Today's topic is "No-Knock Entries". It's a police/SWAT term. You ever watch cops on TV who gather in front of a door, bang on the door and shout "This is the police! Open up!" and then the camera cuts to the guy in the apartment going "Oh shit!" and running out the back exit? And you start thinking that those cops are morons, and they should have just burst in? Well, it turns out there's a reason they do that. The police have experimented with so called no-knock entries, and the results didn't turn out so good.

The problem mainly comes when you've got the wrong house, and live in a country where citizens are legally allowed to carry firearms. Let's say you're one such citizen who owns a firearm, and you alone live in a bad neighborhood, a neighborhood where drug dealers, muggers, robbers, rapists and other criminals might live. You hear a window break or a door getting kicked down, and you hear some footsteps running around in your house. Your first reaction is to reach for your gun, right? And as soon as some sorry bastard pops their head in, you'll either shoot them, or, if you're "kind-hearted", shoot a warning shot into the air. Well, if the people who broke into your house are armed, they're going to get startled by the gunshot and shoot back.

On Nov. 21 of last year, Atlanta police planted marijuana on Fabian Sheats, a "suspected street dealer." They told Sheats they would let him go if he "gave them something." Sheats obligingly lied that he had spotted a kilogram of cocaine nearby, giving them the address of the elderly spinster Miss Kathryn Johnston, who neither used nor dealt drugs, but who did live in fear of break-ins in her crime-infested neighborhood.

Police then lied to a judge, claiming they had actually purchased drugs at the Johnston house, acquired one of those once-rare "no-knock" warrants, and violently battered down the reinforced metal door of a private home where there were no drugs.

Miss Johnston fired a warning shot at the unknown people busting down her door. That bullet lodged in the roof of her porch, injuring no one. Police replied by firing 39 rounds at her, hitting her five times, and wounding each other with another five rounds – though they lied and said they’d been shot by Miss Johnston.

They then handcuffed the old woman as she bled to death on the floor, and searched her house.

‘No-Knock’ Searches Get People Killed

Meantime, a black man named Cory Maye was still sitting on death row in Mississippi, the last I heard, because he heard men trying to break into his Prentiss, Miss. home late at night in December of 2001, where he was alone with his 18-month-old baby daughter.

Mr. Maye, who had no criminal record, got the child down onto the floor and lay down beside her to protect her. When one of the men finally broke into the bedroom, Cory Maye shot and killed him.

The man was hit in the abdomen, just below his bulletproof vest, and died a short time later. It turns out the man who had failed to knock and identify himself before breaking in was a cop, who was really after suspects in the other half of the duplex where Cory Maye lived. Turns out the cop was the white son of the white chief of police. An all-white jury sentenced Cory Maye, who is black, to death for exercising his right to defend his locked home and family against violent invasion by an unknown intruder. The all-white jury took only a few hours to do so, at least one juror explaining he wanted to get home for supper.

‘No-Knock’ Searches Get People Killed

While I don't want to belittle the race issues, or the corruptness of cops, they are really irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make. Even in a society where everyone's intentions are good, no-knock entries can end up causing "unintended deaths".

What do I mean by "unintended deaths"? If we have a simplifying model of "good guys" and "bad guys", an unintended death is a good guy killing another good guy. E.g. a cop shooting a civilian who happened to be holding a gun, or a civilian shooting a cop. If a cop shoots a bad guy, or a bad guy shoots a cop, that's an "intentional death". Arguably, unintentional deaths are worst than intentional deaths, both from the perspective of the person who got killed and from the perspective of the person doing the killing: From the victim's point of view, bad guys "deserve" to die (it's more complicated than that, I know, but I don't really want to get into this for this post), and cops "expect" the possibility of dying as part of their work, but civilians neither deserve nor expect to die. From the killer's point of view, if a bad guy kills a cop, they won't feel remorse, whereas a civilian may feel remorse for killing a cop, and vice versa.