- The main story is about policing and focuses on police raids
- Police raids are often carried out by various law enforcement agencies and are intended for life or death scenarios, but are frequently used for drug searches
- The war on drugs has contributed to the popularity of police raids
- Data on police raids is limited, but estimates suggest tens of thousands occur each year in the US
- Police raids can have dire consequences and are often disproportionate to the alleged crimes being targeted
- Certain neighborhoods, predominantly Black and Latino, are disproportionately targeted for police raids
- Police departments have become militarized, with access to military equipment and training exercises that prioritize violence over non-violent solutions
- The militarized police culture can encourage officers to act aggressively and without accountability during raids
- The video provides examples of excessive force and inappropriate behavior during police raids.

- The use of supposedly non-lethal tools by police, such as flashbang grenades, can still result in serious harm or damage.
- A couple's two-year-old child had a flashbang grenade thrown into their crib during a police raid.
- Police often obtain search warrants with minimal scrutiny from judges, leading to errors and unnecessary raids.
- The bar for obtaining a search warrant is low, requiring only probable cause or a reasonable belief of finding evidence.
- Police have been caught making up informants and providing misleading information in warrant applications.
- The distinction between knock-and-announce raids and no-knock raids is thin, with little consequence for violating the rules.
- There have been numerous cases of police raiding the wrong address, causing harm and damage to innocent individuals.
- Officers are rarely criminally charged or convicted for botched raids, and departments are not held responsible for damages.
- These raids are dangerous for both civilians and police officers involved.

- A Republican state senator in Georgia faced backlash for saying he would shoot police in a no-knock raid on his home.
- There are real consequences for those who resist police raids, including serious criminal charges or death.
- Lives are being destroyed through police raids, even if no physical harm occurs.
- An example is given of a social worker in Chicago whose home was raided and she was handcuffed naked.
- Small changes and reforms are not enough to address the issue.
- Drug raids should be stopped and raids in general should only be used as a last resort to save lives.
- Raids are being used too widely and are destroying lives, particularly for black and brown people.
- The police force should respect and protect the lives of the community they serve.

- The text discusses the issue of police raids, particularly in relation to drug searches.
- Police raids are frequent and often disproportionate to the alleged crimes being targeted.
- Certain neighborhoods, primarily Black and Latino communities, are disproportionately targeted for police raids.
- The militarization of police departments and their access to military equipment contribute to aggressive and violent behavior during raids.
- There have been numerous cases of innocent individuals being harmed and their properties damaged due to police raiding the wrong address.
- Officers are rarely held accountable for botched raids, and there are real consequences for resisting police raids.
- Lives are being destroyed through these raids, even without physical harm occurring.
- The text emphasizes the need to stop drug raids and to only use raids as a last resort to save lives.
- The police force should prioritize respecting and protecting the lives of the communities they serve.

John Oliver explains how raids became a favorite tool of police, how few guardrails there are on their use, and what we should do about that.

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Our main story tonight concerns policing.

It's 1 of TV's favorite subjects, from Hill Street Blues, through Law & Order, through this.

Do you think the cops have too much power?

Do you think the use of sadness is false?

♪ ♪ Tell us, was your life in danger?

Would you agree this case has racial overtones?

♪ Now, you're probably just currently shouting, what?!

That is a scene from Cop Rock, a very real musical cop show that premiered on ABC in 1990 and lasted exactly 11 episodes.

Think of it like if Pitch Perfect crashed into The Wire and there were absolutely no survivors.

Now, I'd say that was the best worst thing that I've ever seen on TV, But the thing is, I have seen more cop rock.

There's a subplot about child selling, and if you're wondering, does the child seller sing?

I'm the baby merchant Tots R Us ♪ I give you all the service And no damn fuss ♪ Give the baby merchant Just a week or 2 I'll have your baby for you.

♪ That song is 3 minutes long, and they never do anything else.

That couple just stands there while a man informs them that he's the baby merchant for 3 human minutes.

But as long as we've been questioning on TV whether policing has, and I apologize for even attempting this, racial overtones, We've made very little progress towards actually addressing that issue.

As we've discussed on this show before, the past and present of policing in America is very much tied up with racism.

And we want to focus on 1 area of policing in particular tonight, police raids.

It's a practice that attracted a lot of attention last year in the wake of the Breonna Taylor case.

She was killed after officers broke down her door in the middle of the night and fired 32 shots into her home.

A year later, none of these officers have been indicted for charges relating to her death.

And if it is somehow nobody's fault that an innocent woman was killed in the middle of the night in her own home, there might be an issue with police raids.

Now, data on them is pretty scarce, so it is hard to say exactly how many take place in America, but estimates put it in the tens of thousands per year.

And they can be carried out by almost anyone in law enforcement, from federal agents, to SWAT teams within police departments, to detectives and patrol officers.

While these tactics were initially intended for life or death scenarios, like active shooters or hostage situations, 1 analysis found that only 7 percent of SWAT deployments met that criteria, while more than 60 percent of the cases involved searches for drugs.

And that shift was the result of intentional policy choices.

Police raids were supercharged by the war on drugs, and the tactic became so popular that Geraldo Rivera even produced a special where he showed you raids happen in real time.

The first in a series of raids we'll be showing you this evening.

In this 1, members of the San Diego, California Police Department are raiding a so-called crack house.

Where pushers sell cocaine to people in this neighborhood.

For the past 6 months, we have covered the street cops whose job it is to rip and tear and pound their way into the nation's crack houses and shooting galleries.

And we have gone undercover to expose the pushers who profit from this dirty business.

They all seem to be having a lot of fun there, from the officer's mad dash like it's Black Friday and Walmart has a sale on marijuana, to Geraldo's ridiculous disguise, which looks like the Pringles guy auditioning for Miami Vice.

Although, I will say, that is still better than his current look, which answers the question, what if every single Batman joker were rolled into 1.

And raids can obviously have dire consequences.

A Times investigation found that from 2010 to 2016, at least 81 civilians were killed in them.

And these tactics are rarely proportional to the alleged crimes being targeted.

In Louisville, Breonna Taylor's home, a year and a half before the raid that killed her, this happened.

This police body camera video shows LNPD SWAT officers breaking into Doherty and Burr's house on West Chesna Street.

The couple and their 3 children, who were under the age of 16 at the time, claimed they were held at gunpoint the morning of October 26, 2018.

17 SWAT officers burst in because a detective smelled marijuana coming from the family's home.

If you just smell marijuana, you don't show up with loaded assault rifles like you're in Call of Duty.

You show up with Settlers of Catan and $50 worth of cookies from Subway.

And the thing is, absurdly disproportionate and dangerous responses are basically par for the course when it comes to police raids.

Why they are such a favored tool of police, why they really shouldn't be, and what we should do about that.

And let's start with what you probably know already, which is that not all of us are at equal danger of being raided.

When CBS2 in Chicago did an investigation of several years' worth of search warrants, they found that certain neighborhoods tended to be hit a lot more often than others.

Also in the top 5 neighborhoods are Austin, with 668, North Lawndale, 455, Garfield Park, 442, and Humboldt Park, with 376.

Census data shows these neighborhoods are all nearly 90 percent or more Black and Latino.

We found only a small percentage happen in white neighborhoods, and none listed for Edison Park, Printers Row, Wrigleyville, Museum Campus, and Magnificent Mile.

Yeah, That's about as fucked as you'd expect.

Although I will say, you didn't actually have to tell me that those neighborhoods are predominantly white, because Edison Park, Museum Campus, and Magnificent Mile are some of the whitest sounding place names I've ever heard.

Right up there with Alabaster Prim, SPF 50ville, and Vermont.

And that racial disparity has been found again and again.

In Louisville, an examination found search warrants disproportionately targeted Black residents.

And a study of 1 year of warrants in Washington, D.C.

Found they were almost exclusively executed in black communities.

And police have been given tools to carry out those warrants with increasing force.

Police departments have become heavily militarized after either purchasing or just being handed military equipment, and some don't even try to hide how much they enjoy using it.

Just listen to this officer introduce 1 of his toys in a career day live stream for kids.

Because with enough force, I can take this ram on the front of this vehicle, and I can put it against a brick house, and I can go right through that brick.

And I come right in your house if I need to.

Not your house, because all of you are good kids.

We've certainly got no reason not to trust you to determine who's a good kid and a bad kid.

You're just a nice, talkative guy who apparently roots for the wolf in the story of the 3 Little Pigs.

If only the wolf had possessed military-grade equipment, you say as you tuck your children in at night.

Fortunately, your godlike father has no such limitations on his powers.

Now, there are important questions over whether or not police officers really need access to that kind of equipment, just as there are questions over what messages they take away from some of the training they receive.

Take a look at 1 particularly extreme exercise for SWAT team members.

The cult leader realizes that they got an armored vehicle gonna start, he goes, okay, let's pull the trigger, sends out the RPG, and then they start executing people.

It's really a mass suicide, but in fact, it's really a murder-suicide.

None of the scenarios we saw left much room for non-violent solutions.

And then back in here, the cult leader is basically systematically executing babies.

When the amount of hours you spend at the shooting range outnumber the number of hours you spend learning conflict resolution.

And by, you know, 10 or 15 to 1, you're gonna be more likely to use the tool that you've trained more with.

Because look, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be prepared for cult leader baby murder, but how many cult leader baby murders do they think they're going to be called to every year?

I don't know what you're thinking here, but John, if there is a baby murder cult, how are we gonna replace all those babies?

Well, don't worry, I'm pretty sure I know a guy who can help.

I'm not saying you should seek it out, I'm just saying you do need to know that it exists.

Now, the obvious danger of fostering a militarized police culture that trains and equips officers like they're the lead in an action movie, is that it can encourage them to then act that way.

Take a look at a raid that took place in Little Rock.

Here, the police blow open the door of the apartment belonging to a man named Roderick Talley because they falsely believed he was selling cocaine.

But despite not finding any, when they realized he had a home security camera, they asked him while he was still cuffed to a chair if they could re-watch the footage of their raid so they could see how it looked.

We're just high-fiving ourselves for how cool it looked when we blew your door in.

By the way, thanks for being such a good sport about this, even though we do all have guns, so you kind of have to be.

And police might point to the fact that they don't just use guns, they also have supposedly non-lethal tools at their disposal.

In theory, they just stun and disorient people, but they can generate heat in excess of 2,000 degrees.

So you'd hope officers would be really careful with them.

We heard a loud, a loud noise, which was, busting through the door.

Then came a flash grenade right into the two-year-old's bed.

You can see by this picture how badly it was damaged.

And I kept begging the officer, you know, give me my son, just let me hold him.

The officer told me to shut up and go sit down.

Police were looking for drugs but found nothing.

The police threw a flashbang grenade into a crib.

I don't have a PhD in grenadeology, but purely as a layperson, the police should not have thrown that fucking grenade into a fucking crib.

And if the police are truly incapable of knowing whether they're throwing a grenade into a crib, maybe they shouldn't have fucking grenades.

Here is another quick rule that applies to both horseshoes and hand grenades.

If you throw either of them into a crib, even 1 time, guess what?

Now, thankfully, that couple's baby survived.

But it is hard to believe the police didn't realize there were children in the house, given that the family had lived at that address for 2 months, and there was a minivan with 4 car seats in the driveway.

And when they did find the man that they were actually looking for at a different house, he surrendered peacefully when officers knocked on his door.

So in hindsight, grenading a baby might not have been necessary.

And again, they didn't find what they were looking for.

And troublingly, police don't have to work very hard to get a warrant to blow someone's door open.

Judges have to sign off on warrants, and ideally, they would function as a check here.

But in practice, they often don't spend much time scrutinizing police justification.

An investigation in Utah of more than 10,000 electronically submitted warrants found that half the time, judges approved warrants in less than 3 minutes, with hundreds signed off in less than 30 seconds.

Even the cases on Chrissy's court were longer than 30 seconds, and it was a show on Quibi, a platform we all collectively fever-dreamed.

And the bar for getting a judge to sign off on a search warrant is pretty low.

All you need is probable cause, or a reasonable belief that evidence of a crime will be found in the place you want to search.

Whether it's the smell of marijuana, or very often, the word of a confidential informant, who might be trading tips for money or leniency.

And a lot of those tips turn out to be complete bullshit.

To get the search warrant that led to the raid on Roderick Talley's home, police told a judge that a confidential informant had bought cocaine from him and that they'd observed the interaction.

But luckily, Talley had a doorbell cam that showed the informant walking up to the door alone, standing there, and then walking away.

And look, normally, I'm not a big fan of doorbell cams.

All they do is record me giving myself a five-minute pep talk before I enter any party.

But in this instance, I'm really glad he had 1.

And police have sometimes been caught making informants up, giving misleading information in their warrant application, or failing to do even the most basic checking to see if their suspect is actually in the home they're raiding or somewhere else that they probably should have known about.

Jolanda Blassingame says it was utterly terrifying.

Chicago police allegedly breaking her door down in North Lawndale, pointing rifles at her children and what's being called a colossal police blunder.

They did not bother to perform the simplest, most routine verification.

Bell, was at that time serving a 20-year prison sentence for a murder conviction 200 miles away in Hill Correctional Center in Galesburg, Illinois.

But I guess it's kind of like when you turn your home upside down looking for your keys, only to discover they were in your pocket the whole time.

Only in this case, the keys are a man, the home isn't yours, and your pocket is a medium security prison in another zip code.

So when you have bad police work on the front end and minimal judicial oversight on the back end, it becomes far too easy to get a search warrant.

And once police have 1, there really aren't a lot of limits on what they can do.

Just about Every search warrant gives officers permission to break down a door to conduct a search.

And I know there's a lot of talk right now, specifically about no-knock raids.

But it's worth noting that the line between knock and no-knock is very, very thin, thanks to a series of court rulings like this.

Supreme Court ruled today police do not have to wait more than 20 seconds before breaking into a drug suspect's home.

The unanimous ruling said waiting any longer would let suspects flush evidence down the toilet.

The ruling there was giving you 20 seconds to answer your door is reasonable because you might flush evidence down the toilet.

Which does raise the obvious question here.

Why the fuck are we raiding people's homes for an amount of evidence that can be flushed away in 20 seconds?

Unless someone is accused of trafficking Smurfs or stealing the world's most valuable goldfish, maybe we should be finding a different way to do this.

And police really aren't incentivized to give you any seconds to answer your door.

Because In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that even when they violate the rules requiring them to knock, announce, and wait, the prosecution can still use the evidence obtained during that search.

So there is often no meaningful consequences to busting right through your door.

And decisions like that mean the distinction between a no-knock raid and a knock-and-announce raid is barely there.

As a judge in Georgia put it, either the door comes in and people are yelling, sheriff's office, or people yell, sheriff's office, and the door comes in.

It's like comparing Bryce Dallas Howard and Jessica Chastain.

Nominally, sure, although not in any way that really means anything.

Now, if you do actually need to tell them apart, Bryce Dallas Howard is the 1 who looks slightly more like Jessica Chastain.

And on top of all of this, there is just case after case of the police messing up the execution of a raid that ranged from the horrific to the almost cartoonishly idiotic.

Like this video of them looking for a suspected drug dealer, but instead, raiding the home of his neighbor, Henri Norris, a 78-year-old with heart problems who thankfully survived, despite the police making 1 mistake after another.

How did deputies end up hitting a house with a different color, a separate driveway, its own mailbox, and another address?

First, the tactical team got lost following instructions from a GPS app on a phone.

Then, as soon as they got to the correct address, deputies were immediately confused.

They walked right past the target house without clearing it and headed through the tree line to the next house on the street.

Looking back and forth at the 2 houses, it was too late.

The entry team was already forcing its way into Henri's home.

It is humiliating to watch a trained tactical unit outfitted with military hardware get so completely stumped by the mystery of more than 1 house.

And you might be thinking, oh, come on, I'm sure that's just a one-off.

But the thing is, mistakes like that happen all the time.

It was a total nightmare for this family when cops burst into their home, which turned out to be the wrong address.

That is the wrong apartment, And that is the 1 that the SWAT team went inside.

Sean and his wife, who both work full-time, live here.

The people the police were looking for live here.

The DEA is apologizing for bursting into the Rink family home with the Bradley county SWAT team, only later finding out that it was the wrong home.

I mean, hell, you could've looked at the mailbox.

And the police hitting the wrong address is just completely unacceptable when the stakes are so high.

Even edible arrangements manages to deliver to the correct address, and that business is just pure chaotic evil.

Please enjoy this flavorless crucified melon.

Now, amazingly, there often aren't consequences for cases like those.

Officers are rarely criminally charged, and even more rarely convicted.

Botched raids usually aren't even investigated unless someone is killed, the media gets involved, or there's a lawsuit.

And even when they happen, police officers are protected from civil liability by the doctrine of qualified immunity.

As for their departments, they aren't even responsible for paying to repair a broken front door or compensating residents for any other losses or damages, even when they raid the wrong residents, which is just absurd.

Look, this is obviously incredibly dangerous, And not just for the people whose homes are raided, for the police too.

That same investigation that found 81 civilians have been killed in raids, found that 13 police officers had died as well.

Which really shouldn't be that surprising.

These raids are, by design, highly disorienting, and for the people who are woken up in the middle of the night to the sounds of an armed invasion, they have to make a split-second decision whether or not to defend themselves.

That is something everyone can understand.

In Georgia, a Republican state senator got in trouble for saying if police raided his home in a no-knock raid, he would shoot them dead.

And when he was pushed on that, he did not back down.

If somebody kicks down my door unannounced, they will meet with resistance, I guarantee you.

But if it's law enforcement, they would be there.

How am I supposed to know at 03:00 in the morning?

Somebody shows up in black outfits, they can say they're law enforcement, maybe they're not,

Now, I know that guy looks like a bit of a belligerent asshole, but the thing is, this country is full of belligerent assholes, and lots of them have guns.

And while it is easy for a white state senator to fantasize about himself, or indeed Dale, mounting a hypothetical armed resistance to a police raid, for those who actually do get raided, there are real consequences to those actions, if not death, then serious criminal charges.

Just a few hours after Breonna Taylor was killed, her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who believed the police were intruders, was charged with attempted murder for firing his gun during the raid and allegedly injuring an officer in the leg.

Those charges were dropped, but only because he had national attention and a good lawyer.

Meanwhile, 18-year-old Tyler Harrell was sentenced to 13 and a half years in prison after he injured a police officer during a surprise drug raid at his home, even though a jury found no proof that he knew he was shooting at police.

Lives are getting destroyed through police raids.

And even if nobody gets physically hurt, that does not mean that no damage is done.

Having your home violated is a traumatizing experience, often exacerbated by how targets of raids are treated.

Take Anjanette Young, a social worker in Chicago whose home was raided and who fought hard to get the body camera footage released to the public, even though it's incredibly difficult to watch.

You see them running up to the apartment complex...

It was so way the thing was hitting so fast I didn't have tim You

a They were in the wrong ho took the word of an informant who gave them Anjanette Young's address.

The informant claimed a 23-year-old man who was a known felon had a gun and ammo inside.

I've been living here for 4 years and nobody lives here but me!

They broke into her home, having done next to no due diligence, and handcuffed her completely naked before eventually throwing a blanket over her while she was still handcuffed.

And then they said, you don't have to shout.

Shouting is not the drastic measure being taken here.

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Raids: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)