Cheye Calvo was at home in his underwear in the US state of Maryland when police in commando gear stormed in, shooting his dogs with automatic weapons and throwing his mother-in-law to the floor.
They were looking for drugs, but there was just one problem: They had the wrong person.
Police had just battered down the door of the local mayor.
“I hear the sound of an explosion, which is our door being blown over, followed by immediate gunfire,” Calvo said.
“Any time that instances of police misconduct make the news, especially when you see armed tanks in our communities, I am reminded of what happened to us,” added Calvo, mayor of the town of Berwyn Heights, about 25km north of Washington.
Calvo, 43, is closely following the news from the Missouri town of Ferguson, where a white police officer shot an unarmed black teenager to death, triggering days of race-related violence.
He is especially concerned about the initial mass deployment of armored cars and heavily armed police.
The images of police in combat gear armed like soldiers on a battle field and aiming rifles at protesters shocked the US and brought back memories for Calvo of the night of July 29, 2008, when the SWAT team burst into his house.
“I had a community meeting that night,” Calvo said, adding that he had come back home to change into a suit when the police arrived.
“I was actually in my boxer shorts when my mother-in-law yelled out to me: ‘Cheye, I think it’s SWAT,’” he said.
The officers swarmed in, pumped four shots into his dog, then “threw my mother-in-law on the ground. They chased the other black lab [Labrador retriever] into the back room, where they mowed him down with an MP5 submachine gun,” Calvo said.
Calvo recalled spending four hours in his boxer shorts, handcuffed, while 30 police officers searched his house for drugs.
Finally, the chief of police started asking questions.
“They moved into ‘Oh shit’ mode: ‘We screwed up,’” Calvo said.
A later investigation discovered that marijuana traffickers were shipping packages to real addresses, but before the packages arrived an accomplice in the shipping company would intercept them. The people living at the addressees never even knew the packages existed.
The botched raid on the home of a well-off white man, mayor of his town, who was completely innocent, made the front page of the local newspapers.
Calvo became an activist, demanding explanations for what he calls an “inefficient and harmful” overuse of SWAT.
Thanks to his fight, Maryland was the first US state to adopt a law requiring SWAT teams to give an account, twice a year, of the reasons behind and results of their raids.
Utah, in the western US, has since followed suit.
Calvo’s investigation has shown that the year before his home was raided, the SWAT team was sent out more than 700 times for a community of about 800,000 people — and in 90 percent of cases it was for routine search warrants related to nonviolent crimes.
The unit that raided Calvo’s home “did it three times a week. It was business as usual,” Calvo said.
“The SWAT team has become the first resort, not the last resort,” he added, calling it evidence of “lazy policing.”
What is happening in Missouri just shows that “the lesson has not been learned,” Calvo said.
“You only see them when they are wearing shields and carrying machine guns,” Calvo said of the police in Ferguson, where state troopers have been deployed after complaints about the heavy-handedness of the distrusted, mainly white local force. “It’s off-putting. This type of militarization has really driven a wedge in between the law enforcement and the communities that need them most.”
Incidents like the shooting of Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager whose death sparked Ferguson’s angry ongoing protests and rioting, and the initially strong-armed police response to those demonstrations, send a signal for many critics.
“If you are a young African-American male in this country, I think you have good reasons to be fearful of police,” Calvo said.
“I think Americans should be alarmed about what they see. This was not on my radar until the police kicked in my door,” he said.
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