Texas SWAT Team Destroys Home While Searching For The Wrong Person At The Wrong Address

Legal Issues

from the nothing-says-badass-like-a-self-inflicted-black-eye dept

To be sure, SWAT operations are pulled off flawlessly around the nation every day. The right addresses are hit. The right windows are smashed. The right doors are destroyed. The correct perps are arrested. The proper people are filled with bullets if needed, etc.

But, far too often, they go wrong. Often more concerned with delivering an awesome show of force than handling things professionally, SWAT teams do all the wrong things: wrong houses, wrong people, senseless destruction of people’s homes, extended standoffs with houses containing nothing but the family dog or, in one case, a house containing nothing but nothing.

When it’s all said and destroyed, the invaders leave. Those who remain are left to clean up the mess created by the cops, whether or not officers actually managed to get their man. Here’s another data point for the case against violent entries by law enforcement, provided this time by the Galveston Police Department. (via FourthAmendment.com)

Members of an island family assert they were injured and traumatized and their house wrecked by a SWAT team searching for a homicide suspect who wasn’t there and who was later cleared of involvement in a shooting death.

The police department argues the team was only following its training when it raided a house in the 5300 block of Avenue O, shattering windows with “flashbang” devices, kicking in doors and ripping out wires.

Erika Rios, her 16-year-old son, her 18-year-old daughter and her daughter’s 16-year-old friend, were asleep about 2 a.m. Sunday when the children awoke to the megaphone-amplified sound of Galveston Police Department’s SWAT unit announcing its arrival, Rios said Thursday.

You’ll notice a lot of really wrong things happening here. First, the suspect wasn’t supposed to be a suspect. Second, the best defense the cop shop could offer was basically “just following orders.” Third, the raid was performed at 2 a.m., which is generally considered to be an “unreasonable” (in the constitutional sense of the word) time to be performing warrant service.

Rios and the children were forced to walk shoeless across broken glass by the SWAT team. Rios and her son were both handcuffed. The supposed suspect, Cameron Vargas, had left the house more than two hours earlier.

And, as if all of that wasn’t terrible enough, there’s more.

After police had cleared the house of all occupants, officers continued to break garage windows with a wooden stick, Rios said.

An officer ripped out two cameras in her living room and kitchen, but she still had one that captured the whole raid, Rios said.

“When the officer found the other camera, he started laughing and said, ‘who keeps cameras in their living room,’” Rios said.

The first is just a form of bullying, destroying something of value just because you can. The second part is extremely disturbing, suggesting officers wanted only one narrative — theirs — to survive.

Here’s Police Chief Doug Balli’s official shrug at the thousands of dollars of damage his officers caused.

“SWAT is trained in a specific way to raid a home, which includes working from the outside in,” Balli said. “They need to ensure there is no threat to themselves.

“Police work is inherently dangerous and anytime we have a warrant, we do a threat assessment and since this was related to a murder case, the risk to ourselves increased.”

Bullshit. Police work can be dangerous but it isn’t inherently dangerous. Whatever “threat assessment” the PD performed prior to this raid didn’t manage to take into account the person they were seeking had been falsely accused of the crime. It didn’t take into account the fact that the wrongly accused suspect didn’t live at that address. If the PD had performed any surveillance prior to warrant service, it would have discovered both of these facts, saving the Rios family the terror and wanton destruction inflicted on them at 2 in the morning.

The attorney representing the family claims the PD did know the suspect was no longer in the home when it carried out the raid. SWAT officers then tried to make the raid about something else when they failed to find the suspect they allegedly knew had vacated the premises two hours earlier.

Buzbee asserted police knew Vargas’ whereabouts before they carried out the raid and told the Rios family they were searching for “guns and drugs.”

“They later tell your daughter that they are looking for ‘guns and drugs’ but the arrest warrant being executed is for a particular person accused of a crime who doesn’t even live at the address and isn’t a family member,” [attorney Tony] Buzbee said. “You later learn the police knew the actual whereabouts of the, actually innocent, ‘perp’.”

This has led to the police chief being briefly sidelined while city officials try to repair the damage done to their poker faces.

Police Chief Doug Balli is on paid administrative leave for no more than 10 days after city leaders were blindsided with news about a SWAT raid that terrified a family and did an estimated $5,000 in damage to their home, City Manager Brian Maxwell said Saturday.

“There was a major breakdown in communication and we want to figure out why the city was not in the loop,” Maxwell said. “This decision was solely based on the lack of communication and not related to the raid.“

Um, what? The lack of communication is directly related to the raid. City officials first learned about the raid when the Galveston County Daily News published its article. You can’t pretend one doesn’t have anything to do with the other. This internally incoherent statement is probably the right one to make, though. It refuses to admit any wrongdoing by the police department or its city oversight by pretending the raid was completely above-board, even if it targeted an innocent family’s home, rather than the home of the (actually innocent) murder suspect.

But Maxwell may have overstepped here.

To be reimbursed for the damage to her home, Rios would have to speak to the city’s risk manager and fill out forms, Maxwell said.

The city’s insurance would cover the cost, he said.

I certainly hope he’s talked to the city’s insurer. Most won’t cover stuff like this because it’s considered to be damage lawfully created in the course of legitimate police work, which means there’s nothing for the city to be held liable for. But if Maxwell wants to set this precedent, he should. And maybe the inevitable insurance rate hike will be enough to deter excessive deployments of the PD’s Excessive Force Squad.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, brian maxwell, doug balli, flashbang, galveston, galveston pd, raid, swat team, texas