Joanna Schwartz - Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable

On the afternoon of February 8, 2018, more than two dozen law enforcement officers crowded into a conference room in the Henry County Sheriffs Office, on the outskirts of Atlanta. They were preparing to execute a no-knock warrant at 305 English Road, the home of a drug dealer who had been under investigation for almost two years, and had gathered for a briefing about the operation. The special agent leading the briefing told the team that 305 English Road was a small house with off-white siding and several broken-down cars out front, showed them an aerial photograph of the house, and gave them turn-by-turn directions to get there.

All of the members of the task force had the opportunity to review a copy of the warrant, which described the target house and its surroundings. But only oneCaptain David Cody, who was leading the operationtook the time to read it. And even Captain Cody didnt read it all the way through. The officers piled into their SUVs to head to 305 English Road but ignored the directions they received during the briefing; instead, an officer plugged the address into the GPS on his cell phone, and the convoy got lost.

When the officers finally arrived at their destination, the house described in the warrant was right in front of themrun-down, off-white, with cars strewn across the yard. But the entry team walked swiftly past 305 English Road and toward 303 English Road, forty yards away. The house at 303 English Road looked nothing like the house described in the briefing and in the warrant; it was tidy and yellow, with a carefully maintained grass yard. The mailbox at the end of the driveway made abundantly clear that it was not the house the task force was looking for. Yet, less than a minute after getting out of their cars, officers deployed flash grenades outside 303 English Road and used battering rams to smash open all three doors of the home.

Inside, they found Onree Norris, a seventy-eight-year-old Black man wearing a baseball cap, jeans, and a windbreaker. For more than fifty years, until February 8, 2018, Norris had lived peacefully at 303 English Road. He and his wife had raised their three children there. He had spent decades traveling back and forth from that home to his job at a nearby rock quarry. Now Norris was retired and lived alone; although he was still married to his wife, they got along better living separately and saw each other on Sundays at church. His children had grown up, moved away, and had children of their own. Norris was no drug dealer. He had never been in any trouble with the law; hed never even received a traffic ticket.

Onree Norris was watching the evening news in an armchair in his bedroom when he heard a thunderous sound, as if a bomb had gone off in his house. He got up to see what the commotion was and found a crowd of men in military gear in his hallway. Norris was more than twice as old as the target of the search warrant, but the officers pointed assault rifles at him anyway and yelled at him to raise his hands and get on the ground. When Norris told the officers that his knees were in bad shape, an officer grabbed Norris, pushed him down, and twisted his arm behind his back. Norriss chest began to hurt, and he had trouble breathing. He told the officers that he had heart troublehed had bypass surgery and used a pacemakerbut they kept him on the ground for several minutes and never sought medical care. Norris was eventually picked up and led outside in handcuffs. When the officers realized they had blasted their way into the wrong house, they turned their cameras off one by one.

Whatever one believes about the job of policingwhether its that well-intentioned officers often must make split-second decisions that are easy to criticize in hindsight or that the profession is corrupt by its very naturevideos that have filled our screens in recent years offer concrete evidence that the police sometimes egregiously abuse their authority. And these videos only scratch the surface of injustices that occur.

Before Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyds neck, on May 25, 2020, many others died beneath the knees of police officers. Before Louisville police officer Myles Cosgrove fired sixteen times into Breonna Taylors apartment, on March 13, 2020, many others were shot during no-knock police raids. Countless peopledisproportionately Black and brownwhose names youve never heard, have been unjustifiably killed, assaulted, arrested, searched, and surveilled by police.

Of course, many people have been saved and protected and comforted by police as well. While there may be disagreement about how often police officers abuse their power, hopefully we can agree that police sometimes do abuse their power in ways that leave people dead, hurt, or humiliated and that, when they do, there should be meaningful accountability for law enforcement officers and officials, and justice for their victims.

People whove lost loved ones or have themselves been harmed by the police often say they want the officers involved to be punished and assurance that something similar wont happen in the future. Thats what Onree Norris and his children and grandchildren wanted as well. In our current system, there are really only three paths toward this type of justice, and none is easy to travel.

One option is criminal prosecution: police officers can be arrested, charged with crimes, and sent to prison. If you believe that our prisons are already too full, you may not have much appetite for a solution that puts more people behind bars. But even if some manner of justice could come from the criminal prosecution of a police officer, it rarely does. Prosecutors have historically been disinclined to bring charges against the officers they rely on to get convictions in other cases, and juries have proven reluctant to indict officers or find them guilty of crimes that will send them to prison. As a result, police officers are criminally charged in less than 2 percent of fatal shootings and convicted in less than one-third of those cases. Officers are even less likely to be prosecuted for using force that does not kill or for violating peoples rights in other ways.

Police officers also can be investigated, disciplined, and fired by their departments. But police departments internal affairs divisions rarely sustain allegations of misconduct. Internal affairs divisions in departments across the country have been criticized for conducting shoddy investigationsfailing to interview witnesses, collect and preserve evidence, reconcile inconsistent statements, or question when officers submit essentially verbatim statements that suggest collusion. In the rare event that charges are sustained, officers often have elaborate processes they can use to challenge departments decisions to discipline or fire them, and those challenges are often successful. As a result, local police departments cant be relied upon to render justice to their own.