Rock Houses : Police Ram Opens Door to Debate

In 1971 a man in Kansas City went crazy, proclaimed his desire to die, locked himself in his house with a pair of pistols and wounded three policemen as they advanced with tear gas.

To get him out, the authorities brought up a World War II-era armored personnel carrier that had been sitting around for a year in case of riot. It rumbled through the front door followed by policemen, who arrested the sniper.

That was the Kansas City Police Department’s first and last use of armor to break into a house.

“The guy was renting the property, and the owner submitted us a bill, which we paid, for about $22,000 to repair the damage,” Police Sgt. Jim Treece said. Since then, he said, “we’ve found alternative methods that don’t require us to tear someone’s house down just to get in.” Today Kansas City’s armored personnel carrier gathers dust most of the time.

Rare Use

So do similar vehicles owned by police departments across the country. Inquiries to 17 U.S. police departments suggest that the episode in Kansas City 14 years ago was the only use of a military-type vehicle to breach a wall.

Except in Los Angeles.

Here, as part of the war on drugs, the Police Department has started using a recently acquired armored vehicle to punch holes into certain fortified houses. In so doing, according to various experts, they have entered uncharted legal territory.

The military vehicle has a 14-foot steel nose, flat on one end. Four times this year, it has been used to pierce the walls of places believed to be “rock houses,” so called because cocaine in solid, or rock, form is sold in them.

Special Problems

Rock houses are a special problem when it comes to serving a search warrant. Typically they have double-reinforced steel doors with slots through which dealers peep out, accept cash and push packets of cocaine. Inside some of them, hot pots of grease bubble all day, into which dealers pop the coke when the police knock.

The appeal of the ram is that it gets into a house so fast that dealers supposedly can’t boil away the goods. The drawback is that if the police turn out to be wrong, presumably innocent civilians see the moon where once there was a wall--if they can see anything after their living room has been flattened.

That was the outcome of the ram’s maiden voyage. On the night of Feb. 6, Police Chief Daryl Gates christened the ram with a bottle of wine a few blocks from a suspected rock house in Pacoima, in the northern San Fernando Valley. Then, with news photographers recording the event, Gates rode shotgun as the ram knocked a hole into the house.

The raid produced less than one-tenth of a gram of cocaine, so little that the district attorney’s office refused to file charges.

A week later the ram was used to break into a South-Central Los Angeles house, to the cheers of neighbors. The operation yielded about one-quarter of an ounce of cocaine and three juveniles, two of whom were subsequently charged with selling cocaine.

On March 22 the wall of a suspected rock house in Lake View Terrace fell before the ram. The place gave up two ounces of cocaine and a 25-year-old man who was charged with possessing the drug and transporting it for sale. Officers said they fished cocaine from a pot of hot grease.

Finally, on April 26 the device was used at another house in South-Central. Officers arrested 16 people and confiscated three grams of rock cocaine and two guns. Charges were filed against three men. The others were deemed to be customers.

In all four instances the police announced their presence over a public address system, then promptly drove into the house. It gave the inhabitants little time to think about it, which was the idea.

The ram was immediately a controversial tool. Two women and three children were the only occupants of the Pacoima house. A lawsuit challenging the use of the ram has been filed by one of the women, who claims it violated her state and federal constitutional guarantees against excessive force, invasion of privacy and unreasonable search and seizure. A hearing on a motion for a preliminary injunction against use of the ram is set for June 18 in Los Angeles Superior Court.

The authorities and some others seem delighted with the ram, however. A small illustration is a boomlet in bumper stickers and pins saluting the vehicle being sold by two policemen. One has sold 3,200 bumper stickers.

Gates said recently that he is convinced that the battering ram has put drug dealers on the run. In an interview, he said he will use it “over and over and over and over again whenever appropriate.”

No Written Policy

Exactly when that is isn’t clear. Bob Blanchard, a narcotics captain, said the department has no written policy on when officers may batter down a door to serve a search warrant. There are informal guidelines, but they are a secret.

As a rule, the authorities are not supposed to break down doors unless they have to. That principle can be traced in English law to 1603. It is embodied in the U.S. Constitution and statute law. It is constantly being refined by judges examining actual cases of police behavior.

The wholesale destruction wrought by the battering ram appears to have added a new element.

“In most narcotics cases, police break down the door but the damage is minimal--a lock on the door broken, a splintered lintel,” said Scott Spear, an Alameda County public defender and part-time teacher of search law. “I’ve never seen a case where the damage was so excessive that it was felt necessary to challenge it in court as a violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

Wayne La Fave, a University of Illinois professor who filled three volumes with search law, said the Supreme Court has never ruled on how much force can be used to serve a warrant.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits “unreasonable” searches. A law professor at Notre Dame, G. Robert Blakey, said, “One would think there would be a substantial body of case law on how much force is reasonable. But I can’t think of a case.”

California and federal statutes say an officer may “break open any outer or inner door or window of a house or any part thereof” to execute a search warrant, “if after giving notice of his authority and purpose, he is refused admittance.”

“What they’re supposed to do, according to the law, is knock, say, ‘We’re the police, we have a search warrant, open up,’ ” Spear said. “They may then break in if they are refused entry.”

Court Restrictions

In many cases the courts have sought to restrict the police.

For instance:

In 1958 the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision on searches, involving a drug conviction. Police officers had knocked at the suspect’s door at 3:45 a.m. and identified themselves. He opened the door and asked why they were there. Without waiting for an answer, he tried to close the door, whereupon officers forced their way past the chain lock. The search was declared unreasonable, the evidence disallowed, the conviction reversed.

Federal legislation that allowed unannounced entry by narcotics agents was passed in 1969. It was short-lived. Federal and local law officers made warrantless drug raids on the wrong homes twice in Collinsville, Ill., terrorizing the inhabitants and dooming the law to repeal by Congress.

In general, Blakey said, the California courts have been more strict with the police than their federal brethren.

Exemption Sought

In 1967 prosecutors in California sought vainly to exempt all drug cases from the knock-notice requirements. Los Angeles police had forced their way into a house without knocking or announcing themselves. They found heroin under the suspect’s mattress, and he was convicted. On appeal, the prosecution argued that because narcotics violators will always try to dispose of their drugs quickly, no-knock searches should be the rule. The state Supreme Court would have none of it and tossed out the conviction.

In 1969 the same court suppressed evidence used to convict a man of drug possession because officers, with permission of his absent wife, had entered his home through an unlocked door in the middle of the night 30 seconds after they knocked, without announcing themselves. “If the husband had awakened and heard intruders enter his home without explanation and had responded to the invasion with the reasonable force a homeowner may use in expelling night prowlers, the two young children who were in the house, the police and the homeowner might have suffered injury,” the court wrote.

In 1973 the court said a magistrate may not authorize in advance noncompliance with the knock-notice law. Exceptions must be in “emergency situations existing at the time of entry.”

From the time the police announce themselves until the battering ram destroys a wall takes about six seconds, officers have said. In 1973 the state Court of Appeal said that even with an ordinary hand-held battering ram, six seconds was too short a time for officers to conclude that entry was being refused or that evidence was being destroyed.

All that is on the one hand.

Special Cases

On the other hand, courts have excused the police from the knock-notice requirement in cases of express or implied refusal to open the door, a danger to officers and the possibility of escape or destruction of evidence.

In 1956 the California Supreme Court held that officers need not knock and give notice if they have a “good-faith belief that compliance would increase their peril, frustrate the arrest or permit the destruction of evidence.” In the case at hand, the defendant had said, “Wait a minute,” after the officers knocked to arrest him for selling heroin, whereupon running footsteps were heard within. Only five seconds lapsed between the knock and the breaking in of the door, but the conviction was upheld.

In 1973 the state Supreme Court held that it was permissible for Los Angeles police to have burst into the apartment of a man who an informant had said invariably answered the door armed.

Foes of the ram point out, by way of analogy, that courts have held some bodily intrusions are illegal even if the evidence can be secured no other way. Courts have held it impermissible for the authorities to administer laxatives and emetics and pump stomachs to seek drugs, to compel deep surgery to retrieve a bullet and to palpitate the prostate of an incest suspect to procure a sperm sample. Whether these cases have any bearing on the battering ram remains to be argued.

Joan Howarth, a staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the woman in Pacoima, said the battering ram is so dangerous as to make its use unreasonable per se. But professors Blakey, La Fave and Charles H. Whitebread of USC said they think the ram stands a good chance in court.

Sellers Locked In

La Fave thinks the fortifications and the armed inhabitants arguably make rock houses a special category, excusing the need to knock and identify. Often, the police say, the sales personnel are locked in by the employer and couldn’t open up if they wanted to.

Michael Lightfoot, a professor of criminal law and procedure at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said judges may deem the battering ram reasonable since rock houses are fortified in large part to keep the police out and since narcotics raids are notoriously dangerous.

On the other hand, “when you get into questions of reasonableness, you also have to talk about danger to individuals who may be inside,” he said. “It seems to me that when you use a ram like that, the potential for such immediate danger exists that there is a greater chance that it’s unreasonable.”

Alan Dershowitz, a defense-minded Harvard University law professor, said a recent Supreme Court ruling that the police can’t shoot a fleeing felon not known to be dangerous has “clear implications for the battering ram.”

“The Constitution does not permit the police to use dangerously disproportionate force to effectuate a search warrant any more than it allows the police to use deadly force to effectuate an arrest,” Dershowitz said.

But Deputy City Atty. Donna Weisz, who is defending the ram, said, “We’re not talking about anything like shooting a fleeing kid. Don’t officers have a right in making these dangerous rapid entries to be safe as well?”

Beyond the constitutionality issue is the matter of civil damages. The residents of two of the rammed houses have taken the first step toward suing the city by filing damage claims, one for $60 million.

Prohibition Roots

The roots of the ram can be traced to Prohibition, when police trucks would go crashing into warehouses full of alcohol, Los Angeles Police Cmdr. George Morrison said.

Decades later, prompted by the ghetto riots of the 1960s, many police forces bought armored personnel carriers with federal money.

“After the riots you had four-man police departments in the middle of Kansas buying armored personnel carriers in case blacks ever invaded the town,” said Lawrence Sherman of the Police Foundation, a research organization in Washington.

Los Angeles police wanted armor after the Watts riots of 1965 and intermittently since then. But top city officials seemed to balk at the thought of military vehicles rumbling down the streets, recalled Jack White, who formerly served as coordinator of the Los Angeles Police Commission.

Wendell Nichols, a Police Department financial planner, recalled that the department refused the Army’s offer of the indefinite loan of an armored vehicle after the Watts riots. The authorities didn’t like its sniper-vulnerable tires, and it wasn’t air conditioned, Nichols said.

Two years ago the force devised a makeshift battering ram. A metal sleeve was drawn over the prongs of a forklift and was used to knock down the door of a rock house. The gizmo was not a huge success. It went only five miles an hour and was so close to the ground it couldn’t climb a curb.

Olympic Terrorism

Last summer’s Olympic Games brought Los Angeles its first military vehicle for police use. The U.S. Department of Energy indefinitely lent the city a pair of surplus V-100 vehicles to help quell terrorism should it arise. The government uses such vehicles to guard nuclear power plants and warhead factories. They look a little like tanks with tires. They weigh 6.4 tons, travel 62 miles an hour, can withstand small-arms fire and can climb a 30% grade.

During the Olympics they stood sentry at USC and UCLA. Afterward the city planned to use them for rescues. “L.A.P.D. Rescue Vehicle” is painted on the sides.

So far the V-100s have not been used to rescue anyone. Several months ago someone whose name cannot be retrieved from the department’s collective memory came up with the idea of turning one of them against rock houses.

The steel nose and square plate on the business end of it were fabricated by the police force’s Motor Transport Division to specifications written by the Special Weapons and Tactics unit. The battering ram slides into a bracket bolted onto the front of the V-100. It is driven by a policeman named Chic Daniel, a Vietnam veteran who drove such a vehicle during the war.

Around the turn of the year, Daniel spent a day poking the nose into an abandoned house that the state owns in Lynwood. “Every time we hit it, we made a hole,” SWAT Capt. John Higgins said.

Law officers in other cities with rock houses said they get in by using more traditional tools: sledgehammers, bolt cutters, axes, plain old battering rams. Or they use trickery to lure the dealers out.

A few, including the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the police in Miami, New York and New Orleans, have used chains attached to trucks to pull the doors off suspected rock houses.

New York Rescues

New York has a big rock house problem. The police there have an armored personnel carrier but use it only for rescues. Old-fashioned battering rams, pry bars and tow trucks with chains are used on drug raids, police spokesman Bob Fitzpatrick said.

Officials in Philadelphia, New York and several other Eastern cities said an armored motorized ram would be impractical for them. Their dwellings tend to be multistory, on narrow streets and attached to one another, as became painfully clear last month when Philadelphia authorities dropped an explosive charge onto a roof to rout a group of radical gunmen out of one house, apparently starting a fire that destroyed 60 homes. The L.A. ram needs room to maneuver and couldn’t effectively poke its nose above the second story.

The New Orleans police use non-motorized tools. Also sneaky tactics.

“We do things such as stage accidents in front of a house or cut off their electricity or water,” Capt. Ray Holman said. Or they’ll arrange a police chase with careening cars, after which a police officer, usually female, knocks to inform the inhabitant that his car has been hit. “When they come out of the house, we’re there,” Holman said.

The Chicago police like 16-pound sledgehammers. Police Sgt. Maj. John Klein said that using a motorized ram would be “like, if you have to issue a parking ticket, getting out of the car with an Uzi and shooting him in the leg so he can’t walk away.”

Kansas City has rock houses, and there is even a detachable steel battering ram for its V-100, but it has never been used, Treece said.

“It’s too expensive repairing houses,” Treece said. People, he noted, “will sue you at the drop of a hat.”

Protection of Officers

Kansas City police have used their armored personnel carrier a handful of times since that day in 1971, usually to protect officers rescuing people from sniper range, Treece said.

Once they parked it against a garage door to pin in a prison escapee. Another time they drove it back and forth in front of a building to keep a sleepy sniper awake for negotiations.

Ten miles away in Lenexa, Kan., population 23,000, the authorities in 1978 bought a 13-ton Korean War vintage M-59 armored personnel vehicle.

It holds 20 people and was useful in the winter of 1979, said Maj. George Barton, deputy chief of the Lenexa force. A snowstorm piled up traffic on interstate highways. The armored personnel carrier took one heart attack patient to a hospital. For the most part it carried personnel to hotels.