Things are getting worse for Prince George’s County, Md. police officials after last week’s botched no-knock raid (previously chronicled on C@L here).
Not only did the police not have a warrant to conduct a no-knock raid, but it now appears they were well-aware that a drug ring was delivering large shipments of marijuana to innocent addressees’ homes in the D.C. suburbs. The packages would then be intercepted by other members of the ring, all without the addressees’ knowledge or involvement. Nonetheless, the cops executed their guns-ablazin’ raid on the home of Berwyn Heights mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife Trinity Tomsic, where the cops shot the couple’s black Labs and detained Calvo and his mother-in-law in handcuffs for hours.
The cops have now arrested the delivery truck driver and an accomplice who apparently orchestrated the Berwyn Heights shipment, and P.G. Police Chief Melvin C. High has conceded, “Most likely, [Calvo and Tomsic] were innocent victims.”
Astoundingly, High refuses to admit that police did anything wrong in the raid. He says in today’s Washington Post:
In some quarters, this has been viewed as a flawed police operation and an attack on the mayor, which it is not. This was about an address, this was about a name on a package … and, in fact, our people did not know that this was the home of the mayor and his family until after the fact.
I correct Chief High: When police officers execute a no-knock raid though they have no warrant or cause to do so, when they blast and shoot their way into a home without first learning who lives there, then they’ve carried out a flawed police operation. That’s the case regardless of whether Calvo and Tomsic are guilty of trafficking drugs.
In Prince George’s County, flawed law enforcement isn’t unusual. At least, in this case, the victims of the botched raid may have the social stature to fight back.
UPDATE (8/8): It took a week, but P.G. County police chief Melvin High has finally conceded that Calvo and Tomsic were not involved in drug trafficking.
Unfortunately, Chief High did not issue an apology for the police action or admit that the raid was botched. That raises an interesting question: Is he trying to protect his department, or does he really think the Berwyn Heights incident exemplifies how law enforcement is supposed to act?
