Back in December, police in Minneapolis raided a house in a high risk, SWAT-style, raid. Unfortunately, their former gang member informant gave them bad information, and they burst in to an innocent man’s house. The man thought the police were robbers or worse (it’s not a nice neighborhood, at all), and shot at them through his bedroom door. The police shot back. 22 times. Several rounds hit within inches of the man, his wife, and their 6 young children. For bonus points, the house is across the street from a police precinct, with whom the SWAT team didn’t bother to check with to see if the house was occupied by the African American gang members they were looking for, rather than the Hmong family they found. Way to verify that highly reliable source’s information.
You might expect that someone would be fired, or even charged with criminal wrong doing, for an incident where police broke into an innocent man’s house in the middle of the night, and shot 22 rounds at him and his family, all on bad information, which they obviously did little or nothing to verify.
Nope.
Instead, the Minneapolis Chief of Police today honored the officers who carried out the raid by giving them medals for their brave service. In attacking an innocent family. Bravely. Because, he said, the officers, “performed very bravely under gunfire and made smart decisions”. While breaking in to the wrong house, and shooting 22 rounds at an innocent man, his wife, and their six kids. Sorry that’s a little repetitious, but, seriously?
For more:
An article over at Reason from briefly after the incident – http://www.reason.com/blog/show/123994.html
A very detailed, but concise article on ABC News covering the incident and the medals – http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=5484185&page=1
And at the Star Tribune – http://www.startribune.com/local/26083024.html?location_refer=Homepage:highlightModules:1
Great to see Minneapolis in the news twice in two days for our great public officials. And McCain’s apparently still considering making our Governor his running mate.
On the up side for Minneapolis (okay, so, actually the down side for absolutely everyone), police raids getting the wrong houses and shooting at innocent people really aren’t all that uncommon, at all. The Cato Institute has a map of over 300 of them. Reason magazine details quite a few of them, just search for “Isolated Incident” on their site (the results go on for 19 pages, though admittedly not all of them are related). Both sources do a pretty good job of chronicling the general militarization of police SWAT teams, and how this leads to terrible decision making all around.
There was also a chapter in Malcom Gladwell’s book Blink (same guy who wrote Tipping Point, and I’d say Blink is the much better of the two) about why this leads to terrible decisions- not just by police, but by most anyone put in these types of situations.
The chapter covers how police operating in large groups behave differently than those who patrol alone. He covers the gist of it in a letter here. Basically, if you send a lone cop, he’ll be cautious and think things through more, because no one is there to immediately back him up, and it’s harder to get hyped up in the situation. If you send a group they’ll be more aggressive, knowing they have each other’s backs, and feeding off of each other’s energy. If you send a group into a very stressful, potentially dangerous situation (like raiding a house believed to be filled with well armed gang members in the middle of the night), outfit them in SWAT gear, arm them with military style weapons, and… well, you get the idea.
And they get medals.