High noon in the living room
It was just after midnight on Dec. 16, and Yee Moua was unwinding in her spartan north Minneapolis home, watching TV. Such moments of solitude are hard to come by when you’re trying to raise six children in a crime-plagued neighborhood. Her husband, who had recently lost his job as a machine operator, and their kids were asleep.
So when one of her windows shattered, she knew it wasn’t an accident. There were voices. Men were breaking into their home.
She ran upstairs. Vang Khang had already removed his shotgun from a closet and was ready to defend his family and property. They heard footsteps on the stairs.
Mr. Khang fired three blasts through his door. More than 20 shots came back at them through the walls.
Calling the police on this night would have done Ms. Moua and Mr. Khang no good. They were already there.
It was a Minneapolis SWAT team that had barged into the home unannounced. Such raids are common in the government’s war on drugs and guns. And with increasing frequency, police kick down the wrong door. Just as they did last week in Minneapolis.
In an early Christmas miracle, no one was hurt in this boondoggle. Two policemen were saved by bulletproof vests and helmets, and Mr. Khang, Ms. Moua and their children, possessing no body armor, happened to be curled in the right places to avoid the return gunfire.
“I have six kids, and only one mistake almost took my kids’ life,” said Ms. Moua, 29. “We will never forget this.”
Nor should anyone else who values their freedom and the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
For nearly a week, the department refused to release the search warrant used to justify the assault. On Friday, authorities finally made the document public. Police smashed through the family’s windows to investigate what amounted to a domestic violence complaint.
A woman who had previously served as a police informant told police her boyfriend, whom she alleged was a gang member, had threatened her at the address. She believed there were guns in the basement.
Police saw the tip as an opportunity to round up a violent gangbanger. Spokeswoman Lt. Amelia Huffman said narcotics and gang unit officers have thorough training in corroborating information and verifying addresses. Evidently, that training didn’t include examining property records or phone books.
“That’s one of the things the internal investigation will go through in exhaustive detail,” Lt. Huffman said.
What’s less relevant, sadly, is the allegation of Mr. Khang and Ms. Moua that police never identified themselves. Not when they crashed through the windows, not when they climbed the stairs, not when they opened fire.
Thanks to a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, it’s fully constitutional for police to break into homes and seize evidence without knocking, so long as they have a warrant — even a bogus one. In 2003, in a case out of North Las Vegas, the court had previously ruled that police executing a search warrant must wait 15 to 20 seconds after knocking and announcing themselves before entering a property.
Now the courts favor the convenience of police over the safety and rights of the public.
It’s no wonder that law enforcement agencies don’t track how many times they serve search warrants on incorrect addresses. Doing so might undermine their ability to kick down doors in the dead of night.
A 2006 study by the Cato Institute concluded: “Because of shoddy police work, over-reliance on informants, and other problems, each year hundreds of raids are conducted on the wrong addresses, bringing unnecessary terror and frightening confrontation to people never suspected of a crime.”
Your tax dollars at work.