The New Haven SWAT team must have been pretty amped up: It was midnight, and they were getting ready to bust down the door of a man wanted on charges involving weapons violations, robbery and murder. They were not sure how many people were in the house, or how theyd react. After a volley of flash grenades that set fire to the carpet and a sofa, they moved in, guns drawn. A minute later, they had their man zip-tied on the floor.
If only theyd double-checked the address first.
Bobby Griffin Jr. was wanted on murder charges. His next-door neighbor on Peck Street, Joseph Adams, wasnt. But that didnt stop the SWAT team from knocking down his door, setting his home on fire, roughing him up, keeping him tied up in his underwear for nearly three hours, and treating the New Haven man, who is gay, to a nance show as officers taunted him with flamboyantly effeminate mannerisms. If the events detailed in Mr. Adamss recently filed lawsuit are even remotely accurate, the episode was a moral violation and, arguably, a crime.
And when Mr. Adams showed up at the New Haven police department the next day to fill out paperwork requesting that the authorities reimburse him for the wanton destruction of his property never mind the gross violation of his rights the story turned Kafkaesque, as interactions with American government agencies at all levels tend to do. The police who that same night had managed to take in the murder suspect next door without the use of flash grenades or other theatrics after his mother suggested that they were probably there for her son denied having any record of the incident at Mr. Adamss home ever having happened.
This sort of thing happens with disturbing regularity. The New York Police Department killed an older woman in Harlem when they mistakenly raided her home in 2003. In that case, too, flash-bang grenades were deployed, and the concussions sent 57-year-old Alberta Spruiell into cardiac arrest, killing her. The NYPD was acting on information given to them by a local lowlife drug dealer they were leaning on. It was the first information hed given them as an informant, and based on nothing more than that they went in hard no-knock raid, grenades, the whole circus. As it turns out, New York dope-slingers turned rat are not entirely trustworthy.
In Miamis Coconut Grove, police struck a child in the head with their rifle butts after a no-knock SWAT raid. The address of the home was not the address on the warrant that was two blocks away but police insist they were in the right, warrant be damned. They broke every single flat-screen TV, they broke the PlayStation 4, they broke every single picture frame, for whatever reason. Every single thing they could possibly break, they broke, the homeowner said. The police insisted that they had meant to hit that house, in which there was no one other than the children, and that they had seized narcotics a trivial amount of marijuana and weapons a handgun, which is perfectly legal to own in Florida.
The stories get grisly: In Habersham County, Ga., police looking for a drug dealer at a home in which he did not reside broke down the doors thinking theyd find drugs and guns, which of course they didnt. But they did manage to toss a flash grenade into a babys playpen, burning part of the childs face off. The family was left with nearly $1 million in medical bills, and the kid will need surgery every few years until he stops growing. The police insist they did nothing wrong. And as in New Haven, when they found the drug dealer for whom they were searching, the Georgia authorities brought him in without incident, without kicking down any doors or throwing any stun grenades.
The disfigurement of a child is horrific to contemplate. (If youve never wept and want to, have a child, David Foster Wallace wrote in Incarnations of Burned Children.) But the image that really hooks me is that of Joseph Adams schlepping up to the New Haven police department to endure some bureaucracy and to fill out some paperwork because no matter how badly government screws up, fixing whats gone wrong is always your problem. I can picture his situation precisely every police department, drivers-license office, tax bureau, and city licensing agency exhibits the same distinctive blind of slowly simmering hostility, smugness, contempt, and complete immunity from accountability. We are ruled by criminals, and their alibi is: Theres no record of that in the system. That, or: The computer wont let me do that.
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