The form that Louisville, Kentucky police officers use when requesting search warrants includes a list of possible justifications, such as hope that stolen property, tools of crime or other evidence of activities illegal will be discovered. In a case recently Underline by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), an officer checked “other” but wrote nothing on the three lines next to that option, where he was supposed to explain the reason for the warrant.
A judge nevertheless authorized the officer to search the man’s home. This incident underscores a lesson that stands out clearly in a DOJ report published last week: The civil liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights are meaningless without an accountability infrastructure that ensures those promises are kept.
The 90-page DOJ report lays out a litany of outrageous police abuse in Louisville, including unlawful house searches, unannounced home invasions, excessive force and retaliation for speech protected by the First Amendment. These abuses have been condoned and encouraged by supervisors and judges who shirk their constitutional obligations.
In Louisville, according to the DOJ, “search warrant applications consistently fail to demonstrate probable cause,” requiring “a reasonable belief, based on reliable information,” that police will find evidence of a crime. The affidavits generally relied on boilerplate language instead of specific evidence, abused confidential informants, and failed to support the breadth of warrants police were seeking.
These loopholes, which cut the heart of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against “unreasonable search and seizure,” could have been uncovered by supervisors, in-house attorneys, or prosecutors had they reviewed the affidavits. But they didn’t, and the judges dabbed mandates despite “glaring omissions”.
The police were often reckless in executing these warrants. They entered homes unannounced or without giving residents enough time to react, often at night, increasing the risk of them being mistaken for criminal intruders, with potentially fatal consequences.
Although Louisville banned no-knock warrants in 2020, officers retained the power to barge into homes without notice in “demanding circumstances,” a requirement they often ignore. And although body cameras are widely available to Louisville officers, they have been used to document only 10% of residential searches reviewed by the DOJ.
Fourth Amendment violations identified by the DOJ also included illegally extended pretext traffic stops and unwarranted pat-downs of pedestrians. The report notes that officers are “unlawfully arresting, searching, detaining, frisking and arresting persons during law enforcement activities”, targeting innocent people without probable cause or reasonable suspicion.
The DOJ found that Louisville officers suddenly and unnecessarily escalate encounters with police and “routinely use force disproportionate to the threat or resistance posed,” including wanton kills, chokeholds, electric shocks, and dog bites. These assaults on unarmed, unresponsive and subdued suspects are more like a punishment for contempt of the cop than the lawful use of appropriate force.
In representative incident, an officer encountered an inebriated woman who was “screaming and crying as she sat on her friend’s lawn.” Within 90 seconds, he pushed her to the ground and held her there with his foot, saying, “I’ve had enough of you.”
After the crying woman “tried to bite the outside of her shoe”, the officer flew “into a frenzy” and “hit the woman’s face again and again with his flashlight”. He later told a supervisor he had “beat the shit out” of the woman – who was five feet tall and weighed 110 pounds – and lost count of how many times he had hit her.
“Despite the use of clearly excessive force,” the DOJ said, “the officer was not disciplined in any way.” This result was typical, the DOJ found: use-of-force investigations were “superficial” and biased, absolving police of any responsibility for appalling brutality.
Over the past six years, the report notes, the Louisville government “has paid more than $40 million to resolve allegations of police misconduct.” This financial cost is only the tip of the horrible iceberg that has formed in an environment coldly indifferent to flagrant violations of the Constitution.
© Copyright 2023 by Creators Syndicate Inc.