WaPo | There are no children at the residence, the lead officer assures his
colleagues. (There were.) There would be a significant quantity of
illegal drugs at the house, another says. (There weren’t.) The tactical
team then proceeds to raid the home of a black family in Richland
County. Most officers storm the front door with their guns while one
shatters some side windows as a distraction. Minutes go by. The
officers’ body language eventually shows signs of frustration as their
search for contraband continues to come up empty. Finally, someone finds
a book bag with traces of marijuana at the bottom — not enough to
smoke, much less sell. They arrest a young black man with long braids
for possession.
“I never one time said you’re a bad person,” the
lead officer tells his arrestee, with an odd cordiality. “I just have a
job to do, and you happen to be in the middle of it.”
The officer
also seems to know that the man is a student at a local technical
college. He’s working toward a degree in construction. The man also runs
a landscaping company to help pay for his education. The man later
tells the officer that he was on his way to pick up some lawnmowers that
morning. Knowing that he’s about to be arrested, he asks the officer if
he could tell his employee that he was arrested and won’t be able to
pick up the lawnmowers. He then gives the officer $876 in cash and asks
it to give it to his employee to go pick up the mowers, along with a
weed-eater.
Instead, the officer confiscates the money under
civil asset forfeiture laws. There is no obvious connection between the
money and the pot residue. The man volunteered the cash, mostly because
he didn’t want his arrest to hurt his business. In doing so, he provided
ample evidence that the cash had nothing to do with illegal activity.
Still, if unchallenged, the $876 will go back to the Richland County
Sheriff’s Department, even if the man is never charged with a crime. The
cost of hiring an attorney for such a challenge would likely exceed
$876.
Meanwhile, the man’s father asks the officers whether the
police would pay for the windows they just shattered. The lead officer
tells him that breaking the windows was a tactic, then adds, “The moral
of the story is, don’t sell drugs from your residence.” Perhaps
realizing that he had no evidence for what he had just accused the man
of doing, he tried to correct himself. “I didn’t say you were actually
doing it, I just said — said you were associated with … ” and then
there’s some mumbling.
The striking thing about the footage is, again, the utter mundanity
of the raid. A family was just violently raided over an immeasurable
amount of pot. A man was arrested over that pot. The money he needed for
his business was taken from him. Yet there’s no shame or embarrassment
from the officers. There’s no panic that the whole thing was captured on
video. That’s when it hits you. They don’t think they’ve made a
mistake. This is what they do. The lead officers later tells
the camera, matter-of-factly, that the raid turned up “a personal use
amount of marijuana.” Perhaps realizing that he was also on camera back
at the police station promising a much larger stash of drugs, he adds,
“It happens. Drug warrants are, you know, 50-50.”
The documentary
also eschews voice-overs and talking heads and simply lets law
enforcement officers speak for themselves. You don’t need a civil
rights activist or ACLU attorney to tell you about the threats posed by
militaristic, aggressive policing when law enforcement officers can make
the point unintentionally — and thus more powerfully and persuasive —
when they’re speaking freely.
For example, the directors attended
one of the many SWAT competitions across the country. One SWAT cop
officer reflected on his first raid. “I was just trying not to smile. I
thought it was so fun. I thought it was so cool,” he says. Since then,
he says, he always loves to watch the “SWAT pups” (his term for
first-year SWAT officers) on their first raid. “They’re always just
smiling from ear to ear. They’re just on top of the world.” At risk of
stating the obvious, the officers he’s describing are about to stage an
armed, potentially lethal invasion of a private residence.
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