It isn’t clear if police in Elyria, Ohio, knew there was a 1-year-old boy with a heart defect and a breathing disorder in the Parmely Avenue residence where they shattered a window, deployed a flash grenade and smashed the door open with a battering ram. What is clear is that they terrified the boy’s mother, who says the smoke and fumes from the flash grenade put her son in the intensive care unit. “There were 20+ officers in the house,” she wrote on Facebook. “Not one had the decency to check on my baby, get the glass off him or get him out of the house that had smoke in it.”
The Elyria Police Department issued a news release insisting, “Any allegation suggesting the child was exposed to chemical agents, lack of medical attention or negligence is not true,” though it’s hard to say how they’d know that for sure. The department also claimed they raided the correct home, even though according to NBC News, a voice can be heard in video of the raid saying, “Whoa, it’s the wrong house.” The raid was apparently part of an investigation into some stolen guns.
Nor is it rare for these raids to go very wrong, very quickly, even when there isn’t a young child at home.
This isn’t the first time police have apparently injured a toddler with a flash-bang during a raid. Back in 2014, a flash grenade put a baby in a coma during a drug raid on a home in Georgia. (The man police were after was not at the house.) Nor is it rare for these raids to go very wrong, very quickly, even when there isn’t a young child at home. And part of the fault lies with the Supreme Court.
Last November, police in Mobile, Alabama, shot and killed a 16-year-old boy during an early morning marijuana raid on his home. The teen thought the home was being invaded by criminals and grabbed a gun to protect his family. The police were investigating the boy’s brother, who was arrested with 8 grams of marijuana.
Eight months before that, police in Mobile shot and killed another man during an early morning raid after he jumped out a window carrying a gun as the raid went down. In that case, too, the man police killed was the brother of the man they were investigating — who wasn’t home at the time.
The police in Ohio and Alabama claim to have announced themselves in all of these raids — they were not officially “no-knock raids.” But for the people on the receiving end of these violent tactics, they might as well have been. Elyria police claim to have waited 10 seconds after knocking and announcing, but video puts it closer to six seconds. It isn’t clear how long police in Mobile waited in either raid, but both were deliberately conducted when the occupants of the home would have been asleep, which defeats the entire point of knocking and announcing.
In 1995, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled in Wilson v. Arkansas that (in most cases) agents of the government must knock and announce themselves and their purpose to give a home’s occupants an opportunity to answer peacefully, avoid violence and avoid the destruction of their property. The court affirmed that this “knock and announce” requirement is part of the Castle Doctrine, a centuries-old legal concept from English common law which posits that the home should be a place of peace and sanctuary. Notably, the Castle Doctrine, along with the Fourth Amendment, treats the home’s occupants as if they were innocent.
Civil liberties advocates warned at the time that the court had just given police carte blanche to dispense with the knock and announce requirement entirely.
Even that ruling, however, contained some huge exceptions, called exigent circumstances, which allowed police to enter without knocking or announcing themselves. The court has been chipping away at the Castle Doctrine ever since.
Eight years later, the court unanimously ruled in U.S. v. Banks that police who waited 15-20 seconds after knocking and announcing before breaking into a home did not violate a suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights. But more important was the reasoning: The court decided that any more than 15-20 seconds was plenty of time for a suspect to destroy the cocaine the police were looking for. The Castle Doctrine had presumed that search warrant targets are innocent and entitled to a peaceful home until proven otherwise. In Banks, the court couched its Fourth Amendment analysis not on how long it would take an innocent person to answer the door peacefully, but how long it would take a guilty person to destroy evidence.
Then, in 2006, the court essentially made all of its prior rulings moot. In Hudson v. Michigan, a 5-4 majority ruled that even when police violate the knock and announce policy — be it by failing to wait long enough, lying on a warrant affidavit or just conducting a full-on no-knock raid without authorization — they can still use any contraband they find against the suspect in court. The court essentially removed the main incentive for police to abide by the rule. Civil liberties advocates warned at the time that the court had just given police carte blanche to dispense with the knock and announce requirement entirely. They warned that people would die. They were right. After the death of Breonna Taylor, we learned that police in Louisville, Kentucky, routinely violated the knock-and-announce rule by “announcing” themselves at about the same time their battering ram struck the suspect’s door — which is effectively a no-knock raid. A study published last year found a similar problem in North Carolina. My own reporting in Little Rock, Arkansas, has shown that in the late 2010s police appeared to illegally use no-knock raids to serve nearly all drug warrants. Even the judges who signed off on those warrants claimed to be unaware that they were illegal. When police in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, left a man severely disabled for life after shooting him during a raid for marijuana, a security camera showed they had lied about knocking and announcing. In depositions for the man’s lawsuit, officers made clear that they had no policy for following the law, and routinely disregarded it. It would be nice to think we shouldn’t need the courts to tell police to avoid unnecessary violence, to abide by the Constitution, and to exercise due diligence when battering down doors and storming homes in the dead of night. But the last 17 years have demonstrated that we clearly do. And until judges start taking seriously their responsibility to protect the Fourth Amendment, expect to see more innocent people shot, more injured children and bystanders, and more avoidable, unnecessary death.
Radley Balko
Radley Balko is a writer and investigative journalist who publishes the newsletter The Watch. 
