You can bet the house, five years’ salary and your first-born child on it: Prince George’s County police will NEVER give us the answer to these two questions:
1. Why didn’t the officers who raided the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo contact the police chief of Berwyn Heights?
2. Why didn’t police knock and announce to gain entry to Calvo’s house, instead of going cowboy, bursting in with guns drawn and then greasing the mayor’s two Labrador retrievers?
I wrote about the raid — and the anti-marijuana obsession that inspired it — on Thursday. But the two questions above have bothered me ever since I heard about the raid.
So I called the public information office of the Prince George’s County Police Department last week to ask those two questions, because asking public officials annoying questions is what journalists are supposed to do.
A very gracious gentleman named Cpl. Clinton Copeland took my call and referred me to a press release on the department’s Web site.
“We probably won’t be making any comments other than what’s in the press release,” Copeland said.
So I went to the Web site and found the press release. Here’s part of what it said:
“Prince George’s County Police Chief Melvin C. High said that the Department’s Narcotics Enforcement Division arrested two suspects in the drug parcel delivery scheme investigation in Berwyn Heights that included a parcel delivered to Trinity Tomsic, the wife of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo.
“High said he called Mayor Calvo to inform him that in the Department’s screening of the case with the State’s Attorney’s Office, it was concluded that Ms. Tomsic and the Calvo family were the innocent victims of drug traffickers.
“High said ‘The Calvo family members were the apparent victims of a local drug ring. I called [Calvo] to express my sorrow and regret for that and for the loss of the family’s two beloved dogs.’ The chief said that the Department is conducting a thorough review of the drug interdiction operation that lead (LORDY!) investigators to the Calvo home.”
I inserted the “LORDY!” in the above passage to express my dismay at those folks who don’t know that the past tense of the verb “to lead” is spelled l-e-d. But there are more important matters than spelling here. Not the least among them is the language in the press release.
Notice the phrase “a thorough review of the drug interdiction operation that led investigators to the Calvo home.” A more correct phrasing would be “the Brobdingnagian SNAFU that led police to jackboot their way into the home of an innocent family.”
Guess the PGPD and I will have to agree to disagree on that one. But here’s the most important issue: Why didn’t police knock and announce before entering the Calvo-Tomsic household?
Knock and announce is not some mere police courtesy. It’s actually the law of the land. Cops in PG County — and Chief High might want to be the first — need to look it up. The Supreme Court made that principle clear even as justices ruled for police in Wilson v. Arkansas, and affirmed “sanctity of the home” in subsequent rulings.
The 1995 Wilson decision stated that, in most cases, police do indeed have to knock and announce before entering a home with a search warrant. The court was unanimous. The much-maligned Justice Clarence Thomas, reputed to be the most conservative member of the Court, wrote the only exceptions are when police can prove they had good reason to believe officer safety would be compromised or easily disposable evidence destroyed. And if that’s the argument the cops who raided the Calvo-Tomsic home are going to use, they’d better be prepared to back up the claim.
But they won’t have to. The last line of the press release contains the ominous sentence “the investigation is continuing.”
When public officials tell us “the investigation is continuing,” you can translate that to mean they’re not going to tell us a darned thing about what they’re up to. It’s a way to avoid accountability. You can rest assured that PG police will “investigate” this matter until it fades from public memory.
There is no good answer to what PG police did in Berwyn Heights, so they came up with the answer they were sure would fly: The investigation is continuing.
So is, I can only hope, the lawsuit Calvo and Tomsic are sure to file.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Maryland and Baltimore for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
