Alex Henderson

The Political Zone

"Collateral Damage": Innocent Victims in the War on Drugs  



By Alex Henderson
RealmNoir, February 25, 2012

During wartime, the term “collateral damage” is used to describe innocent victims of a military attack. Non-combatant civilians who become “collateral damage” aren’t considered the enemy by the attacker; rather, they have the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And in the United States’ War on Drugs, there has been no shortage of “collateral damage.” A long list of innocent people have been killed, maimed or injured as a result of the War on Drugs, and the carnage underscores the fact that the innocent victims have as much to fear from drug enforcement officers as they do from drug traffickers.

The examples of drug enforcement officers killing  innocent people who had nothing to do with drugs are numerous—and in many cases, it is simply a matter of targeting the wrong address. In 1999, that happened with 46-year-old Willie Heard in Osawatomie, Kansas, where a SWAT team targeted Heard’s house by mistake and conducted a no-knock raid. Heard, fearing a home invasion by criminals, grabbed an empty rifle; he was shot and killed in front of his wife and teenage daughter. It was also in 1999 that Denver police broke into the house of Ismael Mena; although they had the wrong house, Mena was shot and killed.

New York City narcotics officers had the wrong address when, in 2003, they broke into the Harlem home of 57-year-old Alberta Spruill and set off flash grenades. The raid caused her to suffer a heart attack and die. A heart attack also claimed the life of the 75-year-old Rev. Accelyne Williams, whose apartment in Boston was raided by a SWAT team that, in 1994, raided the wrong apartment.  When Williams was tackled, violently forced onto the ground and handcuffed, that brought on a fatal heart attack. Not surprisingly, no drugs were found in Williams’ home.

Sometimes, innocent people are killed when narcotics officers target the wrong vehicle. In Columbus, Georgia, 39-year-old Kenneth Brown Walker (who worked in middle management at Blue Cross) was shot in the head after officers pulled over the car that his friend Warren Beulah (a high school basketball coach) was driving; Walker was a passenger, and the car resembled the car of someone they suspected of selling cocaine. Officers ordered the four men in the vehicle to get on the ground, and although Walker complied, he was shot and killed by a Muscogee County deputy who claimed that he couldn’t see one of Walker’s hands.

The deputy acted as judge, jury and executioner but ended up lynching someone who had no connection to the drug trade. Of course, no drugs were found in the vehicle; Walker was yet another innocent victim in the War on Drugs. The fact that some narcotics officers wear plain clothes can easily lead to misunderstandings, and those misunderstandings can have tragic results. In 2004, 43-year-old Rudolfo Cardenas of San Jose, California had the misfortune of passing by a house where narcotics officers were attempting to serve a warrant for a parole violation—and the officers, who weren’t wearing uniforms, wrongly assumed that Cardenas was the one they were after. Having no idea they were police officers, Cardenas thought they were trying to rob him and ran; the officers shot him in the back numerous times. Cardenas, who was unarmed, was a father of five—and thanks to the War on Drugs, his kids are growing up without a dad.

Many victims of the War on Drugs have been people of color. Alberta Spruill, Kenneth Brown Walker and the Rev. Accelyne Williams were African-American; Ismael Mena and Rudolfo Cardenas were Latino. But while there has been a strong element of racism to the War on Drugs, whites can easily become victims as well—even if they are Baptist ministers. One of the War on Drugs’ white victims was the Rev. Jonathan Ayers of Toccoa, Georgia. In 2009, Ayers gave a woman who was attending his church $23 to help her pay her rent, which was overdue; he didn’t know that she was under police surveillance. Plain-clothes narcotics officers decided to follow Ayers; when Ayers left a convenience store and saw those plain-clothes officers brandishing their guns, he had no idea they were cops and didn’t know what was going on. Ayers, who was understandably frightened, got in his car and tried to drive away but was shot and killed by the plain-clothes officers.

When someone comes face to face with armed individuals who are brandishing weapons but aren’t wearing uniforms, it is logical to assume that they are violent criminals instead of police officers. Ayers, like Rudolfo Cardenas, had no idea that the armed men he tried to get away from were cops rather than carjackers or gang members. This type of atrocity is typical of the War on Drugs; narcotics officers will create a dangerous situation, and they end up becoming as much of a menace to innocent people—or even more of a menace—than drug traffickers themselves. It is no exaggeration to say that thanks to the War on Drugs, innocent unarmed civilians have as much to fear from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) as they do from Los Zeta and other Mexican drug cartels.

The War on Drugs is clearly an abysmal failure, yet very few American politicians have the courage to openly oppose it. Most Republicans, apart from libertarians like Sen. Ron Paul of Texas, have encouraged the bloodshed. And instead of having the integrity to stand up to those GOP neocons, too many Democrats are afraid to speak out against the abuses because they fear being labeled “soft on drugs.” But one politician who has never been afraid to criticize the War on Drugs is Paul, who demonstrated his clarity on this issue when he said that “the federal War on Drugs has proven costly and ineffective, while creating terrible violent crime. But if you question policy, you are accused of being pro-drug. That is preposterous. As a physician, father and grandfather, I abhor drugs. I just know that there is a better way—through local laws, communities, churches, and families—to combat the very serious problem of drug abuse than a massive federal-government bureaucracy.”

Even back in the 1980s, Paul was speaking out against the Gestapo-like tactics being employed in the War on Drugs—and he continues to do so without hesitation in 2012. Other libertarians are speaking out as well, including former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson (who recently switched from the GOP to the Libertarian Party in order to run in the LP presidential primary) and radio talk show host Alex Jones. Johnson has said that the War on Drugs is as much of a “proven failure” as Prohibition was during the 1920s: “Ninety percent of the drug problem is prohibition-related, not use-related—and that is not to discount the problems with use…..This is a health issue, not a criminal justice issue,” Johnson correctly asserted.

In an actual war, collateral damage can be a necessary evil. Many German civilians, for example, were caught in the crossfire when the U.S. military fought against the Adolf Hitler regime during World War II, but that collateral damage was necessary because the U.S. was acting in self-defense; Hitler, like Japan, declared war on the U.S. in 1941, and violent aggression on the part of the Axis Powers necessitated a violent response. But the War on Drugs is totally different because it often creates violence in situations that weren’t violent to begin with. Radley Balko, senior editor for Reason Magazine, put it well when, in 2011, he appeared on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s program “Freedom Watch” (which was recently canceled by the Fox Business Channel) and said that “SWAT teams have an appropriate use, and that’s when you’re using violence to defuse an already violent situation—hostage taking or bank robbery, that sort of thing. But when you’re using a SWAT team to serve a warrant for a non-violent, consensual crime, you are creating violence. The government is creating violence where there was none before. And that’s really the heart of the problem.”

Napolitano and Balko were discussing the killing of 68-year-old Massachusetts resident Eurie Stamps. Near Boston, a SWAT team showed up at Stamps’ home with a warrant for the arrest of his grandson Joseph Bushfan, who was suspected of distributing crack. When a trigger-happy member of the SWAT team opened fire, one of the bullets killed Stamps (who wasn’t even a suspect in his grandson’s drug-related activities). It was obvious that Stamps wasn’t going for a weapon; when he was shot, Stamps was lying face down on the floor with his hands stretched out over his head. Outraged by Stamps’ killing, Napolitano observed, “There are 150 drug raids a day, 50,000 drug raids a year in the United States of America. That might sound good to the anti-drug warriors, but the tragic consequences of that are innocent people are often terrorized and—in some cases—killed, like in this case.”

To the authoritarian ideologues who continue to applaud the War on Drugs, the killing or maiming of innocent people is not a problem. To proponents of the War on Drugs, innocent victims like Alberta Spruill, Rudolfo Cardenas, Kenneth Brown Walker, Eurie Stamps, Ismael Mena, Willie Heard and the Rev. Accelyne Williams were expendable; they were “collateral damage.” In truth, they were victims of government-sanctioned lynch mobs that shot first and asked questions later. And as long as the failed War on Drugs continues, many more tragic and unnecessary killings of innocent people are bound to follow.

    Alex Henderson is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in The L.A. Weekly, AlterNet, Billboard, Spin, XBIZ, Creem, The Pasadena Weekly and a long list of other well-known publications. He can be followed on Twitter @alexvhenderson.com.

At 75,  the Rev. Accelyne Williams (above) died of a heart attack in 1994 when a SWAT team raided his apartment based on bad information. No drugs were found. Critics of the War on Drugs  have denounced the killing of Williams for what it was: a government-sanctioned lynching of an innocent man. 



From presidential hopefuls Ron Paul (above) and Gary Johnson (below) to the ACLU to the Rev. Al Sharpton, people from all over the political sprectrum have decried abuses committed in the name of the War on Drugs.