Can you believe what you read in the Post?

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

The state of play in Houston:
No-knock raids are inherently dangerous. So are other types of raids staged in the middle of the night.

In 2019, a married couple in Houston died in a late afternoon no-knock raid. This morning, the Washington Post's Marisa Iati gave this account of what happened:
IATI (9/8/20): On Jan. 28, 2019, Houston police were executing a no-knock warrant for heroin trafficking when they shot and killed Rhogena Nicholas, 58, and her 59-year-old husband, Dennis Tuttle, a disabled Navy veteran—both White—at the Houston couple’s home.

About 4:30 p.m., roughly 12 narcotics officers and about six patrol officers, some of them in uniform, broke down the door while announcing themselves, police said.

A pit bull charged at the first officer inside, who shot and killed the dog, according to police. Tuttle came from the back of the house and shot the officer in the shoulder, causing him to collapse on the living room sofa, police said. Three other officers were also shot by Tuttle, according to Chief Art Acevedo’s statements to reporters.

Nicholas reached for the officer’s gun, according to police. Police told The Post that seven officers opened fire, striking and killing her and Tuttle.

The officers had secured the warrant asserting that there was heroin trafficking at the home, but police said they found no heroin.

In the following months, the official narrative unraveled: An internal police investigation found that an informant referenced in the search warrant said he had never bought drugs at the home.

Acevedo accused the officer who led the raid of lying to justify it.

The officer was charged with two counts of murder, while he and another officer were charged with tampering with government records for allegedly falsifying documents
related to the raid, the Harris County Prosecutor’s Office said in statements. Both officers have pleaded not guilty, and the cases are ongoing.

[...]

“To this day, the chief of police hasn’t apologized,” John Nicholas said. “They still say there was a reason to be there, but nobody knows that reason.”
Please note: In her first paragraph, Iati refers to a "no-knock warrant." She then quotes police saying they announced themselves. The apparent confusion goes unexplained.

That said, was there a good reason for this late afternoon no-knock raid? Was there any serious reason for the raid at all?

We have no way of knowing.

Were Nicholas and Tuttle actually engaged in heroin trafficking? Everything is possible! That said, Iati's account sounds gruesome:

According to Iati, "an informant referenced in the search warrant [has now] said he had never bought drugs at the home." Also, Chief Acevedo "has accused the officer who led the raid of lying to justify it."

According to Iati, a second officer has been "charged with tampering with government records for allegedly falsifying documents related to the raid." Also, "the officer who led the raid" has been charged with two counts of murder!

Acevedo still says there was a good reason for the raid, but he hasn't said what it was, nor has he apologized. As Iati told the story, it sounds like a mess all around.

No-knock raids are inherently dangerous. Stating the obvious, the people being raided may open fire on unannounced police whether they were ever engaged in criminal conduct or not.

That's what happened in this case. That also happened one year later in the post-midnight raid in which Breonna Taylor was killed.

To this day, there's no public evidence that Tuttle and Nicholas were engaged in criminal activity when their home was raided. It's always possible that they were. It's also entirely possible that they weren't.

That said, a recent Associated Press report makes it sound like this was a much bigger mess than Iati's account suggested. On July 31 of this year, NBC News published an AP report about new developments in the case.

New indictments had been handed down. In the process, the case had become much more gruesome:
FIELDSTADT (7/31/20): A grand jury on Thursday indicted six former Houston police officers with a total of 17 counts for their roles in a botched January 2019 drug raid that left a couple dead.

The Jan. 28, 2019, raid came under scrutiny after police alleged then-officer Gerald Goines, who was shot during the raid, lied in a search warrant that a confidential informant had bought heroin at the home. Goines later acknowledged there was no informant and that he bought the drugs himself, authorities said.
Oof. According to the NBC/AP report, six former officers have been formally charged with crimes. Iati's account seemed to suggest that the number was two.

Also, it sounds like the "informant referenced in the search warrant [who has now] said he had never bought drugs at the home" was actually Officer Goines himself! (Or something. We have no idea.) Horribly, that may be what Iati meant when she said that Chief Acevedo "has accused the officer who led the raid of lying to justify it."

(Repeat: we now have no idea what Iati, her two co-writers and her editors actually meant.)

That said, can you believe a freaking thing you read in the Washington Post? We can't answer your question!

We aren't experts on this case, which has generated virtually no national discussion in the 20 months since it occurred. (Obvious reason: Both people shot and killed in this instance were "white.") But it sounds like, for whatever reason, the extent of the alleged misconduct goes well beyond the account which appeared in this morning's Post.

Oof! NBC also included this gruesome information in its version of the AP report:
FIELDSTADT: Three former supervisors and a former senior police officer were also indicted on felony charges Thursday [in addition to Goines and Bryant].

"The charges stem from allegations that include using false information to get judges to sign search warrants; falsifying time sheets, putting false information in offense reports and falsifying government documents to steal," according to a statement released by Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg's office Friday.

[...]

The district attorney's Friday statement said that hundreds of defendants arrested by Goines have been notified that there may be problems with their convictions. The defendants have been provided court-appointed lawyers.

The office has already found that two brothers convicted in a case in which Goines was the sole witness were "actually innocent of the charges."
Oof! At present, these are just allegations, of course.

As noted, the seventeen charges against the six officers were announced in late July. More than five weeks have passed since that time. But based upon what she wrote today, Iati doesn't seem to have been aware of these new indictments. She seems to have described the state of play as it existed before those new charges were filed.

Everybody makes mistakes. With respect to this particular case, Iati and the Washington Post seem to have made some dillies. That said, the larger problem lies in the overt propaganda this morning's report was selling.

At present, the mainstream press is selling a particular story about the topic of police shootings. We're not sure we've seen such a widespread journalistic con since the mainstream press spent twenty months inventing stories to make you believe that the deeply reviled Candidate Gore was the world's biggest liar, just like Bill Clinton, his deeply reviled boss.

At present, the mainstream press is selling a particular story about police shootings. In our view, Iati's report was selling that preferred tribal story hard.

We plan to tell you what we mean as the week progresses.

This is all anthropology, of course. By now, it's much too late to expect some sort of good outcome!

28 comments:

  1. "We're not sure we've seen such a widespread journalistic con since the mainstream press spent twenty months inventing stories to make you believe that the deeply reviled Candidate Gore was the world's biggest liar, just like Bill Clinton, his deeply reviled boss."

    Oh really, dear Bob? Not the 'Iraq's WMD', not the 'Russiagate'? You've gotta be kidding, dear Bob.

    Or, are you, dear Bob, perhaps, some form of a "sociopath", badly impaired?

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  2. First, situations change across time and new details emerge. It is not a "dilly" that the press reported a different story than emerged with grand jury testimony.

    Second, police misconduct is not a press "con". Those two white folks in Texas are DEAD and they shouldn't be. The focus of these press reports is on the disparity between the rates of such occurrences for black people compared to white people. It is not to focus on white shootings. It is to focus on the racism inherent in policing today.

    Somerby is trying to confuse matters by raising these stories of white shootings, as if they mean that it is OK to shoot black people at a much higher rate. Somerby is being an ass.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don’t think your problem is accurately described by saying that you can’t read for comprehension.

      Your problem is that you can’t read.

      Delete
    2. can I watch

      Delete
    3. Bob's correct. You have to be an authoritarian asshole, if you don't want to defend these thugs.

      Delete
    4. What are you talking about @9:25? Who exactly are the thugs? Two people lying in bed in their home? The cops? Cecelia? Is your comment maybe misplaced?

      Delete
    5. 9:55,
      The police are the thugs.

      Here's yet another reminder.

      https://www.npr.org/2020/09/09/910975499/autistic-13-year-old-boy-shot-by-salt-lake-city-police

      Delete
  3. Somerby appears to have difficulty understanding which details of a report are consequential and which have no bearing on how to understand what has happened (and most likely no personal relevance either). Some details matter in terms of making sense of what happened. The lying by the officer is one such detail. Whether the officers identified themselves as they came through the door matters, since it affects the likelihood of the tenants shooting back (thinking they were being invaded, as opposed to receiving a visit by authorities). Charging six officers with crimes related to falsifying the search warrant, instead of two, has no bearing whatsoever on what happened to the two people who were shot. But Somerby seems to think that was a huge flaw in Iati's account, which is focused on women who were shot, not on police abuse of the process for obtaining no-knock warrants.

    Somerby's tendency to use irrelevant details to impeach an entire report is itself faulty reasoning. If there are some parts of the account that are the same across accounts and remain consistent, those details are more reliable than the ones that differ. Thus, an entire report need not be thrown out just because inconsequential details differ, especially when one report comes later than the other (after more time for investigation).

    In this case, Iati's report was published after Fieldstadt's, although the placement of the earlier report after the later one in Somerby's essay implies otherwise. That makes it more likely that her statement about the number of officers charged is more accurate than Fieldstadt's statement. I do not know whether an indictment handed down by a grand jury is the same as being charged with a crime. If those are two different processes, then there is no conflict between the two articles at all. It would mean that fewer people were charged than were indicted by the grand jury. It doesn't necessarily mean that Iati's article is wrong and Fieldstadt's is correct. For Iati's purposes, it doesn't matter how many people were charged with what, since she is talking about shootings, not punishment. The shooting is clearly wrong because (1) the woman and her husband are dead, and (2) they were not dealing heroin, despite Somerby's statement that it is POSSIBLE they were (despite no evidence of it), since anything is possible (and therefore his readers are invited to believe whatever they want, counterfactual or not).

    Somerby is not attacking propaganda here, as he goes through this kind of exercise day after day. He is engaging in propaganda. The only important content in his writing is his negative tone, relentlessly applied to press and liberals, while the content is a confusing jumble of nonsense with no value to anyone, especially those who try to figure out what he is saying.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Somerby’s complaints about Iati’s story don’t add up.

    He complains about Iati mentioning the no-knock warrant but then claiming the police announced themselves after they broke down the door as if this is a puzzling oversight of Iati’s.

    Here is what Iati said (emphasis mine):

    “About 4:30 p.m., roughly 12 narcotics officers and about six patrol officers, some of them in uniform, broke down the door while announcing themselves, police said.

    Then after describing the police version of events, Iati says this:

    In the following months, the official narrative unraveled

    Then Somerby says this:
    “Was there any serious reason for the raid at all? We have no way of knowing.” In fact, there is a way to know. It’s called “google.”

    Police received a 911 call from a neighbor of Tuttle’s who claimed her (the neighbor’s) daughter was at the Tuttle house, that drugs were being sold, and there were machine guns. The 911 caller has in fact now been charged with lying.

    Then Somerby claims he (we) “now have no idea what Iati, her two co-writers and her editors actually meant” when they wrote that Chief Acevedo "has accused the officer who led the raid of lying to justify it."

    What is difficult to understand here? Officer Goines (allegedly) did lie to get the search warrant: there was no informant in this case with knowledge of drug dealing at the Tuttle house, even though Goines claimed there was. You can learn about this by following the link in Iati’s (online) story (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/23/couple-was-killed-during-botched-drug-raid-now-an-officer-has-been-charged-with-murder/).

    Finally, Iati’s description of the event and the charges against Goines and Bradley are substantially correct. The fact that other officers have now been charged doesn’t render her version wrong. She isn’t attempting an exhaustive timeline of the event.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Bob's gone full wingnut. Stupid, stubborn and arrogant.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's happened to many of us. I voted both times for Obama and didn't vote in 2016. I can't wait to vote for Trump.

      Insults don't mean anything coming from deranged, kneeling, weeping Democrats. They're batshit now.

      Delete
    2. 1:44,
      Which of Trump's six bankruptcies is your favorite, and why?

      Delete
  6. I want Rittenhouse to know how I feel.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Do you want blacks to have equality?
      If so, Rittenhouse know how you feel, and the snowflake isn't happy with you.

      Delete
    2. Blacks have nothing to do with it. Who wouldn't want blacks to have equality by the way?

      Delete
    3. 11:11,
      You'd think no one. It's 2020 fercrissakes. But look at all the laws Rittenhouse had to violate, just to be on the wrong side of history.

      Delete
  7. I see the DoJ is now taking over Trump's defense in the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit. The legal basis for doing so is that misogyny is a core function of Trump's Presidency.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Shithole country is, as shithole country does.

      Delete
    2. She's a nutcase.

      Delete
    3. He's a sexual predator.

      Delete
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