There’s been a bit of clarification from the authorities, although what they reveal isn’t pretty:
The Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General served a warrant on Stockton, California resident Kenneth Wright at six in the morning on Tuesday. Though the initial story gave the impression that the raid was focused on unpaid student loans, the department’s press secretary helpfully informed us this was not the case, and that the office conducts investigations of bribery, fraud, and embezzlement.
That’s little comfort. A review of the warrant reveals that the investigators were searching for financial records connected with suspected financial aid fraud, conspiracy, theft of government funds, false statements to the government, and wire fraud. Wright wasn’t the suspect — his estranged wife was and she wasn’t present for the raid — but for this list of white collar crimes the agents breached the front door, dragged Wright and his three children from the home, and kept them in a police cruiser for hours (the children for two, Wright for over six).
Kenneth Wright’s gut reaction, captured on video, largely mirrors mine. Ridiculous. Someone may have lied on student loan paperwork, so federal investigators converged to kick in a door and keep a family in the back of a cruiser for hours when they could have simply knocked and served the warrant.
Of course, the stated reason for the raid isn’t likely the real one:
This raid was a tactical dog and pony show to justify the existence of the OIG’s office, timely executed as Republicans are sharpening their fiscal knives. The same bureaucratic survival instinct motivated the ATF’s raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. The ATF needed a high-profile bust to justify its existence in the face of perennial budgetary scrutiny, scrutiny that is deserved now more than ever as ATF officials knowingly let guns get shipped across the Mexican border to support the cartels. Two turned up at the scene of the shooting death of a Border Patrol agent and others shot a Mexican military helicopter and forced it to land.
Update: Some useful commentary at Popehat:
Anton Chekov (no, not the Star Trek guy) said of writing drama, “one must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”
Law enforcement training and procurement follows a similar ethos: supply creates its own demand. If you buy fancy toys for cops of any stripe, and train them to use them, then they’re going to use them. Once law enforcement is equipped and trained to wield the hammer of paramilitary raids, then every search looks like a nail. [. . .] (I suspect there’s a Napoleonic phenomenon going on as well: in my experience as a former fed and current defense lawyer, the more petty an officer’s power, and the narrower his patch, the more he itches to exercise force and authority.) That’s how they get to the place where they think it’s appropriate to use this much force against an innocent citizen with no criminal record, and his family, because his ex was committing fraud
[. . .]
Searches can be unreasonable not just in their purpose or in their supporting probable cause, but in their execution. A paramilitary raid is a grotesquely disproportionate approach to the investigation of a non-violent crime. It poses a grave risk of accidental death. It terrorizes innocents. And it conditions both police and citizens to view any law enforcement inquiry as justifying overwhelming force. Things like loan fraud and illegal milk sales should not require shock and awe.
The bottom line: we need to be vigilant for government abuse of the application for and execution of search warrants as well as erosion of the use of search warrants.
