One in 5 officer involved killings involve mental illness

Police are often called to respond to situations involving people experiencing mental health crises—with disastrous results. According to The Washington Post's database of fatal police shootings, at least 1 in 5 people fatally shot by police since 2015 were experiencing a mental health crisis at the time. More than 40 percent of the people incarcerated in state prisons nationwide had a history of mental health problems, according to data from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, according to The Appeal.

In the absence of better healthcare, municipalities often turn to police and jails to house and "care" for people in crisis—big-city jails like New York's Rikers Island and Los Angeles County's Twin Towers Correctional Facility are often referred to as some of the largest mental health institutions in the country, for example. Experts say criminalizing people for their health problems only makes things worse.

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No-Knock Raid: Castle Doctrine or Murder? Texas jury provide an answer

A jury in Texas convicted a man of murdering a local police officer in a case that pitted no-knock raids against the right to self-defense, reported Reason Magazine.

Marvin Guy, who waited in jail for over nine years before his trial, was found guilty of murdering Detective Charles Dinwiddie, whom Guy said he mistook for an intruder after a SWAT team in 2014 smashed his bedroom window and tried to break into his home with a battering ram during a 5:45 a.m. drug raid. The panel declined, however, to convict him of capital murder and instead opted for murder, meaning they did not agree—at least not unanimously—that Guy knew he was shooting at law enforcement.

The raid was the product of a no-knock warrant, which police pursued in response to a tip that Guy had been dealing cocaine, and which allowed them to break into Guy's apartment without first identifying themselves.

On May 9, 2014, before the sun rose, about two dozen officers arrived at Guy's residence. The team struggled to fully penetrate the door with their battering ram; something was blocking it from behind. One officer accidentally detonated his stun grenade, inflaming what was already a raid rapidly going awry.

Guy, who lived in a high-crime area, said he was woken up and assumed the police were criminals trying to break into his home. He had allegedly been on edge about such a situation: One of his neighbors had reportedly been victimized similarly a week before when an intruder choked her after forcing entry by way of her first-floor window. Guy allegedly hit four officers, killing Dinwiddie and prompting police to fire over 40 rounds in return.

The prosecution, however, theorized that Guy had somehow come to know the police were coming and that he'd set a trap to "ambush" them. "One man's ambush is another man panicked, being scared his home is being broken into," countered Jon Evans, Guy's defense attorney.

Key to the defense's case were the frenzied circumstances characteristic of many no-knock raids—namely that it was set in motion without warning and before dawn, when the target is likely to be disoriented. A witness for the government testified the first day that during such raids it was department policy to shine a light into the home so police could see in but the subject couldn't see out.

The prosecution concluded their case on Thursday with testimony from Dinwiddie's widow, Holly, in what was effectively a victim impact statement. "He had a zest for life," she said. "He woke up happy." The defense rested the same day after calling one witness: retired Killeen Police Department Commander Scott Meads, who conducted an administrative review of the raid and identified several tactical errors and concerns, including that the officers were confused over the apartment's layout.

Texas has the Castle Doctrine, the legal principle that entitles someone to stand their ground in their home if they perceive a deadly threat. That protection evaporates, however, if the person is engaged in illegal activity. Law enforcement allegedly found traces of white powder on Guy's apartment floor, in his car, and in the trash, though the government did not charge him with a drug crime.

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Murder of a police officer or stand your ground

Nine years after the shooting death of Killeen police detective Chuck Dinwiddie, the man accused of his murder is finally set to begin trial on Oct. 30, 2023. according to KCEN-TV in Texas. The trial pits capital murder against the stand your ground doctrine.

Marvin Guy is charged with Capital Murder for the death of Dinwiddie on May 9, 2014. Guy is accused of shooting Dinwiddie when police conducted a no-knock raid at his home.

Guy has been in county jail for nine years. During this time, he has been represented by 11 different attorneys, causing multiple delays for the trial. 

Most recently on April 12, 2023, a judge granted a motion from yet another defense team to withdraw from Guy's counsel.

Today, a motion by the prosecution to request a visiting judge was denied and Guy is now set to begin trial at the end of October. 

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Eleven people shot by Indianapolis police in 2023, all but one black

The Concerned Clergy of Indianapolis said they lost faith in Police Chief Randal Taylor after a Black motorist stopped for a traffic violation was fatally shot running away from an officer August 3, reported the Indianapolis Sar.

Six more people were shot by city police in the eight weeks that followed — and a total of 11 in the first nine months of the year. All but one of them are Black.

The repeated use of deadly force has invoked apathy for some people, who accept it as unavoidable in this era of increased gun ownership and strained relations between residents and the people sworn to protect them.

Members of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, who have been shot twice this year on city streets, say they also have had enough.

“We are fed up with it. The community should be fed up with it,” Assistant Chief Chris Bailey said after the April shooting.

What’s driving the rash of police shootings this year isn’t clear. Police, politicians and community advocates have differing opinions. Experts say a reason can’t be known without scrutinizing each case.

“You would have to analyze the data to see what, if any, patterns emerge from these shootings,” said Jon Shane, professor of police policy and practice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

While debate continues about what may be driving the uptick, the fact remains Indianapolis police officers have killed people this year at a level not seen since 2016.

Chief Taylor told IndyStar in an interview he cannot recall a time in his 36-year career in law enforcement that so many police shootings have happened in such a short period.

"It's definitely concerning," he said.

Fewer police shootings in other cities

Of the 11 people Indianapolis police have shot in the first nine months of the year, six have died. In 2022, police shot four people, one fatally. Officers in six additional incidents fired their guns but did not strike anyone.

“It's a very rare occurrence," Stephanie Whitehead, a criminal justice professor at Indiana University East, said about the frequency of shootings since August.

Not included in the total are three people who were shot by state troopers in the city. Within a week in May, Indiana State Police troopers shot two people in separate incidents. In February, a state trooper shot a man being tracked in a gun and drug investigation.

More people have been shot by Indianapolis police this year than by other agencies in cities with roughly similar population sizes.

San Francisco police, for example, have shot six people since 2022.

Indianapolis surpassed Columbus, Ohio, a slightly larger city, where police have shot 10 people so far this year. Six were shot last year, according to the police department.

Indianapolis also stands out compared to several smaller Midwestern cities.

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Missouri felons not entitled to self-defense

 Missouri is one of only four states where there are no limits on which felonies can trigger a felony-murder charge, and, once prosecutors invoke the law, defendants can no longer claim they acted in self-defense, reports The Appeal. Having previous felonies means having a gun for self-defense is a felony for illegally possessing a gun. In the eyes of the law, the rest of what happens no longer mattered.

There are at least 10 men in the state of Missouri who are serving sentences for felony murder in cases where they maintain that they killed someone in self-defense, according to a three-month investigation by The Appeal and the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab. The Appeal also spoke to 10 public defenders across the state. Eight said they either had such a case in their district or knew of one nearby.

Of the 10 men who say they shot someone to save their own lives, seven had prior felony convictions at the time of the shooting.

According to a study by the Sentencing Project, there were at least 67,800 felons on parole or probation in Missouri in 2020. The situation raises questions about who Missouri believes deserves the right to fight back if someone is trying to kill them.

“If you are a convicted felon in Missouri, you have lost your right to self-defense,” Hatley told The Appeal.

Ruth Petsch, the district defender in Kansas City—Missouri’s largest city—seethed as she spoke about the law’s impact in her district.

“Once you become a felon, you lose all these rights to keep a job. It’s harder to get housing. It’s harder to get assistance,” she said. “You’re left in a neighborhood where you’re more likely to have someone put a gun in your face like that. But in Missouri, once you become a felon, you just have to get shot.”

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One in 20 gun homicides in the U.S. are committed by police

In the US, an estimated one in 20 gun homicides are committed by police, as law enforcement killings have failed to decrease despite years of nationwide protests, reports The Guardian.

Law enforcement officers killed at least 1,192 people in 2022, the highest number recorded in a decade, according to Mapping Police Violence, a prominent non-profit database of police killings. More than 1,100 people were killed by the police in both 2020 and 2021. The vast majority of these deaths were police shootings.

There were more than 25,000 total homicides in the US in 2020 and 26,000 in 2021, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). National data for 2022 is not yet available.

Police shooting deaths represented 5% of all gun homicides in 2020 and 2021, and total police killings represented nearly 5% of all homicides, according to the best available public data.

Because only a small number of deadly incidents each year receive wide media attention, many Americans may not realize that “a meaningful fraction of homicides in the US are police killings”, said Justin Feldman, a researcher at the Center for Policing Equity.

The number of US homicide victims who die in mass shootings each year, for instance, is smaller than the number killed by police. While definitions of “mass shooting” vary, the estimated number of people killed in these incidents have ranged from a few dozen to 700 people a year in recent years.

“There is a lot of fear, with mass shootings and gun violence in general, that some stranger will show up wherever you are and kill you,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, the founder of Mapping Police Violence. “But police contribute a large part to those numbers.”

The circumstances for many murders are listed as unknown in the FBI’s incomplete national crime statistics database, but in 2020 nearly 4,000 people were listed as being killed by a friend or an acquaintance, and about 1,800 were known to be killed by a stranger.

Some police departments have much higher rates of police killings than others. In Vallejo, California, which is known for police violence, the police department was responsible for 30% of the city’s homicides in 2012. Police killed six people that year; a single officer killed three people in three different incidents, and was later promoted.

More than 32,000 Americans have been killed by police since 1980, but official public health statistics have undercounted the number of killings for decades, according to a 2021 study from University of Washington researchers published in the Lancet, a prominent medical journal. Over the past four decades, US police have killed Black people at a rate 3.5 times higher than white people, and have also killed Hispanic and Indigenous people at higher rates, the study estimated.

The rate of fatalities from police violence rose even when the nation’s overall homicide rate sharply declined, with the rate of deaths from police violence rising 38% from the 1980s to the 2010s, the study found. 

The US has much higher rates of both police killings and overall homicides than other wealthy countries. In Europe, the combined number of police killings and state executions remains in the single digits each year in many countries, according to data from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). The US’s annual rate of police killings and state executions, with more than 1,000 deaths a year, is more comparable to Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Cameroon, Libya and Sudan, according to IHME data.

At least one international study has found the rate of police killings “strongly correlates” with overall homicide rates across multiple countries, but also noted that data on police violence is likely to be less reliable in countries where police kill more frequently.

A 2018 paper published in the American Journal of Public Health found that “police were responsible for about 8% of all homicides with adult male victims between 2012 and 2018”, or about one in 12. Frank Edwards, a Rutgers University sociologist and the lead author of that study, said it was not surprising that the current percentage of police homicides would be somewhat lower than 8% when factoring in the killings of women and well as men, and as the national total number of homicides had also increased sharply since 2020.

Public databases from news outlets and non-profits still offer more complete and reliable data on police killings than the US government, more than seven years after the nation’s FBI director called it “embarrassing and ridiculous” that newspapers produced a more accurate national count of US police shootings than the Department of Justice. Mapping Police Violence, for instance, tracks police killings using a combination of state law enforcement data and incident data drawn from media reports and public records requests.

It’s not only national crime data that’s flawed when it comes to homicides by police. For decades, more than half of police killings have been mislabeled as generic homicides or suicides in the CDC’s official death statistics database, said Eve Wool and Mohsen Naghavi, two of the authors of the Lancet paper on police killings.

The undercounting of police killings in public health data is a result of coding failures by coroners, medical examiners and other public health officials, many of whom “work for or are embedded within police departments”, the researchers found.

Because of the lack of official statistics, Feldman and Edwards said, comparing the count of police killings in non-profit databases like Mapping Police Violence with the CDC’s total homicide numbers is the most accurate way to estimate the percentage of homicides committed by police.

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Sentence affirmed for killer who rigged shed with a shotgun

 A state appeals court has upheld the murder conviction for a Southwestern Illinois man who was convicted for killing a trespasser with a shotgun booby trap set up inside his shed, reported the ABA Journal.

The Appellate Court of Illinois’ Fifth District upheld the conviction of William P. Wasmund of Chester, Illinois, in a Nov. 9 opinion.

Wasmund was sentenced to 30 years in prison in December 2019, according to previous news coverage by the Telegraph. The shotgun blast killed Jeffery Spicer in September 2018.

The appeals court said Wasmund’s use of force was not justified under Illinois law because he could have used nonlethal means to protect his shed.

The shotgun was placed in a vise on a table in the shed, so that it pointed directly toward the door. The rope was attached to the gun’s trigger, so that it would fire toward the door if it was opened.

A warning on the shed door had indicated that no one should enter. Wasmund said he had also placed a table in his driveway and set up no-trespassing signs to keep people off his property.

He was no longer living on his property at the time of the shooting because of a fire at his home.

Months before Spicer was killed, Wasmund told an acquaintance that he had set up the shotgun to scare a previous burglar, according to trial testimony. Wasmund said the gun wasn’t loaded, however, when the acquaintance expressed concern.

Wasmund denied setting up the shotgun in interviews with detectives.

On appeal, Wasmund’s lawyer argued that Wasmund’s use of force was justified.

The issue of justified force is governed by an Illinois law. It provides that a person “is justified in the use of force which is intended or likely to cause death or great bodily harm only if he reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

The issue, the appeals court said, was whether it was reasonable to think that the only way to prevent the shed from being burglarized was to set up a spring-gun trap.

The defense had argued that the booby trap was justified because Spicer was on Wasmund’s property illegally and was trying to commit burglary, a forcible felony.

But the appeals court said even if Spicer was trying to burglarize the shed, it was not reasonable for Wasmund to think that deadly force was necessary.

“There was no evidence that the defendant attempted to install an alarm system, security cameras, motion detection lights or any other nonlethal means which individuals regularly take to protect their property,” the appeals court said.

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No-knock warrants need more judicial scrutiny

 In Louisiana, it took a judge just a few clicks online to give West Baton Rouge Parish deputies the go-ahead to force their way into a motel room without knocking. Within 30 minutes, officers rushed in and fatally shot an unarmed Black man, seizing a little more than 22 grams of methamphetamine, marijuana, cocaine and hydrocodone, reported the Washington Post.

In St. Louis, a judge authorized police to break down the doors of three homes simultaneously without knocking. Officers killed a 63-year-old Black grandfather, and police said they found just over nine grams of heroin, marijuana, fentanyl and hydrocodone in the three homes combined.

In Houston, a judge approved scores of requests for no-knock warrants for officers who relied on unnamed informants. One raid led to a gun battle that left a White man and woman dead and four officers shot, and it failed to turn up the heroin police said they would find. The officer who requested the warrant later admitted he fabricated the confidential informant.

Judges and magistrates are expected to review requests for no-knock warrants — one of the most intrusive and dangerous tactics available to law enforcement — to ensure that citizens are protected from unreasonable searches, as provided in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

But judges generally rely on the word of police officers and rarely question the merits of the requests, offering little resistance when they seek authorization for no-knocks, a Washington Post investigation has found. The searches, which were meant to be used sparingly, have become commonplace for drug squads and SWAT teams.

Criminal justice experts estimate that police carry out tens of thousands of no-knock raids every year nationwide, mostly in drug-related searches. But few agencies monitor their use, making the exact number unknown. None of the 50 state court systems or the District of Columbia reported tracking the use of no-knock warrants. And no federal or state government agencies keep tabs on the number of people killed or wounded in the raids.

“The whole system has devolved into a perfunctory bureaucracy that doesn’t take any care or due diligence for how it’s done,” said Peter Kraska, an Eastern Kentucky University professor who has studied no-knock raids for more than three decades. “That wouldn’t be as big of a deal, except that we’re talking about a really extreme policing approach — breaking into people’s homes with a surprise entry with the possibility of finding evidence.”

The raids became a flash point two years ago when Louisville police killed 26-year-old Breonna Taylor inside her apartment as part of a drug investigation involving an ex-boyfriend who didn’t live there. In that case, an officer obtained no-knock warrants for Taylor’s home and four other residences. Police later said they knocked and announced themselves at Taylor’s home, a claim that has been disputed. In a no-knock raid in February, Minneapolis police shot and killed 22-year-old Amir Locke. Body-camera footage shows Locke, who was not the target of the investigation, wrapped in a blanket on a couch with a gun in his hand when police shot him.

Police carrying out 21 no-knock warrants have killed at least 22 people across the country since 2015, according to a review of The Post’s database of fatal shootings by police and hundreds of court records. In one case, an officer was also killed.

Of the 22 people fatally shot during no-knock raids since 2015, 13 were Black or Hispanic. Experts have suggested that high-risk searches disproportionately target Black and Hispanic homes.

In the vast majority of the cases, police said they were searching for illegal drugs and expected the subjects to be armed.

In all but two of these raids, police claimed they encountered someone who had a weapon — in most cases a gun. In at least five raids, police killed someone who was not a focus of the warrant, according to court records and media reports.

The Post obtained documents listing evidence for 13 of the fatal raids: In 12, officers recovered less than three pounds of drugs combined — including marijuana, mushrooms and heroin. Only one raid recovered more: In 2018 in Fort Worth, officers found more than a pound of marijuana, three pounds of mushrooms and more than 16 pounds of a prescription allergy medicine. Officials did not respond to a request for or declined to provide a list quantifying the drugs seized in the other eight raids.

The full tally of fatalities from no-knock warrants is unknown: The Post database includes at least 24 other searches that ended in fatal shootings of civilians, but court officials and police departments were unable or declined to provide records clarifying whether the raids involved no-knock warrants. In 2017, the New York Times examined SWAT team raids and found that at least 81 civilians and 13 officers had died from 2010 through 2016 in searches that involved both no-knock warrants and knock-and-announce warrants.

In recent years, it has become quicker and easier for judges to approve no-knock warrants, bypassing the normal process that usually involves an officer meeting with a judge in person. Software, adopted by hundreds of law enforcement agencies, allows judges to remotely approve requests using computers, cellphones or tablets.

The Post reviewed more than 2,500 warrants in 30 states, examined court and police records, and interviewed dozens of judges, police officials, lawmakers, witnesses and relatives of people who died in raids.

Officers obtaining typical search warrants are required to show a judge they have probable cause, listing the location to be searched and the contraband or evidence they expect to find. They’re also supposed to “knock and announce” before entering homes.

But with a no-knock warrant, police can force their way into a home without warning. The requirements for no-knock warrants may vary by jurisdiction, but are generally guided by a 1997 Supreme Court opinion involving a forced-entry search by police. The court ruled that police seeking to conduct these searches must have a “reasonable suspicion” why knocking and announcing could be dangerous or result in the destruction of evidence. Police are generally expected to make this argument to judges when seeking approval for a no-knock warrant.

“This showing is not high, but the police should be required to make it whenever the reasonableness of a no-knock entry is challenged,” the justice wrote.

Training and educational requirements for judges vary state to state. In some cases, judges or magistrates without law degrees or extensive training are tasked with approving no-knocks.

“It’s set up so that police departments can do whatever they want with regards to no-knocks,” Kraska said.

Across the country, 29 states and 21 cities have approved legislation or ordinances restricting the use of no-knocks, according to Campaign Zero, a police reform group. At least 13 other states and nine other cities have recently considered proposals for such restrictions, the group said.

In Maryland, after Montgomery County Police killed a man in a no-knock raid, the council in 2020 imposed limits on such warrants. Police reported that 108 of 140 search warrants executed by the SWAT team in 2019 were no-knocks.

In South Carolina, Chief Justice Donald W. Beatty ordered a temporary ban on no-knocks in 2020 after a survey by the state court system revealed that magistrates routinely issued warrants without questioning police, and that most “do not understand the gravity of no-knock warrants and do not discern the heightened requirements for issuing a no-knock warrant.”

But many judges say that in evaluating the requests for search warrants, they rely on the officers’ claims in the affidavits because they are filed under oath.

Gordon Marcum, a former municipal judge who approved the no-knock warrant for the 2019 deadly raid in Houston, told The Post in an interview that he considered himself the last line of defense against unjustified searches and carefully scrutinized the warrants he handled. But he said it wasn’t his responsibility to spot patterns, including whether officers appeared to be lying on affidavits or whether police failed to locate the guns or drugs they claimed they would find. Though officers typically must file documents with the court detailing what they seized in raids, judges who sign the warrants aren’t required to examine them.

“It wasn’t my job to do that,” Marcum said. “It’s the officer who’s in charge. The police officer, the supervisor, the captain, the department director, and all of them who have access to those things.”

Police defending these warrants note that the vast majority of them lead to no injuries and are likely to have prevented violence and preserved evidence that otherwise would have been destroyed.

Patrick Yoes, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said there are misconceptions about no-knocks, including that police use them frequently and haphazardly. “In reality, there’s a whole lot of assessment that goes into determining whether a no-knock warrant is going to be executed,” Yoes said.

The raids can be deadly not only for residents, but officers as well.

One Texas man, Marvin Guy, is facing charges, including capital murder, after an officer was killed and three others were shot during a 2014 no-knock raid at his home in Killeen. Guy was sleeping when officers smashed his window and slammed a battering ram into his front door. He said he thought he was being robbed and fired a gun through the broken window. Police had suspected that Guy, who had an extensive criminal history, was selling drugs, but no drugs were found in his home. Police said they found trace amounts of a white powder in his car, records show.

Survivors of raids have said they feared that intruders were breaking into their homes. In Louisville, Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend said he fired at police because he didn’t know who was storming the apartment.

Tamika Palmer, Taylor’s mother, said she blames the judge who signed the warrant that led to her daughter’s death as much as she blames the police.

“We know that [police] are not doing the work to get these warrants, that they’re not doing what needs to be done,” she said. “Why would you want to sign your name on that? Why wouldn’t you want to make sure, ‘Let me just take a day or two to make sure you’ve done what you need to.’ … It’s insane, it’s lazy.”

On Feb. 21, 2017, a boom shook Marlon O’Neal from his sleep in his basement bedroom in south St. Louis. Panicked and half-dressed, he told his girlfriend to hide in the closet. She yelled for her 4-year-old son, who was sleeping near the front door.

O’Neal, thinking intruders had broken in, said he crept up the steps and saw red lasers from gun sights aimed at the living room wall. He realized the men, clad in dark clothing, were police. Officers yelled at him to go outside, where police SUVs lined California Avenue.

A SWAT team had already raided his neighbor’s home two doors down. Now, the team of 17 officers converged and headed to a third house next to O’Neal’s home.

Inside was his former father-in-law: 63-year-old Don Clark, known as “Pops.” He was hard of hearing, couldn’t see well and walked with a cane. He slept in a bed near the front door.

Officers smashed a battering ram into Clark’s front door and tossed a flash-bang device inside, according to witness statements and police records. Nicholas Manasco, the first officer in, later told an investigator that Clark shot at him — he said he felt a bullet whiz past him and in the darkness saw someone holding a gun. Manasco shot at Clark, hitting him nine times. He was pronounced dead at a hospital.

O’Neal was not arrested or charged in connection with the raid.

The deadly raid was one of many in which judges gave St. Louis police the go-ahead to target multiple homes simultaneously with no-knock warrants.

In the raid on California Avenue, police initially sought to search two addresses; they added Clark’s home two days later, records show. The affidavits were identical for all three homes.

Detective Thomas Strode of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department accused Clark and others of conducting drug sales and storing weapons and narcotics in homes on California Avenue. In his affidavit, Strode said he also did several weeks of surveillance. He reported a controlled drug buy, but it happened five months earlier and about a mile away from California Avenue, according to the affidavit.

Strode noted in his affidavit that some of the residents of the targeted homes had criminal histories: “Since the targets of the investigation are known to be armed narcotic traffickers, many of whom have a violent history, I am requesting no-knock search warrants” for the three homes.

O’Neal, who lived next to Clark, had felony convictions, including unlawful possession of a firearm in 2010. Ben Byas, another neighbor, was on probation for possession with intent to distribute drugs. And Strode said in the affidavit that Clark had arrests for unlawful use of a weapon, felonious restraint and assault. A Post review of local court records showed Clark, who once owned a security company, had no charges or convictions.

On the morning of the raid, Associate Circuit Court Judge Barbara Peebles signed the warrants.

A court spokesman said Peebles determined there was probable cause “based on the information presented under oath.” Peebles, now a judge in the juvenile court, declined to comment further.

From 2016 through 2018, Strode received approval for at least 43 no-knock warrants, according to a Post analysis of records obtained by ArchCity Defenders, a legal advocacy group helping to represent Clark’s family in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed against the police. Twenty-four of the warrants involved multi-house raids.

In nearly half of those 43 raids for which Strode received approval, officers said they failed to find suspected drugs, according to a review of documents filed in court by police.

Police need a judge’s approval to raid a home or business without warning. These are high-risk searches that require additional scrutiny — but a Post investigation found that judges rarely question the merits of these requests by police. This affidavit from a 2017 raid by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department shows how police obtained no-knock warrants to raid three homes.

Strode did not respond to messages seeking comment. Evita Caldwell, a police spokeswoman, said Strode and Manasco, the officer who fatally shot Clark, no longer work at the St. Louis police department and declined to discuss the terms of their departures. More than five years later, the department and the circuit attorney said they are still investigating the fatal shooting.

Police rely heavily on confidential informants, but experts said they can be unreliable — incentivized to trade questionable information for reduced sentences or other beneficial treatment.

David Moran, a University of Michigan law professor who argued before the Supreme Court in a case about evidence seized during no-knocks, said a raid on one home can easily become a violent confrontation. Carrying out simultaneous no-knock warrants at several homes “just multiplies the risk,” he said.

That risk takes on a new dimension in states with high gun ownership or “stand your ground” laws, including Missouri. In those states, people may legally defend themselves with deadly force if they believe their life is in danger.

Clark had moved into his home a few years earlier and was concerned about crime, his family said.

Sherrie Clark-Torrence, one of Clark’s daughters, said that she doesn’t believe her father used a gun as police claimed, but even if he had, it would have been self-defense. In the family’s lawsuit, they allege that he was unarmed, that he had no criminal convictions and police lied about surveillance of his home.

“He’s already an elderly man in a bad neighborhood,” she said in an interview. “So if he heard a boom and he grabbed his revolver … to protect himself, wouldn’t that be right?”

The city of St. Louis declined to comment, citing the pending lawsuit.

Police said they recovered a .45 caliber Glock handgun, a 9mm Taurus handgun and boxes of ammunition from Clark’s home. A forensics report concluded that one gun had been fired.

Clark’s family disputes that he had any drugs, according to their lawsuit.

At Clark’s home, officers reported finding 8.39 grams of heroin and 0.50 grams of marijuana. They also said they found 20 pills; a lab test determined one to be .005 grams of hydrocodone.

At the home of Ben Byas, police said they recovered 0.1 grams of fentanyl, .08 grams of heroin and fentanyl, and a plastic bag with an unknown white substance.

After the raid, Byas told police he had heroin and cocaine in his home. When a detective asked if he sold them, Byas responded, “No I just pretty much use.” He was arrested, but wasn’t charged.

Police said they seized no drugs at O’Neal’s home. He and his girlfriend claimed officers stole money from a safe in his basement. He questioned whether the raids were worth it.

“You did all these search warrants, and that’s all you found in this house,” he said, referring to Clark’s home. “What about my house? What did you find there? … You know, not nothing.”

On a humid afternoon in July 2019 in Port Allen, La., the River West Narcotics Task Force sent a confidential informant to buy $50 worth of methamphetamine from a suspected drug dealer at the Budget 7 Motel, sandwiched between a gas station and another motel near the Mississippi River.

The quick transaction in room No. 5 was enough evidence for West Baton Rouge sheriff’s Deputy Brett Cavaliere to request a no-knock warrant.

Cavaliere filled out the request in his office, using software called CloudGavel. The affidavit was barely four pages long, mostly filled with Cavaliere’s law enforcement experience and boilerplate language.

He typed in one sentence about the suspect: “Affiant states in the last 72 hours, an informant purchased a quantity of methamphetamine during a controlled operation from a Black male at the Budget 7 Motel Room #5.” He didn’t include the suspect’s name, whether he had a gun or who else was in the room.

At 6:06 p.m., with the click of a button, the deputy sent the request to Tonya Lurry, a West Baton Rouge judge, for approval: “Affiant has requested and cause has been shown for the authorization of a ‘NO KNOCK’ entry or entry without announcement to search the aforesaid premises,” it stated.

At 6:17 p.m., Lurry electronically signed it, records show. It’s unclear whether Lurry spoke with the deputy or how much time she spent considering the request.

About 6:40 p.m., Cavaliere approached the motel room with Deputy Vance Matranga and two other West Baton Rouge sheriff’s deputies.

Jessica Clouatre told The Post she was on the bed inside, watching a YouTube video. Her 38-year-old fiance, Josef Richardson, had just showered, and she said he opened the door a crack to let out cigarette smoke. The couple was staying at the motel while searching for a new apartment, and had hosted Richardson’s daughters the day before.

He had a criminal record that included felony convictions for resisting arrest and battery of an officer, and he was on parole after pleading guilty in 2017 to possession with intent to sell drugs. He looked tough with tattoos and gold teeth, but his friends and family knew him as a father of three who enjoyed taking his children shopping and to water parks.

Clouatre said she looked up as deputies rushed in and yelled “sheriff’s office!” She said both she and Richardson had their hands up when one deputy bent Richardson’s arm and brought him to the ground. Within seconds, she said, Matranga had shot Richardson in the back of the neck.

The deputies involved in the raid told a state police investigator that there was a struggle between Cavaliere and Richardson. One deputy said he holstered his gun to help Cavaliere, and Matranga said he fired his gun after seeing Richardson pull out a dark object from the waistband of his shorts, according to interviews with investigators.

But Richardson was unarmed: He was holding a bag of drugs, according to an attorney general’s report. Officers arrested Clouatre, and Richardson died at the scene.

Officers said they recovered about 9 grams of methamphetamine, 9 grams of marijuana, 4.4 grams of cocaine and a few pills containing hydrocodone.

“Anybody selling drugs out of the Budget 7 Motel is not a major player,” said Ron Haley, an attorney representing Richardson’s children in a wrongful-death lawsuit against the sheriff’s office.

The state attorney general ruled the killing was justified. Cavaliere, who is now a lieutenant, did not return requests for comment.

In an interview with The Post, Matranga declined to discuss most details of the case. Matranga, who is now a corporal in the department, also defended Cavaliere, saying he is a “meticulous and thorough” officer. And he said he believed Richardson could have been armed because of his “extensive criminal history.”

Deputies found no weapons in his motel room.

The family questions the basis for the deadly raid.

Lurry, who approved the warrant, was elected as a judge 15 months before Richardson’s shooting after a career as a public defender and prosecutor. She declined repeated requests for comment.

For years, Louisiana has been a leader in “e-warrants,” warrants that are processed electronically on computers, smartphones and other tablets. CloudGavel, the Baton Rouge software company used by the sheriff’s office, said its technology is used in nine states by more than 200 agencies, including police in Austin and New Orleans. The number of all types of warrants processed annually increased from 13,000 to almost 90,000 over the past six years. The company declined to say how many of those were no-knock warrants.

CloudGavel markets its software by emphasizing its efficiency, using the tag line “Serves justice. Saves time.” An information sheet on its website proclaimed: “The one that got away? Not this time. When officers use CloudGavel’s Electronic Warrant Solution, warrant processing can happen up to 90% faster.”

Around the time of Richardson’s death, CloudGavel touted that it took about 27 minutes from warrant submission to approval. Cavaliere and Lurry beat that by 16 minutes.

Casey Roussel, CloudGavel’s president and chief customer officer, said law enforcement likes the technology because it saves time and money. He also said that the software allows courts to gather more data about warrants.

“The technology is not giving them the ability to more easily get no-knock warrants,” he said. “We’re eliminating the drive to and from the judge. At the end of the day, whether it’s a paper warrant or a digital warrant, one hundred percent of the responsibility relies on the judge.”

But some criminal justice advocates worry that judicial scrutiny is being compromised for efficiency, said the Rev. Alexis Anderson, a member of the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition. The organization sends volunteers to monitor bail hearings in Baton Rouge.

“While the technology certainly speeds up the process, what gets lost sometimes is the due process in that speed,” she said. “Because we’re assuming, quite frankly, that great thought is given to these warrants … and sometimes that’s not true.”

Richardson’s children, as well as Clouatre, have sued the West Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office over the raid. That case is pending.

Clouatre is facing felony charges of possession with intent to distribute drugs from that night at the motel. She has pleaded not guilty.

The warrant did not name Clouatre, who said she is haunted by the raid.

“To this day, I cry every day and I’m traumatized,” she said.

Houston Judge Gordon Marcum was watching television at home in his gated community on Jan. 28, 2019, when he learned about a deadly no-knock raid across town. Immediately, he knew that he had signed the search warrant.

Just hours before the raid on a house on Harding Street, Houston police officer Gerald Goines had requested Marcum approve a no-knock warrant, claiming a confidential informant purchased an unspecified quantity of heroin at the house in a low-income, largely Latino neighborhood in southeast Houston. The narcotics officer didn’t list the name of the suspected dealer, information that is not required.

Shortly before 5 p.m., members of Narcotics Squad 15 descended on the home of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, forcing open the front door and fatally shooting their pit bull. Officers shot and killed Tuttle and Nicholas in their living room.

Police claimed that Tuttle was armed with a .357-magnum revolver and shot first. Four officers, including Goines, were shot during the gun battle. One was permanently paralyzed.

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Last year more Americans died by gun fire than any other year on record

More Americans died of gun-related injuries in 2020 than in any other year on record, according to recently published statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Pew Research Center. That included a record number of gun murders, as well as a near-record number of gun suicides. Despite the increase in such fatalities, the rate of gun deaths – a statistic that accounts for the nation’s growing population – remains below the levels of earlier years.

Here’s a closer look at gun deaths in the United States, based on a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the CDC, the FBI and other sources. You can also read key public opinion findings about U.S. gun violence and gun policy in our recent roundup.

How many people die from gun-related injuries in the U.S. each year?

In 2020, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 45,222 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC. That figure includes gun murders and gun suicides, along with three other, less common types of gun-related deaths tracked by the CDC: those that were unintentional, those that involved law enforcement and those whose circumstances could not be determined. The total excludes deaths in which gunshot injuries played a contributing, but not principal, role. (CDC fatality statistics are based on information contained in official death certificates, which identify a single cause of death.)

What share of U.S. gun deaths are murders and what share are suicides?

Though they tend to get less public attention than gun-related murders, suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths. In 2020, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (24,292), while 43% were murders (19,384), according to the CDC. The remaining gun deaths that year were unintentional (535), involved law enforcement (611) or had undetermined circumstances (400).

What share of all murders and suicides in the U.S. involve a gun?

Nearly eight-in-ten (79%) U.S. murders in 2020 – 19,384 out of 24,576 – involved a firearm. That marked the highest percentage since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online records. A little over half (53%) of all suicides in 2020 – 24,292 out of 45,979 – involved a gun, a percentage that has generally remained stable in recent years.

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PA State Trooper who shot and killed for people since 2008 still on the job

 Pennsylvania State Trooper Jay Splain has shot and killed four people in the line of duty since 2008 and is still on the job, according to The New York Times.

In 2008, Trooper Splain was honored at a county law enforcement banquet as a hero, the police officer of the year. The reason: He had shot and killed a suicidal man who allegedly pointed an Uzi submachine gun at him.

That was the first killing. Trooper Splain went on to fatally shoot three more people in separate incidents, an extraordinary tally for an officer responsible for patrolling largely rural areas with low rates of violent crime. All four who died were troubled, struggling with drugs, mental illness or both. In two cases, including that of the man with the Uzi, family members had called the police for help because their relatives had threatened to kill themselves.

The most recent death was last month, when Trooper Splain shot an unarmed man in his Volkswagen Beetle. After learning that the officer had previously killed three other people over nearly 15 years, the man’s sister, Autumn Krouse, asked, “Why would that person still be employed?”

Trooper Splain is an outlier. Most officers never fire their weapons. Until now, his full record of killings has not been disclosed; the Pennsylvania State Police even successfully fought a lawsuit seeking to identify him and provide other details in one shooting. In the agency’s more than a century of policing, no officer has ever been prosecuted for fatally shooting someone, according to a spokesman. That history aligns with a longstanding pattern across the country of little accountability for police officers’ use of deadly force.

Prosecutors and a grand jury concluded that Trooper Splain’s first three lethal shootings were justified, and an inquiry into the most recent one is ongoing. Rather than have independent outsiders look into the killings, the police agency has conducted its own investigations — which were led by officers from his unit — raising questions about the rigor of the inquiries.

“When a police officer has shot at and potentially killed a civilian, the public will never trust the police agency to investigate itself and be unbiased,” said Tom Hogan, the former district attorney of Chester County, Pa. A Republican, he helped write recommendations by the state prosecutors’ association for independent investigations — a reform that many departments resist, but one sought by the national prosecutors’ association and major policing groups.

In its review of Trooper Splain’s killings, The New York Times found inconsistencies between the evidence of what occurred and what the state police said had happened. The officer appeared to have departed from police protocols in several of the fatal confrontations, according to interviews and an examination of investigative and court records.

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Over last 5 years police have killed over 400 drivers or passengers

“Open the door now, you are going to get shot!” an officer in Rock Falls, Ill., shouted at Nathaniel Edwards after a car chase.

“Hands out the window now or you will be shot!” yelled a patrolman in Bakersfield, Calif., as Marvin Urbina wrestled with inflated airbags after a pursuit ended in a crash.

“I am going to shoot you — what part of that don’t you understand?” threatened an officer in Little Rock, Ark., adding a profanity, as she tried to pry James Hartsfield from his car.

The police officers who issued those warnings had stopped the motorists for common offenses: swerving across double yellow lines, speeding recklessly, carrying an open beer bottle, reported The New York Times. None of the men were armed. Yet within moments of pulling them over, officers fatally shot all three.

The deaths are among a series of seemingly avoidable killings across the United States. Over the past five years, a New York Times investigation found, police officers have killed more than 400 drivers or passengers who were not wielding a gun or a knife, or under pursuit for a violent crime — a rate of more than one a week.

Most of the officers did so with impunity. Only five have been convicted of crimes in those killings, according to a review of the publicly reported cases. Yet local governments paid at least $125 million to resolve about 40 wrongful-death lawsuits and other claims. Many stops began with common traffic violations like broken taillights or running a red light; relative to the population, Black drivers were overrepresented among those killed.

The recurrence of such cases and the rarity of convictions both follow from an overstatement, ingrained in court precedents and police culture, of the danger that vehicle stops pose to officers. Claiming a sense of mortal peril — whether genuine in the moment or only asserted later — has often shielded officers from accountability for using deadly force.

 “We get into what I would call anticipatory killings,” said Sim Gill, the district attorney for Salt Lake County, Utah. “We can’t give carte blanche to that.”

Whenever any kind of encounter between law enforcement and citizens ends in a loss of life, it is highly regrettable. When that loss of life is avoidable, it becomes more so. But where the legal standard for justification on the use of force is met, criminal prosecution is not an available remedy to address it.

In case after case, officers said they had feared for their lives. And in case after case, prosecutors declared the killings of unarmed motorists legally justifiable. But The Times reviewed video and audio recordings, prosecutor statements and court documents, finding patterns of questionable police conduct that went beyond recent high-profile deaths of unarmed drivers. Evidence often contradicted the accounts of law enforcement officers.

Dozens of encounters appeared to turn on what criminologists describe as officer-created jeopardy: Officers regularly — and unnecessarily — placed themselves in danger by standing in front of fleeing vehicles or reaching inside car windows, then fired their weapons in what they later said was self-defense. Frequently, officers also appeared to exaggerate the threat.

In many cases, local police officers, state troopers or sheriff’s deputies responded with outsize aggression to disrespect or disobedience — a driver talking back, revving an engine or refusing to get out of a car, what officers sometimes call “contempt of cop.”

fire at a motorist with a suspended license in 2017: “Don’t ram him, shoot him!” he later recounted saying, according to a body-camera recording. Knocking the man off the highway might “tear my cars up!”

Struggling to subdue a driver a few months later, a patrolman in Moundridge, Kan., warned that the man might be reaching for a police sidearm; an officer shot him, another struck his head with the butt of a shotgun and a third pummeled his body with a baton — killing him though he never touched a gun, video records show. And last year a body camera recorded an officer in Las Cruces, N.M., warning a motorist that he would “choke you out, bro,” then pinning him in a headlock. “A good little scrap,” the officer called it, before realizing the man had died.

Some families of the drivers said that their relatives were not blameless. “I don’t have my head buried in the sand,” said Deborah Lilly, whose 29-year-old son, Tyler Hays, had drugs in his car and tried to run away when he was pulled over for tinted windows last year by a sheriff’s deputy in Hamilton County, Tenn. “I am just saying he did not deserve to get shot in the back.” (Over the next three months, the deputy shot at two other unarmed drivers, wounding one.)

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Police officer involved killings significantly under counted

More than half of police killings in the United States over the past 40 years have been mislabeled, according to a new study, leading to a stark undercount of deaths at the hands of officers and a lopsided perception of what experts say is a public health crisis, reported The Washington Post.

Researchers from the University of Washington found that from 1980 to 2019, more than 55 percent of 31,000 deaths attributed to police violence were assigned other causes in official federal death data. Black men are killed by police at disproportionately high rates, and their deaths are mislabeled at higher rates than for any other race, according to the study, which was published in the Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal.

The study underscores a grim reality: Despite years of scrutiny, criticism, protests and calls for reform, no government agency tracks how often law enforcement officers in America kill people. Since 2015, The Washington Post has been counting how often on-duty police shoot and kill people. But there is no comprehensive federal attempt to keep track of these deaths or other uses of force by law enforcement, including chokeholds and nonfatal shootings. One of the study’s authors called the deaths poorly catalogued and preventable, and an expert said the lack of meaningful tracking of these deaths underscores the deep-rootedness of systemic racism.

High-profile police killings over the past several years, such as that of George Floyd in May 2020, have led to nationwide calls for police reform and an examination of why Black men are disproportionately killed during police encounters. But until now, this study’s authors say, the true scope of police killings has been largely unknown.

Police and a medical examiner initially attributed Floyd’s death to drug use and underlying conditions, despite bystander video showing former police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck and back for more than nine minutes. Chauvin was found guilty of murder and manslaughter in April.

The study compared decades of data from the National Vital Statistics System, which tracks births and deaths, to three databases that track police violence: Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence and the Guardian’s The Counted. The databases sift through news reports and public records for instances of people killed during police encounters.

Mohsen Naghavi, the study’s senior author, told The Post that it is critical to look beyond the incomplete data provided by government agencies.

“Here the role of the media is very important,” he said. “If we didn’t have the media, we wouldn’t have open-source data.”

Noting the striking discrepancy between the study’s findings and the government’s data, the authors called for public health officials and researchers to “swiftly adopt open-source data-collection initiatives to provide accurate estimates and advocate for policy change to address this long-neglected public health crisis.”

Researchers identified places where misclassification of deaths often occurred, noting that medical examiners or coroners — who must fill out the cause of death when there is suspicion of foul play, including police violence — can be embedded in or work for police departments.

If the medical examiner, coroner or other certifier fails to indicate police involvement in the cause of death on the death certificate, the incident could be misclassified.

The study underscores how deeply enmeshed systemic racism is in different aspects of life — including health, said Edwin G. Lindo, assistant dean for social and health justice at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

“We have to really sit back and say, ‘What does this mean?’” the critical race theory scholar told The Post. “In my mind there is a deep-seated undercurrent of systemic racism to the point that a medical examiner doesn’t have to declare that they’re racist. The practices are already showing, and the racism is occurring, not just during the encounter itself, but even after the individual has passed away.

“There’s still acts of racism trying to hide the murder or the killing that occurred,” he said.

The study’s authors said forensic pathologists should be independent from law enforcement to avoid incorrectly identifying the cause of death due to outside pressures. They also said the experts should be offered whistleblower protections so they can fully investigate police violence.

“We need the government and policymakers to fix this conflict of interest because violence is a public health crisis,” Naghavi said.

Researchers found Black people were 3½ times more likely than White people to be killed by police, and Latinos and Native Americans also faced higher rates of fatal violence at the hands of law enforcement. About one in every thousand Black men in the United States is killed by police, the study found.

“Systemic and direct racism, manifested in laws and policies as well as personal implicit biases, result in Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic Americans being the targets of police violence,” it read.

Lindo said the number of people dying at the hands of police highlights how this violence is a major public health problem.

“That is a mortality rate greater than the likelihood of you dying of riding your bicycle in the United States, and riding your bicycle is dangerous,” he said.

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