Balko draws lessons from Detroit shooting death

Much attention has been given, and will continue to be given, to the shooting death of 7-year old Aiyana Stanley-Jones in Detroit on May 16. Radley Balko, a policy analyst with the Reason Foundation who has written widely about the dangers of the militarization of law enforcement, draws some lessons from the situation.

Balko’s primary message is that regardless of the specific behavior of the officers on the scene, the source of this tragedy begins with the fact that the SWAT team was there at all:

According to the Detroit Free Press, the police say they had information that their suspect, 34-year-old Chauncey Owens, was armed. He was a suspect in a homicide. If Owens were on a killing spree, knowingly fleeing police, or holed up in the house with hostages, it may have justified using a SWAT team to apprehend him. But it doesn’t appear that Owens presented that sort of imminent threat. Police had spotted him earlier in the day outside of the house. It’s difficult to understand why the police didn’t confront him then or the next time he left. Instead, they waited until the middle of the night to conduct a volatile raid on a duplex, putting everyone inside the property in jeopardy. Geoffrey Feiger, the attorney for the Stanley-Jones family, alleges the police weren’t even aware the building was a duplex, and only obtained a warrant for the upper apartment after the raid.

The Stanley-Jones family says the police should have known there were four children in the building. They say there were toys strewn about the yard, and that a cousin warned the police shortly before the raid after seeing police approach the house. I’m not sure it matters if the police knew or not. If they didn’t, they should have. And if they did, they shouldn’t have used the aggressive tactics. SWAT teams are at their best when they’re defusing already violent situations, not when they’re creating new ones.

The police have said that the officer who shot the little girl either had an altercation with the grandmother or tripped over her, accidentally discharging his weapon. And that may well be true; I doubt the officer shot the little girl on purpose. But as Balko points out, the blame lies with the fact that they were in such a situation for that to happen in the first place.

There are better ways to arrest suspects than this. The man may well have been dangerous, but he was not in a violent situation at the time. He wasn’t holding anyone hostage, he wasn’t running away from the police. And if the whole point of a no-knock raid is to take the suspect by surprise, it certainly defeats the purpose to loudly go in to the apartment below him with flash bang grenades and gunfire before going into the apartment he’s in — you’ve just tipped him off in the most obvious possible way.

The militarization of law enforcement is a huge problem in this country. In the wake of 9/11, we started giving surplus military weapons to local police departments to help them prepare for possible terrorist situations. But on a daily basis, they are used instead to serve warrants — sometimes even misdemeanor warrants — and make arrests where there are no hostages and no violent situation to respond to. And in those situations, innocent people often die.