By
Radley Balko January 28
Nine
years ago this month, a Fairfax County SWAT team shot and killed 37-year-old
optometrist Sal Culosi during a raid on his home. Culosi was suspected of
wagering on football games, in violation of Virginia law. (I guess he should
have played the lottery instead.) Culosi was unarmed. The police maintained
that the shooting was an accident — that officer Deval Bullock mistakenly fired
his weapon when the door to the SUV he’d just exited recoiled and bumped his
arm, resulting in a direct hit to Culosi’s heart. Culosi’s family hired their
own investigators, who more sensibly concluded that Bullock probably mistook
the cellphone Culosi was holding for a gun, and shot him intentionally.
Four
years ago this month, the Culosi family settled with Fairfax County for $2 million.
But the county maintained that there was nothing excessive about sending a SWAT
team to apprehend a guy with no criminal history, no indications of violent
tendencies, and who was suspected of a nonviolent, consensual crime. It looks
like they’ve held that line. From my Post colleague Tom Jackman:
On
a quiet weeknight among the stately manors of Great Falls, ten men sat around a
table in the basement of a private home last November playing high stakes
poker. Suddenly, masked and heavily armed SWAT team officers from the Fairfax
County Police Department burst through the door, pointed their assault rifles
at the players and ordered them to put their hands on the table. The players
complied. Their cash was seized, including a reported $150,000 from the game’s
host, and eight of the ten players were charged with the Class 3 misdemeanor of
illegal gambling, punishable by a maximum fine of $500. The minimum buy-in for
the game was $20,000, with re-buys allowed if you lost your first twenty grand.
. . .
Raids
by Fairfax police on private poker games are not new — a similar game in Great
Falls was raided in 2005. But in 2006, a SWAT team was called in to arrest a
single suspect accused of betting on football games, and Officer Deval Bullock
accidentally shot and killed optometrist Salvatore J. Culosi Jr. After that,
the Fairfax police said they would use their tactical teams more judiciously.
Still, the Fairfax police have continued to be unapologetic in their aggressive
enforcement of gambling laws, as seen by their willingness to bet and lose
large amounts of money to take down sports bookies. They will even make the
effort to place an informant in a poker game and they are still willing to
wield their heavy artillery to take down a roomful of unarmed poker players. .
. .
“It’s
crazy,” said the regular, looking back on the night of the raid. “They had this
‘shock and awe’ with all of these guys, with their rifles up and wearing ski
masks.”
The
police justification for the use of these violent tactics is dubious.
Fairfax
police said they could not discuss the Great Falls case since it is still under
investigation. “In general though,” police spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell said,
“detectives have seen that some of the organized card games, even in private
homes, may involve hundreds of thousands of dollars. At times, we’ve seen
illegal activity involved in these games. Additionally, at times, illegal
weapons are present. With these large amounts of cash involved, the risks are
high. We’ve worked cases where there have been armed robberies.”
I
address these poker raids (it happens all over the country) and such
justifications for them in my book:
Police
have justified this sort of heavy-handedness by claiming that people who run
illegal gambling operations tend to be armed, a blanket characterization that
absurdly lumps neighborhood Hold ’Em tournaments with Uncle Junior Soprano’s
weekly poker game. And in any case, if police know that people inside an
establishment are likely to be armed, it makes even less sense to come in with
guns blazing. Police have also defended the paramilitary tactics by noting that
poker games are usually flush with cash and thus tend to get robbed. That too
is an absurd argument, unless the police are afraid they’re going to raid a
game at precisely the same moment it’s getting robbed. Under either scenario,
the police are acknowledging that the people playing poker when these raids go
down have good reason to think that the men storming the place with guns may be
criminals, not cops.
If
you’re wondering, yes, that has happened.
Indeed,
that’s exactly what happened to seventy-two-year-old Aaron Awtry in 2010. Awtry
was hosting a poker tournament in his Greenville, South Carolina, home when
police began breaking down the door with a battering ram. Awtry had begun
carrying a gun after being robbed. Thinking he was about to be robbed again, he
fired through the door, wounding Deputy Matthew May in both arms. The other
officers opened fire into the building. Miraculously, only Awtry was hit. As he
fell back into a hallway, other players reporting him asking, “Why didn’t you
tell me it was the cops?” The raid team claimed they knocked and announced
several times before putting ram to door, but other players said they heard no
knock or an- nouncement. When Awtry recovered, he was charged with attempted
murder. As part of an agreement, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five
years in prison. Police had broken up Awtry’s games in the past. But on those
occasions, they had knocked and waited, he had let them in peacefully, and he’d
been given a $100 fine.
It’s
absurd to think a bunch of poker players are going to open up on a couple of
uniformed cops who come to a game, politely knock on the door and then hand out
light fines. It isn’t at all absurd to think that a few poker players in a
state with friendly gun laws might mistake a group of raiding, mask-wearing
cops for armed robbers and fire at them out of fear. And that’s just the
practical argument here. There’s also the more fundamental question of whether
this sort of force and violence is justified against a bunch of people who are
doing nothing worse than playing cards for money.
Radley
Balko blogs about criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for The
Washington Post. He is the author of the book "Rise of the Warrior Cop:
The Militarization of America's Police Forces."
WE NEED TO CHANGE THE
COPS, NOT ENCOURAGE THEIR AWFUL BEHAVIOR
Boycott the following
companies for hosting the Fairfax 2015 World Police & Fire Games
Apple Federal Credit Union,
LMI,
Noblis,
B.F. Saul Company,
Galls LLC,
Sage Communications,
Macerich,
Glory Days Grill,
Reston Limousine,
City of Fairfax, Karin’s Florist,
NOVA Media Services,
Clyde’s Restaurant Group,
Level3 Communications,
Verizon
Globe, Dewberry,
IMC, ESPN 980,
Serco,
Loudoun County,
Grant Thornton,
Prince William Convention and Visitors Bureau and
Booz Allen Hamilton.
Want to change the murderous arrogance and indifference of the
Fairfax County Police? Then fire the people
who hire the cops and watch how quickly things change. Start with tossing Gerry Hyland out of office.
He basically works for the cop’s best interest and not yours.
Bottom line, if politicians don’t fear that you can harm their
careers, then you don’t exist. They don’t see you, they don’t hear you. You don’t
matter.
Register to vote, form a political action committee. Run a
candidate. Take back your government.
