Small Farm Town’s SWAT Team Leaves Costly Legacy

The question hangs everywhere in this quiet little farm town. Why did Dinuba, known as Raisinland U.S.A., with a dozen cops on the beat and not a single recent murder on the books, even need a SWAT team?

Back in 1997, with scarcely a dissenting voice, Dinuba created a special paramilitary police unit complete with submachine guns and head-to-toe combat gear. It was a choice that this San Joaquin Valley town, population 15,269, would almost immediately regret.

Early one morning, just a few months into training, the new squad set upon the house of Ramon Gallardo looking for a hot gun. Officers in black masks and camouflage burst into the bedroom where the 64-year-old farm worker and his wife were asleep.

Before Carmen Gallardo knew for sure that the intruders were police and not some deranged militia, her startled husband allegedly had picked up a folding knife and was shot 15 times. He died in his underwear. The gun--supposedly belonging to one of Gallardo’s sons--was never found.

A federal jury in Fresno last month awarded the Gallardo family $12.5 million in civil damages, one of the largest judgments ever in a police brutality case.

Tiny Dinuba, its annual budget not even half the size of the jury award, isn’t sure how it will come up with the money. With insurance covering only $9.5 million, residents now face the very real prospect of crippling cuts in public services.

“If we’re on the hook for $3 [million] or $4 million, it would be devastating, no doubt about it,” said Ed Todd, the city manager. “That money would have to come directly out of police, fire and parks and recreation.”

In a last-ditch legal maneuver, Dinuba’s lawyer has asked a judge to throw out the wrongful death verdict or at least grant a new trial.

Rudy Gallardo, the family’s spokesman, said the city’s attempt to dodge the judgment is one more indignity thrown in the face of his mother and 12 brothers and sisters. “The money that is going to come from my dad, really I don’t feel happy about it. Because it comes with blood. That money comes with blood. But it’s the only justice we’re going to receive,” said Gallardo, 40.

“Sometimes I am driving and I think, ‘Why? Why did they kill him?’ Then all the questions come back. ‘Why didn’t they just keep knocking on the door until someone answered? Why so many bullets?’ I can still hear his voice in the backyard. I can’t get rid of it. He was a good man.”

The six-member Special Enforcement Team, or SET as the squad was known here, has been disbanded in the wake of the killing, its techno warrior outfits and weapons donated to another police department still bullish on SWAT.

Although the size of last month’s court verdict certainly sets this Tulare County town apart, Dinuba is far from unique in the impulse to militarize its police force. A 1996 survey of small-town police departments nationwide showed that 65% boasted a fully operational paramilitary unit.

Like Dinuba, many towns felt compelled to start up the squads after the U.S. military began enticing local police agencies with a shopping list of free hardware, everything from surplus tanks to ninja suits.

“SWAT teams have been proliferating beyond anyone’s wildest imagination,” said Peter Kraska, a criminologist at Eastern Kentucky University who conducted the survey and wrote a scholarly article titled “Militarizing Mayberry and Beyond.”

“The biggest problem in small towns is the SWAT team is extremely bored. You’ve got this neat unit with all this equipment and training, and nothing is happening. So you start using them in situations where they’re really not needed, like routine search warrants. And pretty soon, you’ve got an ordinary situation turn deadly.”

Tucked away on the eastern flank of the nation’s richest farm belt, Dinuba once seemed airtight from fear. Residents in their 40s and 50s recall a carefree youth of unlocked doors and midnight raids through Farmer Sarkissian’s melon patch and riding inner tubes down the irrigation canals.

Sometime around 1990, the town turned vigilant. It seemed every time nearby Fresno cracked down on its gangs, a transplant or two landed in Dinuba. Here and there, the words “shots fired” began appearing in the police blotter of the local Sentinel. Many of the Armenians, Okies and Asians who built Dinuba were dying off or moving away, replaced by poor farm workers from Mexico. Old-timers blamed the newcomers for crime.

Dinuba turned to Los Angeles for its new police chief in 1994. By then, the city had already had one brief marriage to a SWAT team. It ended when city fathers concluded that a squad devoted strictly to special operations was too much of an extravagance.

“The town was too small, and we really didn’t need the unit,” Mayor John de la Montanya said.

But in the spring of 1997, after a spate of nonfatal gang shootings, the unit was brought back--this time with the new acronym, SET. Half the city’s 12-member patrol force enlisted. The new team was given a broader role. In addition to the occasional surprise raid, the unit would watch over Cinco de Mayo and Raisin Day festivals.

“I felt the SET team was different from SWAT,” said Police Chief Emilio Perez, a 26-year LAPD veteran. “It was formed to deal with special problems, from curfew checks to enforcement of bicycle helmet laws to drunk driving.

“We had gone through the proper training to do search warrants. And in the event of a hostage situation or a riot, we would have called on the Tulare County Sheriff’s [Department].”

The events that triggered the July 11, 1997, tragedy actually began in nearby Visalia, where police were searching for a sawed-off shotgun used in an attempted murder. An informant told officers that the gun now belonged to 18-year-old Jesus Gallardo, a Dinuba resident who wore baggy pants and flashed gang signals.

After securing a search warrant, 16 officers from Visalia, Tulare County and Dinuba surrounded the small house on Golden Way. But family members said Jesus was never a gang member and didn’t buy any gun. He had had a few minor run-ins with the law, they said, but he also was working and not even home that morning.

While the other police agencies manned the perimeter, Dinuba’s SET team approached the front door at 7 a.m. with the stealth they had picked up in three training sessions. Officers yelled, “Search warrant, search warrant,” a videotape shows, and then burst through the unlocked front door.

Armando Gallardo, 16, was sleeping on the living room floor. He later testified in the trial that one of the officers stepped on his back, put a gun to his head and muttered, “Don’t move.”

Carmen Gallardo, the mother, said she didn’t discern any badges on the men who rushed inside the master bedroom. She saw only hoods and masks and guns. “I thought they were robbers,” she testified. “I became very frightened.”

She said one of the men threw her onto the bed and pushed a weapon into her back. That’s when she heard the rapid fire of the MP5 submachine gun, a weapon that discharges three bullets each burst and is a favorite of the Navy SEALS. “I turned and saw my husband,” she told jurors. “He was leaning on a dresser and then I heard another gunshot, and he looked at me as if I had been killed too.”

The decision to shoot Ramon Gallardo, police said, was a matter of self-defense. He had picked up a large folding knife from atop the dresser and was moving forward to strike them, they said. But family members contend that the knife wasn’t his and allege that officers planted it to legitimize the shooting.

Carmen Gallardo was arrested and taken to police headquarters in bare feet and nightgown. Detectives questioned her for five hours about a sawed-off shotgun she said she knew nothing about.

The Tulare County district attorney determined that the Dinuba officers had acted properly and the shooting was justified.

“The law is very clear that an officer who is threatened can do whatever is necessary to stop the threat,” said Carol Turner, the deputy district attorney who reviewed the shooting. “We had no evidence of a knife being planted.”

The matter might have ended there if not for Arturo Gonzalez, a San Francisco attorney named one of America’s 40 finest young lawyers by the National Law Journal. A fiery offspring of migrant farm workers and Harvard Law School, the 38-year-old Gonzales devotes a good chunk of his practice to cases that no one else wants.

In a valley where jurors often defer to law enforcement and civil judgments in police cases are almost always paltry, Gonzalez had already distinguished himself. Three years earlier, he won a $1.4-million verdict on behalf of four Latino voting rights advocates who were subjected to an unlawful strip-search in the Tulare County Jail.

Gonzalez said the Gallardo case underscored what he believed to be a frightening trend: police departments big and small employing paramilitary tactics against the citizenry on the thinnest of grounds, and constitutional safeguards against unlawful searches being damned.

“They took a handful of patrol officers and gave them camouflage uniforms, automatic weapons and a few days of training and said, ‘Now you are a paramilitary unit,’ ” he said. “This town didn’t need a SWAT team. But if you’re going to have one, why turn them loose without the proper training?”

Gonzalez said he worried how the jury of mostly white blue-collar workers, a truck driver and oil rig operator among them, would respond. Last month, after the $12.5-million verdict was read, Gonzalez stood outside the federal courthouse in Fresno and paid tribute to the jury.

The award dwarfs other excessive force judgments in California and elsewhere. In the Rodney King beating case, for instance, the judgment against Los Angeles officers was $3.8 million.

“There are some people who think that justice cannot be obtained by Mexican Americans in this building, and they are wrong,” Gonzalez said.

Ramon Gallardo’s widow and children, aware that the city’s insurance won’t cover the entire judgment, recently offered to settle the case for $11 million. The insurance carrier--an association of valley cities--never responded to the offer. In May, both sides will return to federal court to argue the city’s motion for a new trial or a reduced verdict.

Rudy Gallardo said he only wishes he could turn back the clock.

“I feel good that this case might save some lives,” he said. “But if someone came up and said, ‘Rudy, you can have $100 million or you can have your father alive again for 30 days,’ I would take the 30 days. There is no money that can buy his life.”