NJ does not track no-knock warrants

Legislators look to ban police from using them

By: Steve Janoski
NorthJersey.com
USA Today Network - New Jersey

..... The steel battering ram punches the door, just above the knob. Boom! Boom! Boom!
..... One of these strikes blows the jamb apart and the door arcs open. Stun grenades twirl in, landing with a thud before bursting with a flash of light and a tooth-rattling explosion.
.... Armored police officers charge in, guns, drawn, wheeling about and yelling. "Everybody down on the ground!"
..... There was no warning, no time to prepare. And when police serve what's called a no-knock" warrant, that's how they want it.
... "The goal is to dominate the space and control it as quickly as possible," said Brian Higgins, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and former commander of the Bergen County SWAT team. "It's a scary, violent thing, and it's designed that way."
.... The dramatic raids, legal in New Jersey and 47 other states, face an uncertain future after the now-notorious incident in March [2020] in which Louisville, Kentucky, police killed Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency-room technician, while serving a no-knock warrant on her home. Her death has prompted nationwide class to ban the practice and led two New Jersey legislators to propose a bill forbidding it in the Garden State.
.... But as New Jersey officials mull the proposal, the data surrounding no-knock warrants remains opaque.
..... While authorities say no-knock searches are rare, an investigation by NorthJersey.com
USA Today Network Atlantic Group found there's little state oversight of which agencies use them or when. The New Jersey Attorney General's Office doesn't track how many no-knock warrants county prosecutors or state judges greenlight every year, or what alleged crimes authorities invoke to obtain them.
..... Tracking is either spotty or nonexistent at the county level also, even though local prosecutors must review every warrant they take it to a judge for approval.
..... Passaic County Prosecutor Camelia Valdes said her office has signed off on only one no-knock warrant in the last five years. But the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office does not track the number of warrants issued or how many of those are no-knock, a spokeswoman said. Nor does the Essex County Prosecutor's Office.
..... "We do not keep knock warrants, but generally speaking we believe they are very rare," Katherine Carter, the spokeswoman for the Essex prosecutor, said in an e-mail.
..... The lack of data and oversight worries Gregg Zeff, the legal-redress chair for NAACP chapters in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
.... "You would be very concerned if hospitals weren't tracking the number of deaths or infections they had," Zeff said. "It should be tracked, and it should be tracked very carefully. They are extremely dangerous."
..... New Jersey isn't unique in this - only Utah tracks statistics on forced entries and SWAT team deployments, said Seth Stoughton, a former Tallahassee police officer and current University of South Carolina law professor. The lack of data is a critical problem that makes it difficult to gauge whether police are using such warrants appropriately, he said.
..... "if you had statewide data, you might see that some agencies sue no-knock warrants much more liberally than others," Stoughton said in an interview. "But you have no idea whether, say, Paterson and Camden have exactly the same rate of wildly disparate rates, because nobody's collecting it."
..... New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal is open to additional oversight but has not decided what that would be, spokesman Peter Aseltine wrote in an e-mail.
..... "We are happy to hear from members of the community who have concerns about no-knock warrants," he said.

HOW COPS GET WARRANTS:

....State guidelines demand that an assistant attorney general or county prosecutor review every search warrant request to ensure it includes information like a detailed description of the place authorities want to search, what property they intend to seize and what their probable cause is.
..... The prosecutor takes the paperwork to either a municipal or state judge for final approval, according to the guidelines.
..... New Jersey cops are usually required to knock and announce their presence before serving a warrant, Aseltine said. but if officers believe knocking will either jeopardize their safety or give suspects too much time to destroy valuable evidence, they can apply for a no-knock warrant as long as they specify why they need it. A general assertion that people who commit the crime in question tend to be armed won't do Asltine said.
..... The judge is also supposed to look at the suspect's legal records, including any history of violence, gang activity and gun use. Tactical consideration, such as whether the suspect hides in a fortified building, uses lookouts or is surrounded by gang members, may also be taken into account, if the judge signs off, police can proceed.
.... These safeguards help keep cops from making mistakes, Aseltine said.
..... But Taylor's death is proof that the guardrails don't always work.

A DEATH IN KENTUCKY:

..... A Kentucky circuit judge reportedly signed off on the Louisville metro Police department's request for a no-knock warrant after police provided written evidence allegedly linking Taylor's residence to drug trafficking operation run by her ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover.
... Police presented to the court five affidavits for no-knock searches. Judge Mary Shaw signed all five in 12 minutes, according to reports in the Louisville Courier Journal. In the early hours of March 13, [2020] three plainclothes cops burst through Taylor's front door just before 1 AM. while she and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker were in bed. The officers say they identified themselves before ramming Taylor's door down. Family and neighbors dispute that.
..... Walker, a legally registered gun owner shot at the police, hitting one officer in the leg.
..... The cops host back and killed the unarmed Taylor. Walker maintains he thought someone was breaking in.
..... A June [2020] report issued by the Justice Collaborative institute, a social justice advocacy group, said no-knock warrants and the explosive entries they-often employ are commonly used to look for illegal drugs and disproportionately target minority communities.
..... The report cited a 2014 study be the American Civil Liberties Union that found 79% of SWAT raids were conducted to search homes, and 60% of those studied statistics from 20 cities, 42% of those target by SWAT search warrant were Black, while 12% were Latino, the report said.
... The institute called to ban no-knock warrants and cited an opinion issued by the Florida Supreme Court that they have a "staggering potential for violence to both occupants and the police." The court forbade their use in that state.
..... The report also points to several botched raids that led to tragedy, as when a Georgia SWAT officer in 2014 tossed a flash-bang grenade into a playpen, nearly killing the 1-year-old boy lying inside.

LAWMAKERS SEEK BAN:

..... It's those kids of mistakes that made Higgins, the former Bergen County SWAT commander, nervous about serving no-knock warrants. police who request them will often cite fears that drug dealers will have time to destroy evidence if they knock, Higgins said. but he doesn't think that's a good enough reason.
..... police should have to list other alternatives and explain while they won't work, Higgins said, or prove the suspect poses an imminent threat to the public's safety as a terrorist or school shooter might.
..... "It's time to take a look at this - we shouldn't wait," Higgins said. "Everything is on the table right now."
..... Some state and federal lawmakers want to ban the practice entirely, as the Louisville City Council unanimously voted to do in June. [2020] New Jersey Assembly Benjie Wimberly, a Paterson Democrat, introduced a bill June 18 [2020] that would demand that police knock on the door of any residence they seek to search, announce their identity and reason for being there and wait a "reasonable amount of time, but not less than30 seconds," before entering.
..... "They wouldn't be able to do this Wild West stuff," said Wimberly, who is sponsoring the bill alongside Democratic Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson of Trenton. "You go into somebody's residence, you have to identify yourself."
..... A spokesman for Governor Phil Murphy did not respond to multiple inquires asking whether the governor supports a ban.
..... Neither the New Jersey State Policemen's Benevolent Association nor the Fraternal Order of Police, the state's two biggest police unions, responded to requests for comment.
..... Asltine, the attorney general's spokesman, said Grewal is open to limiting the use of no-knock warrants but wary of banning them outright, citing concerns about limiting responses to terrorism.
..... "Let's say law enforcement officers plan to execute a search warrant at the home of a suspected terrorist believed to be stockpiling explosives," Aseltine said. "If New Jersey banned all no-knock warrants, then the officers would be required to knock on the suspect's front door and announce their residence before executing the warrant, eve if a judge concluded that doing so presented a significant risk of death or serious injury to the offices. We shouldn't let that happen.
.... wimberly said his ban would exempt such extraordinary circumstances. But Zellie Thomas, a community organizer and Black Lives Matter activist from Paterson who supports a ban, doesn't buy they attorney general's logic. No-knock warrants used mostly for drug raids, he said. Not to thwart terrorist attacks.
... "There are many practices used by law enforcement that may seem logical, but in practice are womanized against black and brown communities," Thomas said. "No-knock warrants are one of them.

HOME