, Tesler, or Smith. 

But White was afraid of the Atlanta Police Department, and of Detective Junnier in particular. White would later tell the New York Times Magazine that Junnier had threatened him. White said Junnier once showed him a picture of a Jamaican drug dealer who had been decapitated. It felt like an unsubtle warning not to cross the detective. Junnier, through his lawyer, denied all claims by White; the Atlanta Police Department would not comment.

White knew the officers were desperate. He feared that if he ignored them, they’d come looking for him. So when they called again, he answered his phone and played along. They sent a car to pick him up. This is the car that White would eventually flee, sparking that foot chase through downtown, and the frantic call to 911 we heard at the top of the show.

Operator: You said undercover, undercover cops had picked you up? 

Alex White: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They came and picked me up to ask me about the killing yesterday. But they tried to play it off. So ATF told me, don’t get in the car with them. By that time, man, I was already in the car with ’em. And then when I tried to talk to ’em in code to tell them where I was, they had me by the tail, they hurry up and pulled up. So we coming out north side, I I jumped out the car real quick. You know what I’m saying?

Operator: OK. All right. I’m gonna have someone out there for to help you. OK.

Alex White: ’Cause there’s a lot of dirty shit going on. 

Operator: I understand, but stay at the KFC, OK?

Radley Balko: Once he concluded the 911 operator couldn’t help him, White hung up, and he called his handler at the ATF. They sent a car to pick White up and take him to the local ATF office. The agent then called Atlanta PD’s internal affairs, who sent an officer for an interview.

While Alex White was scrambling to stay safe, Kathryn Johnston’s neighbors were talking to the media. They were angry at how she’d been portrayed on the news. They told reporters the notion that Johnston was some sort of drug dealer was just preposterous.

News reporter: Residents say the police side of all this just isn’t adding up.

Neighbor: Why would she just start firing if they said they were the police? Something’s not making sense in that gap right there.

Radley Balko: Yet for the first few days, APD officials attempted to maintain some neutrality. Here’s Dreher again, the assistant chief who was acting as department spokesperson while the police chief was on vacation.

News reporter: Was Johnston present when the undercover purchase was made? 

Alan Dreher: That’s still under investigation at this time. 

News reporter: Do you have any reason to suspect that Ms. Johnston might have somehow been involved in any suspected drug dealings at that residence? 

Alan Dreher: That’s still under investigation. 

Radley Balko: Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard spoke at the same press conference.

Paul Howard: Now, I’m not trying to insinuate that Ms. Johnston was involved. But the police have assured me that they had made a drug purchase from this very residence on this day.

Radley Balko: Meanwhile, Alex White was getting anxious. He had hoped that after interviewing him, APD’s internal affairs department would give him some protection. He was scared of retaliation. Instead, they just sent him home.

White, certain that he was a marked man, left an urgent voicemail for his ATF handler and on the hotline for the local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. No one called back; it was the night before Thanksgiving.

The next morning, two APD officers drove by to pick up White and pay him the $150. But still, he had his doubts. Over Thanksgiving dinner, White expressed his fears to his family. His uncle suggested he do something drastic: Go on TV and tell the entire story. If it was all out in the open, White wouldn’t need to rely on police officers to protect him from other police officers. Everyone would be watching. 

Although he was scared of outing himself as a snitch, White decided it was safer to come clean. So after dinner, he called the local Fox affiliate and told them his story. They sent a taxi to take him to the studio. And then he spilled it all out on the air. They pixelated his face and referred to him as “the man who claims to be the informant.”

News reporter: They say he bought drugs at the house. No way, says the man who claims to be the informant. 

Alex White: I never went to that house. I’m telling them, I never went to that house. 

News reporter: When police burst through Johnston’s door, she opened fire and was shot and killed. The police informant says he then got a call from officers.

Alex White: They called me immediately after the shooting and asked me, I mean, to tell me: This is what you need to do. You need to cover our ass.

Radley Balko: At some point, local news outlets began reporting on White by name. Meanwhile, not long after the Fox interview, Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington returned from his planned vacation and resumed his role as the public face of the department.

Richard Pennington (at press conference): They did find drugs in the house. And it wasn’t a large quantity, but they did find some drugs. 

Reporter: What kind? 

Richard Pennington: It was marijuana. 

Radley Balko: Pennington largely reiterated the same cover story. But his concession that police hadn’t found a large amount of marijuana was the first official acknowledgment of growing discrepancies between the raiding officers’ account and what actually happened.

Richard Pennington (at press conference): We don’t have anything to hide. We don’t have anything to cover up. The investigation will be transparent.

Radley Balko: By this point, the FBI had opened an investigation. So behind the scenes, a race was on. The FBI needed to collect evidence and interview witnesses before the narcotics officers could destroy the former and corrupt the latter. 

Meanwhile, officers Tesler, Junnier, and Smith met up to hash out a narrative that would be consistent with what they thought investigators knew. At one point, Detective Smith even printed out scripts for each of them to memorize and recite when they were interviewed by internal affairs.

So simultaneously, APD officials were making the case to the public that the raid was legitimate and justified. The narcotics detectives were scheming to cover their tracks. And FBI investigators were chasing down incriminating evidence. 

News anchor: In Atlanta, the police shooting death of a 92-year-old woman in her home is now a federal case. The FBI now looking into the raid and what led police to make it.

Radley Balko: Alex White’s appearance on TV made national news. It had planted a seed, and the media were now digging not only into this incident, but the police department’s overall track record.

By early December, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other outlets began publishing stories about other botched raids. And as it turns out, 20 months before killing Kathryn Johnston, the same narcotics unit raided a house next door to Johnston’s. That too was a no-knock raid. 

It was also a raid for which the police claimed to have used an informant, but the officer who obtained the warrant never witnessed or supervised the drug buy. And in that case too, the police found no drugs and made no arrests. Days later, another woman told the local Fox affiliate that she had also been wrongly raided by Atlanta drug cops. 

At a town meeting held at a church just down the road from Johnston’s home, more residents told more stories about more mistaken raids.

Markel Hutchins: All that the police department had to do was rely on, as they did, rely on a fabricated word from a fictitious confidential informant and present that to a judge, and the judge would just sign the no-knock warrant. And they were kicking in people’s doors and violating people’s rights. It was Kathryn Johnston that made the news because of her tragic death. But there were dozens of families that came to me in the aftermath of Kathryn Johnston’s death to say that the police had done the same thing to them.

Radley Balko: The Journal-Constitution reported that many of APD’s no-knock raids had produced no suspect, no drugs, and no guns. The paper also found more examples of police making untruthful statements on affidavits for search warrants. 

One attorney and former police officer told the paper that judges in the city never questioned officers’ claims that informants were credible. They never even asked them to verify that an informant existed.

When police request a no-knock warrant, they are supposed to show specific evidence that the suspect is dangerous or may destroy their drug supply. But The Associated Press found that the city’s narcotics cops often provided only “cursory” information, and that judges signed those warrants anyway. 

In some cases, officers merely included boilerplate language about their own experience and training, and offered no evidence at all about why a particular suspect required a no-knock entry.

Markel Hutchins: We knew that this was not just an isolated incident. We knew that these police officers were doing this in that community to people that were not only undeserving, but were totally not connected to any kinds of crime.

Radley Balko: It’s worth taking a moment here to discuss the U.S. Supreme Court’s role in all of this, which is pretty significant. In 1995, a decade before the Kathryn Johnston raid, the court ruled that under the Fourth Amendment, police officers are required to knock and announce themselves before forcing entry into a private home. 

But in June of 2006 — six months before Kathryn Johnston’s death — there was a case called Hudson v. Michigan. A 5-4 majority ruled that even if police violate the knock-and-announce rule — which of course means they’ve violated a suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights — they could still use evidence found during that illegal search. This left officers with little incentive to conduct a search in a constitutional way.

In early January 2007, about six weeks after the Johnston raid, officer Gregg Junnier retired. It was the first indication that the pact between officers Junnier, Smith, and Tesler may have started to crack. Indeed, Junnier would eventually start cooperating with federal investigators.

Then, in April …

News Reporter: Two of those officers, Gregg Junnier and Jason Smith, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and lying on Thursday. A third officer is awaiting trial.

Radley Balko: Officer Junnier was sentenced to six years in prison, Smith to 10 years. Tesler opted to go to trial on the state charges. He pleaded guilty to lying to investigators, although that conviction was later overturned on appeal. He then pleaded guilty on a federal civil rights charge and received a five-year sentence. It would take another three-and-a-half years before the full FBI report was unsealed. But when it dropped, it was damning.

FBI investigators found widespread corruption among Atlanta narcotics officers. Among the findings:

• Drug detectives routinely lied on search warrant affidavits. They described drug buys that never happened, and lied about conducting surveillance.
• Narcotics officers routinely under-reported the quantity of drugs seized from suspects, then used the “extra” to plant on other suspects in order to obtain leverage. They also paid informants less than what they reported, and used the extra money for other purposes.
• Officers often conducted violent, highly volatile no-knock raids based solely on a tip from a single informant, as they did with Kathryn Johnston.
• Judges routinely approved no-knock warrant applications without the required evidence.

APD often conducted what they called “thunder runs,” in which they’d go to a high-crime area, jump out of their vehicles, and randomly search anyone around. Finally, the report found that Junnier and other officers were basically running a protection racket — while on duty. They were collecting payments from local businesses to keep drug dealers away. This too isn’t uncommon among narcotics officers. When police are permitted to break the very laws they’re enforcing, their respect for the law in general can wear down over time. 

Again, here’s Cristina Beamud. 

Cristina Beamud: Once people begin to think that the rules are different for them, that they are different from the rest of the police department, they lose sight of all the other values that the police department imposes on the rest of the employees. They feel different. They feel protected, they feel safer bending rules or breaking rules, or in the case of what happened in Atlanta, of committing very serious crimes.

Radley Balko: Unlike far too many similar incidents, the shooting of Kathryn Johnston did result in some accountability. The three officers most responsible for her death were sent to prison. Her family eventually received about $5 million from the city of Atlanta. And to his credit, Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington would eventually disband the entire narcotics division and rebuild it from scratch. 

News Reporter: Lt. William Trivelpiece is in charge of 30 new members of the narcotics unit, who are now considered the city’s best trained detectives in town.

William Trivelpiece: They’re working side by side with the officers. Almost in the capacity of a training, they’re showing them this is how we do it; this is how it’s done right.

Radley Balko: But relative to the gravity of the FBI’s findings, the overall impact on the police department was pretty mild. The supervisor of the narcotics unit was sentenced to 18 months in prison for faking a burglary to cover up yet another illegal raid. Two other officers who were part of covering up the Johnston raid were eventually fired in 2010. But no one else involved in the raid, or previous botched raids, or the cover-up got more than a slap on the wrist.

The Kathryn Johnston raid made national news. So did the subsequent investigations. There were congressional hearings launched because of her death. Activists demanded substantive change and politicians promised reform. But ultimately things largely remained the same.

One law proposed by a Georgia legislator would have banned most no-knock raids in the state. But it was so watered down with amendments that, by the time it passed, it likely wouldn’t have prevented another death like Johnston’s — the very reason it was introduced in the first place.

One of the main reforms to emerge locally was the establishment of a civilian review board in Atlanta. Beamud was the first director of that board and says she faced resistance the moment she started the job. The first pushback came from the police union, which told officers to ignore the board’s efforts to question them.

Cristina Beamud: They instructed their members not to testify in either in interviews that were conducted by investigators in the office or to the board members. The city would’ve had the power to compel them; however, they chose not to.

Radley Balko: Beamud grew so frustrated with the lack of cooperation that she resigned in 2011.

Cristina Beamud: We spent an extraordinary amount of time investigating these cases, writing up the reports, submitting it to the board, and writing a report, based on the board’s recommendations to the chief of police. The responses were rarely thoughtful or really addressed the issues. So I found myself in a position, I remember saying something like, “I feel as if I’m just writing letters to myself, that there’s really no follow-up in terms of change or a real desire to want to address the concerns that were expressed by citizen representatives of their community.”

Radley Balko: The national attention to Johnston’s death didn’t bring much change outside of Georgia, either. The federal grants that gave rise to Atlanta’s drug arrest quotas have continued. 

In 2010, the Department of Justice audited Atlanta’s use of the $9 million in Byrne grants it had received the previous five years and. It was brutal. The audit found the city had badly mismanaged the grants, made little effort to oversee how they were used, and had no way to monitor whether the grants were actually improving public safety. 

Yet the city would receive over $2 million more over the next two years. In 2010, the Obama administration gave the Byrne grant program a massive $2.25 billion infusion as part of its economic stimulus package. 

Barack Obama: It invests in what works for our cities by funding programs like the Byrne Justice Assistance Grants, and the COPS program, which boosts public safety and bring down crime.

Radley Balko: Like many before hers, Johnston’s death could have prompted some contemplation and reconsideration of no-knock raids and the shortcuts police take to obtain warrants for them.

Instead, the raids continued in Georgia and across the country, with little oversight and little skepticism from the judiciary. 

News Collage: 

“A no-knock warrant.” 

“During a no-knock warrant raid.” 

“A no-knock raid.” 

“During a no-knock police raid.” 

Radley Balko: And then there was the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville in 2020. The language police used to obtain the no-knock warrant in her case was nearly identical to language they’d used in the warrant for their main suspect. A Justice Department investigation would later find that Louisville police routinely conducted illegal no-knock raids.

News Anchor: Today, Louisville’s mayor signed Breonna’s Law after the Metro Council unanimously banned the use of no-knock warrants. 

Radley Balko: But there’s at least some room for hope here. The anger over Breonna Taylor’s death, along with the protests after George Floyd’s, prompted the sort of response that many had hoped for after Kathryn Johnston. In some parts of the country, we have seen some real reform. 

Dozens of cities, towns, counties, and even the entire state of Virginia have now either banned or restricted no-knock raids, unless police can show that someone’s life is in imminent danger.

But that’s still decidedly a minority policy. The vast majority of Americans still live in a jurisdiction where police can kick down the door to your home without warning, as you’re sleeping, and storm your house with guns, all based on little more than a tip from an informant that you’re in possession of illegal drugs.

We have one more important note about this story. I reached out to Alex White to ask if he’d do an interview for this podcast. He’s the informant that went to the press about the Atlanta police. White initially agreed to an interview, but he also asked that we pay him.

That’s a reasonable and understandable request. In a text message, White told me that he has a lot more to share. He pointed out that he has testified before Congress and his story made the cover of the New York Times magazine. Yet, as he put it, he is “still stuck in the Atlanta ghetto.”

Seventeen years after what was a risky and heroic act of truth-telling, White has largely been abandoned by law enforcement, and still lives in a rough part of Atlanta. 

Markel Hutchins: Had it not been for Alex White, the officers that killed Kathryn Johnston may very well have gotten away with their crime.

Radley Balko: Here’s Markel Hutchins again.

Markel Hutchins: While Alex White was a change agent, not much has changed for him. And that’s one of the tragedies of all of this. The city of Atlanta is different. The police department benefited, the family benefited, the community benefited, but Alex White is still in a lot of ways stuck in the same place that he was before Kathryn Johnson’s death. He sees that everybody from mayors to movie-makers benefited from his courage, but he has not.

Radley Balko: White’s frustration is entirely understandable. But there’s also a bright-line rule in journalism: You don’t pay sources. It just isn’t done. So unfortunately, we couldn’t interview White for this episode. But it’s important to emphasize that if it weren’t for Alex White, the official version of the Kathryn Johnston story would be much different. The truth likely would have never been known.

Next time on Collateral Damage. 

Neill Franklin: So when someone comes breaking into their home in the middle of the night, they’re not going to think that it is the police, they’re going to think that they’re getting robbed.

Ryan Frederick: They made me out to be like the devil, like psychotic like just ready to take on the world and shoot everybody cowboy wild wild West.

Neill Franklin: That’s dangerous for them. It’s dangerous for the police.

Radley Balko: Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept. 

It was reported and written by me, Radley Balko.

Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer, who also served as producer and editor.

Laura Flynn is our showrunner.

Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief.

The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal.

We had editing support from Maryam Saleh. 

Truc Nguyen mixed our show. 

Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow. 

Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan.

Art direction by Fei Liu.

Illustrations by Tara Anand.

Copy editing by Nara Shin.

Social and video media by Chelsey B. Coombs.

Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance. 

This series was made possible by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund. 

Thank you for listening.

The post Episode One: Dirty Business appeared first on The Intercept.

From Afghanistan to Iraq, the United States has long used drone strikes to take out people it alleges are terrorists or insurgents. It’s a legacy that started under President George W. Bush and greatly expanded under President Barack Obama. President Donald Trump has taken this tactic to new extremes, boasting about lethal strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and declaring the U.S. is in a “non-international armed conflict” with narcotics traffickers.

Trump appears to be merging the war on terror with the war on drugs. This comes as he’s simultaneously ramping up the use of troops to police inside American cities. It’s a chilling escalation. But it’s not the first time we’ve seen a president stoke public fear and deploy overwhelming force in the name of law and order.

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to President Richard Nixon’s administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is the prelude.

Transcript

Radley Balko: The United States has long used drone strikes to take out people it alleges to be terrorists or insurgents. Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Syria. It’s a legacy that started under President George W. Bush’s war on terror and then was greatly expanded under President Barack Obama. But now President Donald Trump has taken the tactic to new extremes.

NBC: Moments ago, President Trump posted on social media that the U.S. military carried out a second strike targeting drug cartels.

CBS: This attack just two weeks after the military struck another boat from Venezuela in the Caribbean.

WPLG Local 10: The president says three narco-terrorists were killed, posting this video of the strike on Truth Social. The president saying, “Be warned — if you are transporting drugs that can kill Americans, we are hunting you.”

RB: Following Trump’s announcement of those strikes, the U.S. Navy took out another boat — a speedboat in which authorities in the Dominican Republic allege they confiscated 1,000 kilograms of cocaine.

The U.S. president is directing the full force of the U.S. military to kill alleged drug traffickers.

DT: We’re telling the cartels right now we’re going to stop them too. When they come by land, we’re going to stop them the same way we stopped the boats.

RB: And as Trump justifies this expanded role for the president as judge, jury, and executioner, he defines and casts villains, real or imagined, to fit his narrative.

DT: They killed 300,000 people in our country last year. And we’re not letting it happen anymore.

RB: Trump appears to be merging the war on terror with the war on drugs. And this comes simultaneously as he’s ramping up the use of troops to police inside American cities.

DT: What they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles — they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within. …

We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military.

RB: It’s a chilling escalation. But it’s not the first time we’ve seen a president stoke public fear and deploy overwhelming force in the name of law and order.

From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage: a podcast about the half-century-long war on drugs, its enduring ripple effects, and the devastating consequences of building a massive war machine aimed at the public itself.

I’m Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years.

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeating drug addiction, but the “war” part of that metaphor is now all too literal.

When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and ’90s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections.

All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause.

But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage.

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is the prelude.

Donald Trump has begun his second presidential term by unleashing aggressive, abusive immigration enforcement officers all over the country. Federal agencies from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE; Customs and Border Protection; Homeland Security Investigations; even the DEA and ATF are teaming up with local sheriffs and police.

KTLA: New video shows dozens of carwash workers being detained by federal agents including at least one customer.

WFLA: A Tampa family says they were roughed up and their home thrown into disarray by federal ICE agents and Homeland Security investigator.

WFLA: They just pointed guns at us in our face. They told us to open the door, if not they were going to break it down. They didn’t have no warrant.

RB: In some parts of the country, the administration has deployed federal troops, about 35,000 personnel from the National Guard, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines, according to reporting from The Intercept. In service of Trump’s mass deportation agenda, these forces operate now in at least five states.

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One of the first places Trump sent troops was Los Angeles, California, to quell anti-ICE protests that had erupted in response to violent immigration raids.

FOX 11: About 700 U.S. Marines from the Second Battalion, 7^th Marine Regiment out of Twentynine Palms received weekend orders and are on the way expected to arrive this morning. And although they’re trained for close combat, officials say these Marines won’t be on the front lines. Instead, they’ll be focused on crowd control.

RB: Trump’s mass deportation policy has many analogs to the drug war.

Richard Nixon: To the extent money can help in meeting the problem of dangerous drugs, it will be available. This is one area where we cannot have budget cuts because we must wage what I have called “total war” against public enemy No. 1 in the United States: the problem of dangerous drugs.

RB: The modern drug war began during President Richard Nixon’s administration and, like Trump’s fight against undocumented immigration, it was predicated on false claims designed to stir up fear and anger, particularly among white, middle- and low-income voters.

RN: It is time for an honest look at the problem of order in the United States.

RN: In recent years crime in this country has grown nine times as fast as population. At the current rate, the crimes of violence in America will double by 1972. We cannot accept that kind of future for America. We owe it to the decent and law-abiding citizens of America to take the offensive.

RB: Nixon was also obsessed with enemies and held paranoid fears.

RN: You see, homosexuality, dope, immorality in general — these are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the communists and the left-wingers, they’re trying to destroy us.

RB: His aides dehumanized drug offenders with terms like “vermin” and lied about crime statistics to both terrify voters and play to their prejudices.

In 1994, the journalist Dan Baum tracked down Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and interviewed him.

On a talk show, Baum recounted Ehrlichman’s frankness about their goals.

Dan Baum: He said, “Look. The Nixon campaign in ’68 and the Nixon White House had two enemies: Black people and the antiwar left.”

RB: He went on to say:

DB: “[V]ilify them night after night on the evening news, and we thought if we can associate heroin with Black people in the public mind and marijuana with the hippies this would be perfect.” And he looked me in the eye and said, “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

RB: That ought to sound familiar.

DT: She’s eradicated our sovereign border and unleashed an army of gangs and criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions, from all around the world, from Venezuela and the Congo in Africa.

DT: Democrats have vowed mass invasion and mass migration. We are delivering mass deportation. And it’s happening very fast. And the worst of the worst are being sent to a no-nonsense prison in El Salvador.

DT: It’s a great honor to be deep in Florida, the Florida Everglades, to open America’s newest migrant detention center. It’s known as Alligator Alcatraz, which is very appropriate, because I looked outside and that’s not a place I want to go hiking anytime soon. But very soon this facility will house some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet.

RB: The rhetoric of the Nixon administration resulted in more aggressive, less accountable, and ultimately more reckless and abusive police tactics.

It was this era, for example, that gave us the no-knock raid, or the policy that allows police to get prior permission from a judge to forcibly enter a home without knocking.

The policy upended a centuries-old tradition in common law that the home should be a place of peace and sanctuary.

But the no-knock raid wasn’t a policy police groups were demanding or clamoring for.

It was a policy dreamed up by a 31-year-old Senate staffer who had been recruited to Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. Donald Santarelli came up with the policy as a way for Nixon to show he was tough on crime.

“There was an increasing fear of crime,” Santarelli told me in an interview for my book “Rise of the Warrior Cop.” Santarelli said, “At the same time you had the rise of the civil rights movement, the riots, the Black Panthers, and this increase in drug use. I think the public started to pick up on the idea that these things were linked, because they were all happening simultaneously.”

This line of thinking drove policies designed to “unleash” law enforcement. The Nixon administration tried to relax wiretapping laws, roll back Miranda rights, and erode Fourth Amendment protections against unconstitutional searches and seizures.

Related

Cops Are Already Unleashed. Trump Is Telling Them to Run Wild.

And now we’re seeing the Trump administration push even harder to roll back constitutional protections under the guise of immigration enforcement, fighting crime, and what they call “domestic terrorism.”

“Law enforcement is just like any other interest group,” Santarelli told me at the time, “They’re always after greater power. There was a sense that they needed to capitalize on these historic events. And I think there was a real willingness on the part of the public to give them whatever powers they sought.”

That too should sound familiar.

DT: On day one of the Trump administration, we declared an all-out war on the dealers, smugglers, traffickers, and cartels. Within moments of taking office, I deployed the U.S. military to our border and unleashed the patriots of ICE and Border Patrol to defend our country from an invasion. This was an invasion. This wasn’t people coming in. This was an invasion of our country.

RB: Like Nixon, Trump also demagogues fear of crime. The main difference is that while Nixon merely exaggerated crime statistics, Trump just simply fabricated them.

The Justice Department announced in January that violent crime in D.C. hit a 30-year low in 2024.

So far this year, it’s down 26 percent from that. This, in other words, is a curious time for the president to declare that the nation’s capital is a violent cesspool that it demands the sort of crime-fighting expertise that only a 79-year-old man who fetishizes strongmen and dictators can provide.

DT: We have to give power back to the police, because crime is rampant.

DT: There is a literal crimewave going on. You know, and if you look, we have spent last year $113 billion on illegal immigrants. We have to do something about it. And we have to start by building a wall, a big beautiful powerful wall.

RB: In truth, when Trump first took office in 2017, he inherited the lowest homicide rate of any president in modern history. He was also the first president since George H.W. Bush to leave office with a higher homicide rate than when he entered.

But Trump’s biggest lies have always come when he blames crime on immigrants.

DT: When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.

DT: A lot of towns don’t want to talk because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets.

RB: The truth is that immigrants — documented and otherwise — commit far fewer crimes than native-born people. Historically, when undocumented immigration has gone up, crime has gone down. And so-called sanctuary cities actually have lower crime rates than cities that cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

[Break]

There are also some interesting parallels and contrasts between what’s happening now and the Reagan administration, in which fear of illicit drugs and crime would again be exploited to grow the power of police, prosecutors, and government.

Ronald Reagan: Drugs are menacing our society, they’re threatening our values and undercutting our institutions. They’re killing our children.

RR: We will no longer tolerate those who sell drugs and those who buy drugs. All Americans of good will are determined to stamp out those parasites.

RR: Well now we’re in another war for our freedom.

RR: [T]reating drug trafficking as a threat to our national security.

RB: Illicit drugs were not a threat to national security. And to the extent that they were, it was the way in which aggressive U.S. drug policy overseas had turned vast swaths of the world against America.

As with Nixon, Reagan turned drugs into a culture war battle, pitting middle class American values against hippies, activists, urban advocates, and the counterculture.

Recreational drug use was immoral.

So drug addicts weren’t suffering from a health condition; they were simply bad people.

RR: Drug use is not a victimless crime, it is not a private matter. While we must be concerned with the personal consequences for the individual, we must demonstrate our great concern for the millions of innocent citizens who pay the high price for the illegal drug use of some. These costs are measured by crime and terrorism.

RB: This sort of dehumanization made it easier for federal and state government to kick down doors, raid entire towns, city blocks, and housing projects, and bring in National Guard troops and helicopters to invade entire counties where they suspected people were growing marijuana. It also helped Reagan create federal–local task forces with broad new powers, and to begin to blur the lines between domestic policing and the military.

Anchor: We have a report from Spencer Michaels of Public Station KQED, San Francisco.

VOX: Good afternoon skipper, this is the United States Coast Guard. We’re going to be placing a boarding party aboard your vessel this afternoon to ensure your compliance with all federal regulations…

Spencer Michaels: What they’re really looking for is drugs: marijuana and cocaine, smuggled into the U.S. from South America and Asia. San Francisco Bay may not look like a war zone, but this is the Western front of the Reagan administration’s war on drugs. And it is a real war complete with an Air Force and a Navy.

RB: This too echoes in the Trump administration’s version of the war on drugs — one that also folds in war on terror-level racism and propaganda.

DT: In the 21st century, we’ve seen one terror attack after another, carried out by foreign visa overstayers from dangerous places all over the world. And thanks to Biden’s open-door policies, today there are millions and millions of these illegals who should not be in our country.

RB: Trump’s false claim that immigration poses a threat to national security — that we’re being “invaded” and that this poses a “national emergency” — has provided his administration the legal basis to claim sweeping new powers for police agencies. These include the power to arrest and deport immigrants for speech protected by the First Amendment, to deploy the Marines and National Guards to American cities, and to ship people off without due process to slave labor prisons like CECOT in El Salvador.

Stephen Miller: Tren de Aragua has the same legal status as Al Qaeda and ISIS. MS-13 has the same legal status as Al Qaeda and ISIS. These are foreign terrorists operating on our soil. And our gratitude to El Salvador for agreeing to take custody of these terrorists is immense.

Kristi Noem: If you are considering entering America illegally, don’t even think about it. Let me be clear. If you come to our country and you break our laws, we will hunt you down.

RB: The argument that immigrants pose a threat to national security is just as ridiculous as the argument that illicit drugs do. But as we saw during the Reagan administration, the federal courts have thus far been reluctant to question the president when he makes such proclamations.

As many political commentators have pointed out, Donald Trump is in many ways stuck in the 1980s. He seems to think American cities are wastelands of crime and decay.

DT: The capital of America was a bloodthirsty, horrible, dangerous place. One of the worst.

DT: These are high-crime areas. As high as there is in the world. You can go to Afghanistan, you can go to places that you think of are, like, unsafe. You’re safer there than you are in Chicago at night.

RB: In truth, despite the increase in some crimes during the Covid pandemic, crime is falling again. And it’s now at near historic lows.

He seems to think that New York especially is a violent, dystopian hellscape, when in truth it’s safer than most cities a fraction of its size.

DT: I’ve seen New York through good times and bad, through boom times and crimewaves, through market crashes and terrorist attacks, but I’ve never seen it quite like this. We have filthy encampments of drugged out homeless people living in our places that we’ve spent so much time with children where they used to play.

RB: During the 1980s, the Reagan administration and congressional leaders wanted to bring in active-duty military to patrol U.S. streets and raid U.S. homes. That didn’t happen in large part due to opposition from the military itself. And that’s a sign of a healthy democracy.

Rep. Benjamin Gilman: And I would appreciate your comment with regards to the military — the need for the military’s involvement in being a backup force in our war against the narcotics traffickers that are affecting our national security as much as any other common enemy.

RB: That’s Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-N.Y., during a 1988 hearing on the defense budget, asking then Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci about his opposition to relaxing restrictions on the use of military in the drug war.

Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci: My statement was that I would be opposed to making the Defense Department the front-line agency. You and I agree, when you said you don’t think we ought to have the capability to arrest people — that is what I am talking about. But I also have a responsibility to make certain that the military isn’t diverted from its mission, that is, the national security, the security of the country.

RB: That separation is eroding under Trump.

DT: Under the authorities vested in me as the president of the United States, I’m officially invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act — you know what that is — and placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control.

ABC: This next wave of troops expected to join the more than 800 National Guard troops that President Trump activated just last week. Up to this point, we’re told the Guardsmen have been unarmed, but Defense officials say that could change.

RB: The crackdown in D.C. came 10 days after the New Republic reported on a Pentagon memo authored by Phil Hegseth, the defense secretary’s brother. The memo laid out the administration’s plans to deploy active-duty troops around the country to aid in immigration enforcement “for years to come.”

If enacted, that memo would once and for all end this country’s centuries-old tradition of keeping the military out of routine domestic law enforcement. It would eradicate one of the cornerstone principles that drove the American Revolution. And it could well end with U.S. soldiers firing their guns at U.S. citizens.

Despite the best efforts of the politicians who represent them, the American public finally began to see that declaring war on drugs was never really going to make them go away.

States around the country finally began to see the folly of spending billions and incarcerating thousands to prohibit a mostly harmless drug like marijuana.

After the George Floyd protests, we saw dozens of cities and even a couple states roll back some of the broad powers granted to police during the drug war era, particularly when it comes to no-knock raids.

And yet in other parts of the country, the drug war never really ended.

The raids continued, the violence continued, the unnecessary deaths continued.

Even as we were producing this podcast, I continued to find stories about innocent people killed in botched raids, including for marijuana.

The election and reelection of Donald Trump also represents a regression on these issues. Trump has repeatedly fawned over governments that execute drug dealers.

DT: China has the death penalty. I said to him, “Do you have a drug problem?” when I first met him. He looked at me like what a stupid question. He said “No, no, no drug problem.” I said, “Well, what do you do?” “Death penalty. Immediate death penalty.”

DT: They execute the drug dealers. They have zero drug problem, zero.

DT: If you notice that every country that has the death penalty has no drug problem, they execute drug dealers.

RB: And during the 2024 campaign, Trump vowed on Fox’s Jesse Watters show to invade Mexico.

Jesse Watters: Mexico, are strikes against the cartels still on the table?

DT: Absolutely.

JW: Even against our biggest trading partner?

DT: Absolutely.

RB: And since taking office again, Trump has claimed sweeping new powers that have alarmed presidential scholars and historians. In a major escalation Trump has boasted about attacking boats in the Caribbean, killing at least 17 people.

These attacks were illegal both under domestic and international law.

Trump justified these extrajudicial execution by claiming without evidence that the vessels were “trafficking illicit narcotics.”

NBC: The Trump administration says it’s blown up boats near Venezuela that were used by drug traffickers. But the Venezuela government has denied it. And the country’s leader Nicholas Maduro says the U.S. wants to force him from power.

ABC: President Trump has declared drug cartels operating in the Caribbean unlawful combatants. The president says the United States is now in a non-international armed conflict.

RB: His administration has also expanded the definition of terrorist to go after suspected drug dealers, designating gangs and cartels as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.”

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And it doesn’t stop there. The administration has also designated “anti-fascists” as domestic terrorists, directing the full weight of the federal government against everyone from people protesting violent immigration raids to police brutality, to even media outlets covering those protests.

Trump has rolled back many of the Obama-era reforms such as restrictions on transferring military weapons, armor, and vehicles to local police departments.

He has instructed his Justice Department to relax oversight and end civil rights investigations of abusive police departments.

And of course, Trump has exploited public fear of the potent, dangerous drug fentanyl to impose ridiculous, destructive tariffs on virtually every country on earth, including countries with zero connections to fentanyl.

DT: This open border nightmare flooded our country with fentanyl and with people that shouldn’t be here. Some of the worst people on Earth.

DT: We are tariffing countries that are sending us fentanyl and working with fentanyl.

RB: But the most alarming way the stories you’re about to hear on this podcast echo what’s happening today is the way Trump has framed immigration as an existential crisis that demands urgent, extra-constitutional action.

DT: Joe Biden allowed 21 million people — that’s a minimum, I think it was much higher than that — illegal aliens to invade our country.

DT: They allowed millions and millions of criminals into our country, 11,888 murderers, 50 percent of whom murdered more than one person.

DT: That’s what came into our country from prisons, from mental institutions, from street gangs, drug dealers. Disgusting. This enormous country-destroying invasion has swamped communities nationwide with massive crime, crippling costs and burdens far beyond what any nation could withstand. No nation could withstand what we did.

RB: While Pentagon opposition thwarted Reagan-era attempts to enlist the military in the drug war, Trump is keeping his promise to deploy active-duty troops to combat everything from immigration, to drugs, to protest, to homelessness. And he has repeatedly promised to send troops to more cities and states.

DT: Because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city.

Chris Hayes: Hundreds of armed federal agents and police — backed up by riot trucks, smoke grenades, and helicopters — breached fences and busted doors in an immigration raid on an entire apartment building on the city’s South Side. They pulled dozens of residents from their homes in zip ties, including children, some of them without any clothes.

RB: Trump has also attempted to purge the Pentagon of anyone who he believes might stand in his way.

We’ve also seen aggressiveness, violence, bigotry, and disregard for the basic dignity and rights of immigrants we’ve seen from Trump’s deportation forces. This is strikingly similar to the aggressiveness and abuse we saw from drug cops at the height of the crack epidemic.

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Now, Congress has appropriated enough money to make Trump’s deportation army — ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and Homeland Security Investigations — into the largest police force in government, and a force larger than most country’s military.

Meanwhile, the protections the courts created during the drug war to grant police officers new powers and shield them from any real accountability are still in place. So the stories you’re about to hear don’t merely remain relevant today, they are why we are here.

Coming up this season on Collateral Damage.

Bill Aylesworth: So they cooked up a scheme, a story that he was growing marijuana on the property.

Rev. Markel Hutchins: The judge would just sign the no-knock warrant. And they were kicking in people’s doors and violating people’s rights.

C. Virginia Fields: Police officers knocked on her door, threw in a grenade.

BA: And raided his house and killed him.

Ryan Frederick: What do you do when the police are telling you a lie? And how much are you going to argue with the people that make the law?

Cristina Beamud: The goal was to eliminate the enemy. And the people were the enemy.

RB: Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept.

It was reported and written by me, Radley Balko.

Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer, who also served as producer and editor.

Laura Flynn is our showrunner.

Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief.

The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal.

We had editing support from Maryam Saleh.

Truc Nguyen mixed our show.

Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow.

Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan.

Art direction by Fei Liu.

Illustrations by Tara Anand.

Copy editing by Nara Shin.

Social and video media by Chelsey B. Coombs.

Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance.

This series was made possible by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund.

Thank you for listening.

The post Trump’s War on Drugs appeared first on The Intercept.

Collateral Damage is a new investigative podcast series examining the half-century-long war on drugs, its enduring ripple effects, and the devastating consequences of building a massive war machine aimed at the public itself. Hosted by Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years, each episode takes an in-depth look at someone who was unjustly killed in the drug war.

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeat drug addiction, but the “war” part quickly became all too literal, complete with helicopters, tanks, and suspension of basic civil liberties protections. All wars have collateral damage: the civilians, the noncombatants, the innocent people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause.

In each episode, we feature a vivid, wrenching, deeply reported story about someone who was unjustly killed in the U.S. drug war — a self-contained, in-depth investigation into a case in which drug prohibition and the policies and practices used to enforce it claimed an innocent life.

Though several states have now legalized marijuana or ended or reduced mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, and many cities have effectively decriminalized drug possession, in most of the country, the aggressive anti-drug policies of the 1980s and 1990s drag on. During the height of the Covid pandemic, violent crime and overdose deaths spiked, but despite crime falling again, many lawmakers and prosecutors are reconsidering the treatment-based approaches to drug addiction adopted in the 2000s and 2010s and return to more punitive approaches, particularly with harder drugs.

The modern drug war began during President Richard Nixon’s administration and, like Donald Trump’s fight against undocumented immigration, it was predicated on false claims designed to stir up fear and anger, particularly among white, middle- and low-income voters. The rhetoric of the Nixon administration resulted in more aggressive, less accountable, and ultimately more reckless and abusive police tactics. This line of thinking drove policies designed to “unleash” law enforcement. The Nixon administration tried to relax wiretapping laws, roll back Miranda rights, and erode Fourth Amendment protections against unconstitutional searches and seizures. And now we’re seeing the Trump administration pushing even harder to roll back constitutional protections under the guise of immigration enforcement, fighting crime, and “domestic terrorism.” So the stories you’re about to hear don’t merely remain relevant today, they are why we are here.

Though each episode focuses on one case and the policies that drove it, that case is representative of countless others — and though some of these cases are decades-old, the deaths involved were driven by policies still in place today. Each episode is presented as historical journalism, drawing on existing accounts of these cases, interviews with those who were directly involved, court records, and interviews with experts on drug policy and policing and the people who played a role in these cases, including police, prosecutors, families of the victims, activists, and public officials or politicians involved. Taken as a whole, the series documents eight of these now-forgotten atrocities of America’s drug war, while also presenting a powerful critique of the country’s ongoing effort to combat addiction with a militaristic, punitive approach, instead of a strategy informed by public health.

We as a society decided the lives of the people featured in the podcast were expendable — unfortunate but acceptable sacrifices for the unachievable goal of a drug-free America. They were collateral damage, and these are their stories.

Coming October 8, 2025. New episodes every Wednesday. 

Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. 

The post Introducing Collateral Damage  appeared first on The Intercept.