5

Dogs And Cameras Can Paint You As A Dangerous Criminal

As we mentioned, in Rosas' case, he wasn't the target at all. The police were serving a warrant against his nephew, who wasn't even home at the time of the raid. Some drugs were found in the nephew's room, and by "some drugs" we mean "roughly half of what you'd bring for a long weekend at Burning Man."

Corpus Christi Police Department

Wondering what's with the webcam? Well, Rosas had it on the exterior of his house, and the police decided that was the marker of a drug den (rather than of someone who lived in a dangerous neighborhood). See, no-knock warrants require a certain amount of "points" to be granted in advance. The police have to be able to make a case that the person they're raiding is so dangerous that it's simply not safe for them to announce themselves first. And what are the standards for issuing a no-knock warrant? It's hard to say. It took Greenberg two years in court to get the department to admit some of the things that factored into their decision.

"Nobody wanted to give me that info. But if you have a dog and they call it a dangerous dog, you get like 20 points on this scale. And you need like 30 to get a no-knock warrant. I asked the officer what's a dangerous dog. 'A barking dog.' I asked, 'Well what kind of dog doesn't bark?' If you have a gun in your house, you get like five. Everybody in Texas has a gun."

We talked about this to Chris Gebhardt, a 15-year veteran SWAT officer from Utah. He explained that the point system is called a "Risk Matrix" (a search of IMDb shows that, tragically, there has never been a Steven Seagal film with that title), and it's different in every department. "I can see how they justified. Covered windows [are] obstructive, a loud dog, [since] because he barks he gives alert, again taking away this element of surprise. So you've got to think about it in those terms ... There are some places where they'll actually take out a BB gun to take out the lights ... It's about: How do you preserve that element of surprise?"

4

Police Often Act On Incomplete Or Bad Information

Gebhardt and Whitus were both insistent that no raid should ever occur without a huge amount of homework. According to Whitus: "We're going to go and look at the house, we're going to watch the house for a number of hours ... we're going to do background checks on who lives there and then we're going to develop a plan ... we basically set up a mock area where we practice around two or three times, to make sure everybody was on the exact same page, in terms of who is where and doing what."

In Rosas' case, they didn't properly surveil the home or make sure the actual subject of the warrant was even there. In Magee's case, the police drove around the trailer once. Otherwise, they were working off the information given to them by the informant, and no real steps were taken to verify the story of a guy who was, again, trying to reduce his own criminal charges by acting like he was giving up a kingpin.

"[The informant] told them that Hank had said he wasn't afraid to use a gun in case there was a raid. Well that was whole cloth too," says DeGuerin. The police even had some indication that was fishy. They'd been to Magee's home before, responding to a noise complaint due to him shooting off his guns for fun (we understand that in many parts of Texas, if neighbors don't hear gunfire, they assume you're either on vacation or have fallen into a deep depression). On that occasion, Magee spoke to the officers and cooperated without any issues. There was no indication that the man was willing to go down shooting to avoid jail, aside from the word of their terrible informant.

It's hard to say exactly how frequently the police under-prepare for dangerous forced-entry raids, but it's probably worth noting that the vast majority of these raids turn up nothing. The ACLU found that only 35 percent of SWAT drug raids produced anything illegal. In forced-entry raids, like both the cases in this article, the police "hit" rate is a mere 25 percent. The other thing to remember is that a lot of so-called SWAT teams are in fact groups of normal cops with fancy gear. The DA of Burleson described the training of the team that raided Henry Magee as "minimal." That's great for a movie about a rag tag group of scoundrels and farm boys trying to save a princess from Darth Vader, but not for real life.

3

Police Are Forgiven For Mistakes, While Civilians Are Expected To Act With Perfect Discipline

Henry Magee is kind of a legal unicorn, in that a grand jury refused to even indict him for killing a police officer (they would still get him with the marijuana charge). Ray Rosas was eventually declared not guilty for firing at and wounding the three officers, but had to go to trial and spent nearly two years in jail before being exonerated. He lost pretty much everything.

And here's the thing that makes all of that especially hard to swallow: In the chaos during Rosas's raid, one of the officers outside the window (Steve Ruebelmann) shot back and grazed Ross Murray, another officer who was already in the house. Then Rosas was charged with assault for the officer getting hit by the stray bullet. "Ray was charged with six different counts," says Greenberg. "Three of attempted murder on a police officer, and three of aggravated assault. He was also charged with shooting at the second officer in [Murray]."

Rosas spent 22 months in jail during his trial. Officer Ruebelmann, who also shot and wounded a cop, was given an award for valor. Everyone understood he'd made a mistake in a tense and chaotic situation -- he's only human, after all. But why wouldn't that same standard apply to Rosas, who didn't have Ruebelmann's training, or the advantage of knowing what was even happening?

2

Getting Off Doesn't Mean You Don't Get Punished

By the way, this is Ray Rosas:

Gabe Hernandez/Corpus Christi Caller-Times

Or that's how he looks now. Here's how he looked after his arrest:

via Talk Real Solutions

His attorney says that some of those injuries are from the flashbang, while some were delivered by police during the arrest. Yes, Rosas eventually was found not guilty, but the events of that night ruined his life. "He's this cop shooter, right?" says Greenberg. "So after they arrested everybody, they took his elderly mother and called protective services on her. Ray had two animals, two dogs, we never knew what happened to one. We think they killed [it]. Because we heard on the tapes, the dog barking and then shots, and then nothing. The home, they condemned the home and then sold it. The city sold it. This is his family home. And it's by no means beautiful, but it's what they owned. I think they got, like, $17k for the family home."

1

It's All A Big, Dumb Machine That Eats Fear And Spits Out Tragedy

In detailing all of the consequences, we have gone too long without mentioning Adam Sowders, a guy who had wanted to be a cop since he was a teenager (before that, he was a firefighter), and who was awarded Officer of the Year in 2011. Maybe the other players in these two cases will recover, maybe they won't, but Sowders is gone forever. He didn't pass the laws or write the department's procedures. Both Sowders and the man who shot him dead were just a couple of guys. Two human beings, only a few years apart in age, set on a lethal collision course by generations of crass politicians and scared voters.

This will happen again.

In the 1980s, the U.S. saw roughly 3,000 SWAT raids per year. Now we're at 50-80,000 raids per year (that's the whole "militarization of police" thing you've been hearing about). This means that in the U.S., a couple of hundred homes are raided every single day, in a country with 300 million privately owned guns. All because this fierce cultural defense of one freedom (to own a firearm) doesn't seem to translate to any other. It wasn't Magee's ownership of an AR-10 assault that made him dangerous to the state, but his growing of several plants.

If you don't care about the lives of drug users or dealers (and we know for a fact that lots of people don't), then what about the lives of police officers? Or bystanders? How easily could this have ended tragically for Rosas' mother, or Kori White, or her unborn baby? Or are their lives also worthless due to proximity?

If you think so, can you please stop and ask yourself the same question we raised earlier: Have we lost our minds?

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