gotta hit that quota!

For IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 27, 2007

Atlanta Police officers, Gregg Junnier and Jason Smith, pleaded guilty yesterday to manslaughter, violation of oath, criminal solicitation, and making false statements regarding their part in a botched narcotics raid that led to the fatal shooting of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston of Atlanta, Georgia.

They were part of a team that lied to a judge claiming an informant had bought drugs from the home of 92-year-old Johnston. Their reason: to obtain a search warrant so they could "be considered productive officers and to meet [the Atlanta Police Department's] performance targets,"

This was not the first time these tactics had been used and this raid would likely have gone unnoticed but for the fact that Ms. Johnston feared for her life. Due to news stories of the high crime rate in her neighborhood Johnston obtained a hand gun for protection. When the officers crushed down her door and ran into her bedroom the terrified 92-year-old woman fired on them, striking three of the officers. They returned fire shooting 39 shots, of which five or six struck their target killing Johnston.

Raiding the wrong house is not an extraordinary event according to Radley Balko's whitepaper "Overkill: the Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America" and his interactive map of "Botched Paramilitary Police Raids: An Epidemic of 'Isolated Incidents'".

"At LEAP we would like to say this kind of police corruption and unnecessary violence is highly unusual but it is not," said Executive Director of LEAP and former New Jersey state police narcotics officer, Jack Cole.

"This is all the result of the unintended consequences of drug prohibition and the US policy to fight a 'war' on drugs. War calls for very different rules of engagement than policing in a democratic society. Training our police to go to war is perhaps the worst metaphor we could use. In the war on drugs raids and arrests have become a numbers game just as body-counts became a numbers game in the Vietnam War. When funding is based on a numbers game some agents of law enforcement will do whatever necessary to inflate their numbers, including lying to judges and later lying to juries.

Remember, all this could be over if we ended drug prohibition as we ended alcohol prohibition in 1933. The day we did away with that nasty law Al Capone and all of his smuggling buddies were out of business; no longer killing each other to corner their part of that very lucrative market, no longer killing cops charged with fighting that useless war, no longer killing children and 92-year-old women caught in crossfire, drive-by-shootings or botched police raids."

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