The Washington, DC, headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Even among federal agencies, the ATF’s incompetency stands out. Photo via Flickr user Mr. T in DC
At a bare minimum, it would be nice if the authorities didn’t go out of their way to trick mentally disabled people into doing illegal things and then send them to prison. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) can’t live up to even that low, low standard of behavior, according to an investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published last week. The newspaper discovered that the ATF regularly set up shady pawnshops and smoke shops in cities across America in order to catch criminals, then engaged in some questionable behaviors that included employing—and then arresting—mentally handicapped individuals, destroying property, and losing track of guns. It looks as if the dangerously incompetent operation in Milwaukee the Journal Sentinel exposed earlier this year was not the anomaly the agency claimed it was.
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The ATF set up storefronts in at least six cities all across the US, including Pensacola, Florida; Portland, Oregon; and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Undercover agents would sell cigarettes and designer jeans for cheap as well as actual stolen goods and guns while trying to get criminals to sell them drugs and weapons. Over the past six years, in at least four cities, they used mentally handicapped individuals in operations, then had them arrested.
Tony Bruner of Wichita, Kansas, who reportedly had an IQ somewhere in the 50s, was hired by undercover ATF agents to do odd jobs around one of their pawnshops. The 20-year-old called the law enforcement agents his friends, and eventually his “friends” encouraged to set up gun deals. He got three years in prison, and was advised by a judge to consider himself lucky he wasn’t handed a harsher punishment. A brain-damaged drug addict in Albuquerque was similarly coerced into finding and buying machine guns by agents, and he got eight years when he brought them one. Most bizarrely, a pair of teenagers in Portland were paid to advertise Squid’s Smoke Shop, another front operation, by getting a neck tattoo. (A judge was so disgusted by this that he ordered the ATF to pay for the tats to get removed.) The investigation also showed that agents engaged in drug and gun stings within 1,000 feet of schools and churches in several cities, as well as allowing minors to smoke weed and drink alcohol in other stores. Landlords allege that some operations resulted in thousands of dollars of destroyed property, and that agents left without paying or leaving any forwarding address. In essence, ATF agents pretended to be criminals by becoming criminals.
Agents are also accused of selling guns to violent felons then letting them leave the store without any plan to track them, and of talking their targets into buying or selling guns that would bring more severe sentences. This speaks to a general sloppiness in ATF-run operations—in the gun-buying operation in Milwaukee, many of the charges were later dismissed, the store lost tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise when it got robbed, and agents misplaced a machine gun.
The ATF has lost guns before, most notably in Operation Fast and Furious, during which the agency lost track of hundreds of weapons, including one that was used in the killing of a Border Patrol agent in December 2010. A Congressional investigation mostly concluded that the mistakes made were the fault of rogue, local agents. The ATF has been dogged with controversy before that, though—in the 80s and 90s the agency was accused of discriminating against female agents, and it played a key role in the disastrous raids at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas. Unsurprisingly, conservatives tend to particularly dislike the bureau, and Republicans have blocked nominees for a permanent head for seven years. (Liberals tend to see that as fighting dirty over gun control.)
The FBI has also faced accusations that it creates criminals—or at least drags them into bigger loosely-defined-as-”terrorist” plots—but the ATF seems to have a special knack for being both ineffective and dangerous in its methods. Meanwhile, the Journal Sentinel isn’t getting all the answers it wants. The agency has refused numerous Freedom of Information Act requests for details on their internal investigation into the allegations. You have to wonder what else they’re trying to hide.
Now on to the rest of this week’s bad cops:
– A 46-year-old Brooklyn man filed a criminal lawsuit last week claiming that his constitutional rights were violated during an April encounter with the NYPD. Robert Hankins was searched and arrested on ecstasy possession charges, in spite of, he claims, his repeatedly telling officer Sean Nurse that the “illicit substance” the cops found was nothing more than breath mints. According to his complaint, Robert was held for 30 hours before being released and was required to go to court several times before charges were dropped in October. Robert is stressing that Sean was supposedly an expert at drug identification and therefore should have known better. Mistaking a banal substance for drugs is not new to policing, or even the NYPD. Cops have been known to mistake talcum powder for coke, or herbs for weed. And another Brooklyn man filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in October alleging similar wrongdoing by the NYPD when they brought him in on meth charges even though all the drug in question was Jolly Rancher candies that were still in their wrappers. The arresting officer in that case made much of his narcotics expertise, according to the complaint. Maybe new NYPD Commissioner William Bratton should start offering a training seminar to his officers informing them of the existence of candy.
– In an even more disturbing lawsuit filed against the NYPD in Novermber, a Staten Island mother of ten children alleges that police smashed in her door, beat several members of her family, crushed a pet bird, and arrested her kids for no reason. According to court papers, on September 2 of last year police officers questioned 26-year-old Edwin Avellanet about a traffic cone being used to save a parking spot in front of the family home. Avellanet refused to show ID to police, then ran into the house after one officer grabbed him by the arm. Officers began breaking windows and walked inside the house after 57-year-old Evelyn Lugo, Avellanet’s mother, opened the door in response to the noise. Lugo’s daughter Alba Cuevas, an asthmatic, was allegedly arrested for going into another room so she could get away from the pepper spray floating in the air. At one point during this chaos, says Anna Freebles, another daughter of Lugo, police knocked over the cage of the family’s parakeet, Tito. One officer said, “Fuck the bird!” and stomped him, according to the complaint. Lugo’s son George and a family friend were allegedly beaten on the head with batons—there are photographs of the injuries seemingly taken at least a few days after the events—and Lugo says she was thrown to the floor. After all of this, Avellanet wasn’t even arrested. Everyone who was cuffed by the cops later had all charges dropped against them, and the family is asking for unspecified damages related to excessive force, malicious prosecution, and unlawful search. The NYPD had no comment, as usual.
-Uh, so, the FBI arrested a bunch of Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and is accusing them of hiding an FBI informant from federal agents. It’s not clear what exactly is going on, but somebody fucked up pretty bad, evidently.
– For our Good Cop of the Week, we have to go with Icelandic police Chief Haraldur Johannessen. Last Monday, when cops in Iceland killed a suspect for the first time ever, (!) Haraldur apologized, saying, “Police regret this incident and would like to extend their condolences to the family of the man.” The victim, a 59-year-old named Sigrid Oscar Jónasdóttur who was reportedly mentally ill, fired a gun in his Reykjavik apartment, drawing police to the residence. The first responders were unarmed, as are nearly all police in Iceland, and Sigrid shot at them. After they tried and failed to disarm him using tear gas and an armed SWAT-like team was also fired upon, police shot Sigrid. The cops took him to the hospital, but he couldn’t have been saved. It’s possible we’ll find out otherwise, but so far this police shooting sounds justified by any reasonable standard—the man was clearly attempted to kill other people and the cops had made an effort to stop him through nonlethal means. Even in those circumstance, the chief of police still said he was sorry it happened. Compared to US cops, Icelandic ones seem like they’re from another planet. (On the other hand, Sigrid’s sister says there was nowhere for her mentally ill brother to go. Iceland is not a paradise.) Still, expressing sorrow over a death is a very compassionate, very human gesture that few American law enforcement officials ever make in public.
Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter: @lucystag
Previously: Homeland Security Is Afraid of Mentally Ill Canadian Tourists
