SWAT Gone Wild in Maryland

A botched raid on a small-town Maryland mayor exposes widespread abuse by the state's SWAT teams.

Late last month, Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo took the unusual step of filing a civil rights lawsuit against the police department of his own county. The suit stems from a 2008 SWAT team raid on Calvo's house that resulted in the shooting deaths of his two black Labrador retrievers. In pushing back against the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Prince George's County police department, the mayor is helping expose a more widespread pattern of law enforcement carelessness and callousness throughout the state of Maryland. Prince George's police originally obtained a warrant to search Calvo's home after intercepting a package of marijuana sent to the mayor's address. Calvo and his family were innocent—the package was intended to be picked up by a drug dealer. But instead of first investigating who lived at the residence, or even notifying the Berwyn Heights police chief, the county police department immediately sent in the SWAT team. In addition to having his two dogs killed, Calvo and his mother-in-law were handcuffed for several hours, and questioned at gunpoint.

To his credit, the mayor concluded early on that if this could happen to him, it was probably happening to others. "In some ways, we were lucky," Calvo said at a University of Maryland event this April. "We had the support of our community, who knew we weren't drug dealers. It didn't take long for me to realize that many people this kind of thing happens to don't have that kind of support." READ THE REST AT REASON