In 2006, a 93-year-old Atlanta woman was gunned down in her own home by police during a drug raid. The police initially claimed the woman is a marijuana dealer who fired a gun at them. The story might have ended there. But a shady informant bravely came forward to set the record straight. Subsequent investigations and reports revealed that the police had raided the wrong home, killed an innocent woman, then planted marijuana in her basement to cover up their mistake.

In the ensuing months, we’d learn that the Atlanta police department’s narcotics unit routinely conducted mistaken raids on terrified people. The problem was driven by perverse federal, state, and local financial incentives that pushed cops to take shortcuts in procuring warrants for drug raids in order to boost their arrest and seizure statistics. Most of those incentives are still in place today.

The raids haven’t stopped. And neither have the deaths.

Transcript

Radley Balko: It’s November 22, 2006, the day before Thanksgiving. Alex White, a hustler and small-time drug dealer sits in the back of an Atlanta Police Department squad car.

As the car stops in front of The Varsity — a burger joint in downtown Atlanta — White rolls down the window, grabs the exterior handle, and pops open the door. Then he runs. The officers abandon their car in the middle of the street and give chase.

White rushes into the burger spot and exits out the back. The officers follow. White eventually loses them long enough to duck behind a gas station. He then makes this remarkable phone call to 911.

Operator: [Unintelligible] How can I help you?

Alex White: Yes, yes. I have two, two cops chasing me. They, they, they on the dirty side. I have two undercover police officers chasing me. One of ’em name is Detective —

Operator: Are they chasing you now?

Alex White: Yes. I just jumped out the car with ’em. See, I’m working with —

Operator: OK. Are you wanted?

Alex White: Huh?

Operator: Are you wanted, sir?

Alex White: No, no, ma’am. No, ma’am. I’m not wanted at all. You —

Operator: OK. So you’re calling the police to the police …

Radley Balko: Alex White was calling 911 on the police officers who had detained him. His years as a narcotics informant had just taken a dangerous turn. And he was scared.

Operator: OK, sir, hold on. I can send you an officer. What’s your location? There’s nothing —

Alex White: I can’t tell you that. I can’t tell you that.

Operator: OK, sir. This is the police. We send officers out when you dial 911.

Alex White: OK. OK.

Operator: You want to talk to someone at a precinct?

Alex White: I’m waiting on the ATF, I mean, I’m on North Avenue, waiting on ATF to come pick me up.

Operator: You waiting for ATF?

Radley Balko: White’s work as an informant usually went like this: In exchange for a small payout, he would tip the cops off to other drug dealers. According to White, the police let him continue to sell drugs, as long as he cut them in. He’d also occasionally go undercover to buy drugs on behalf of law enforcement. He’s said the cops had him buy illegal guns too. He’d done these jobs for several police agencies, including the Atlanta Police Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, or ATF — a federal agency.

During this panicked call, White told the dispatcher he was waiting for the ATF to come rescue him — to rescue him from the Atlanta Police.

Alex White: I don’t know who on whose side, man. They playing dirty.

Operator: [Crosstalk] Do you want to talk to someone at the precinct?

Alex White: [Crosstalk] You see what happened yesterday that was on the news, yeah, they involved me in there, I had nothing to do with it. … They keep talking in code, saying they had to take me down there, then once I told them ATF was on the way to pick me up.

Radley Balko: White referenced seeing a news report he had seen on TV, and how the police who picked him up were speaking in code. It made him nervous enough to flee.

Alex White: I jumped out of the car. So they around here looking for me right now. [Unintelligible]

Operator: OK. The most I can do is send a police officer to come pick you up, sir. I don’t know what else you think I can do.

Alex White: All right, cool.

White had received an urgent phone call from one of his handlers at the Atlanta Police Department. They needed him to lie for them.

Radley Balko: The dispatcher was pretty confused, and who could blame her? White himself was still trying to figure out what was going on, and who, if anyone, he could trust. The previous evening, White had received an urgent phone call from one of his handlers at the Atlanta Police Department. They needed him to lie for them. That wasn’t unusual. White had lied for the cops before.

But this time, Atlanta narcotics detectives wanted White to say he had bought drugs from a house at 933 Neal Street, in a rough section of Atlanta called “The Bluff.” The detective offered to pay White more than the $30 they usually gave him. So he agreed. But later, White saw a breaking news story on TV that would change his mind — and eventually his life.

Alan Dreher: It was a very tragic and unfortunate incident.

News reporter: That’s how Assistant Police Chief Alan Dreher describes the botched drug raid that left a 92-year-old woman dead and three officers with non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. Police say those shots were fired by the elderly victim, Kathryn Johnston.

Radley Balko: The same narcotics officers who were asking White to lie had raided that same house on Neal Street. 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston lived inside. When Johnston heard the officers break open the burglar bars on her front door, she rose from her bed and grabbed the revolver she kept in her nightstand.

News reporter: Investigators say 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston fired a handgun at officers who entered her home November 21, using a no-knock warrant, injuring three officers. The officers responded by opening fire, killing Johnston. Angry relatives called for justice.

Sarah Dozier: They shot her down like a dog! She is 92 years old!

Radley Balko: After the officers forced open her door, Johnston fired a single shot that hit no one. The officers responded with a swarm of 39 bullets screaming through Johnston’s living room. They shot her five or six times.

Three cops were struck too — but by shrapnel from bullets fired by their fellow officers. They would eventually call an ambulance for those wounded colleagues.

They would not call an ambulance for Kathryn Johnston.

News reporter: Neighbors of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston are devastated.

Neighbor: It’s insane. I’ve been crying all night for this lady, man, her family.

News reporter: Atlanta police say there was an undercover drug buy at Johnston’s Neal Street home. People who live nearby say no way.

Neighbor: Never. Never. This is a 92-year-old lady that lives by herself. She don’t know no young folks like that.

Radley Balko: The police had acted on a bad tip — one they hadn’t bothered to corroborate. Upon realizing their mistake — that Kathryn Johnston was no drug dealer — the officers decided to cover it all up. They left Johnston to bleed to death on the floor of her own home, while one officer planted marijuana in her basement.

When the informant Alex White saw the report about Johnston’s death on TV, he made the connection and quickly decided he wanted no part in concealing the killing of an innocent elderly woman. In the days that followed, Alex White — petty thief, two-bit drug dealer, hustler, snitch — would come forward with allegations that would posthumously vindicate Kathryn Johnston. They would also bring down the Atlanta police department’s entire narcotics division.

Alex White: I think justice was served, and it couldn’t have came at a better time. I’m glad that the truth came out, and I got to clear my name out of all this.

News reporter: After five months of living in a hotel room and looking over his shoulder for those who might do him harm, professional informant Alex White is ready to fight publicly against police practices, which drew him into the center of the deadly Neal Street shooting investigation.

Radley Balko: White’s story would launch an investigation that sent shockwaves throughout the country. It exposed widespread corruption and abuses in the Atlanta Police Department, and resulted in the disbanding of the agency’s entire narcotics division. The incident would prove damning not just for Atlanta police, but the city’s courts, prosecutors, and its political leadership.

When the raid on Kathryn Johnston’s house happened, I was just a few years into my career in journalism. I had been covering the rise of violent drug raids on my blog and as a freelance reporter. Kathryn Johnston’s death had every red flag. The idea that this 92-year-old woman was dealing drugs and knowingly took on a team of police officers — well, I guess it was possible. But even at that point in my career, it was clear to me that something had gone terribly wrong.

I started to write about what seemed to be holes in the police account of what happened. The story quickly made national headlines. Then, slowly, we started to learn that, sure enough, things really didn’t happen the way the police had claimed.

News reporter: There are a lot of questions police have yet to answer.

Markel Hutchins (speaking to the news): Assistant Police Chief Alan Dreher, I think, really insulted and offended this family by saying that proper procedure was followed. What kind of proper procedure would lead to the death of a 92-year-old woman in her own home?

Kathryn Johnston’s death illustrates the disregard the drug war nurtures in police for the very people that they claim to be serving.

Radley Balko: The Kathryn Johnston case embodies the worst excesses of the war on drugs. It has militarized and aggressive policing. Abuse of informants. A no-knock “dynamic entry” raid. Rampant police corruption. Perverse incentives and well-intentioned policies with horrific unintended consequences. Her killing is a case study in how the drug war is fought.

Her death illustrates the disregard the drug war nurtures in police for the very people that they claim to be serving, and the people politicians claim to be protecting when they pass and enforce these laws in the first place.

From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage.

I’m Radley Balko. I’m an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years.

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeating drug addiction, but the “war” part of that metaphor quickly became all too literal.

When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and 90s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric, and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections.

All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause. But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage.

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This podcast will look at people who died because of the war on drugs, but didn’t need to. We’ll tell the stories of completely innocent people caught in the drug war crossfire. We’ll also look at the unnecessary deaths of small-time users and offenders, and of people who legitimately used illicit drugs as medication. We’ll look at cops who were needlessly killed. And we’ll look into the thousands of people U.S. drug policy has unnecessarily killed in other countries.

The legacy of the drug war now rests in the hands of Donald Trump, whose administration has wasted no time expanding law enforcement power with little regard for the human cost.

This is Episode One: Dirty Business: The Atlanta narcotics unit’s deadly raid on Kathryn Johnston.

Markel Hutchins: Ms. Johnston was clearly a person that was full of life. She was vivacious. Although she was 92 years old, she was not someone that was broken down.

Radley Balko: That’s Rev. Markel Hutchins, a civil rights activist who became a spokesperson for Kathryn Johnston’s family after her death. Today, he’s the head of MovementForward Inc., a civil rights group in Atlanta.

Markel Hutchins: She didn’t have a lot of illness. She’d not been in the hospital. She wasn’t sick. She would dance and like music.

Radley Balko: Johnston had no children and was fiercely independent. Even in her 90s, she did her own cooking and cleaning.

Markel Hutchins: Ms. Johnston would regularly work at the daycare. And she was not some meek little woman that needed somebody to protect her, somebody to care for her, anything like that. She was full of life, which is what made Kathryn Johnston’s death so tragic.

Radley Balko: In 1989, Johnston moved into a small, yellow brick house on Neal Street owned by her niece. The house was in a neighborhood known as The Bluff, named for the narrow streets that run up and down its hills. It’s a historically Black part of town, where graduates of Morehouse and Spelman colleges bought houses and made lives for themselves in the late 1800s. But The Bluff and adjacent neighborhoods hit hard times in the 1970s as the city’s wealth fled to the suburbs.

News archive: The Atlanta Planning Department has warned that if this trend continues, it’s just a matter of time until Atlanta will become an island of Negroes surrounded by a sea of white suburbanites.

Radley Balko: Then, in the late 1980s, the city cleared an adjacent Black neighborhood to make way for a football stadium and a convention hall. Despite promises of a spillover economic benefit, the development only served as a barrier between those Black neighborhoods and downtown. Poverty, blight, and crime festered.

Markel Hutchins: The community that Kathryn Johnston lived in was a community that had for decades been under-resourced and under-supported and under-invested in.

Radley Balko: Four years after Johnston’s death, the website NeighborhoodScout.com ranked The Bluff as the fifth most dangerous neighborhood in the United States. Locals joked that........

© The Intercept