Howard County Police Chief William McMahon defended a Jan. 15 tactical team raid on an Elkridge home in which a dog was fatally shot.

“From what I know about this, this was an appropriate use of tactical,” McMahon said last Friday during an interview, his first comments on the police raid. “We had stolen weapons that could present a danger to the community, so it was important for us to get them.”

On Jan. 15, police raided the home of Mike Hasenei, 39, of the 6600 block of Deep Run Parkway, looking for a rifle and other police gear. The rifle and gear had been stolen from two marked police cars reportedly broken into on Jan. 14 in the Elkridge community of Mayfield. No arrests have been made.

During the raid, police shot and killed Hasenei’s Australian cattle dog.

After the raid, Hasenei filed a complaint with the police’s internal affairs division, which is still being investigated, McMahon said.
 
The raid, reported first in the Howard County Times Feb. 5 and later by two local television stations, sparked a sometimes heated debate on the newspaper’s Web site (explorehoward.com) that eventually grew to 83 comments.

On Monday, Hasenei said he was unimpressed with the chief’s explanation.
 
“I think it’s a joke,” he said. “I understand looking for stolen weapons but how they got my address in this is bewildering. I didn’t resist arrest. ... You didn’t identify yourselves. It doesn’t give you a right to hit me and it doesn’t give them the right to shoot my dog.”

Added Hasenei: “I still haven’t had a ‘sorry’ or an explanation of this yet.”

McMahon said that “nobody feels good about” the dog that was killed.

“Probably the person who feels worst about it is the person that did it,” he said. “The vast majority of times when we’re confronted with animals we don’t shoot them. We’re able to secure them, put them in a separate room.”

Hasenei had noted that he was a legal gun owner and said that was no reason for police to break down his door, but McMahon said police do not break down doors just because a resident owns a gun.

“I don’t think we’ve ever broken a door down just because somebody had a registered gun,” McMahon said.

McMahon said bringing animal control officers to the scene of a tactical team’s raid could be “appropriate at times,” but practical matters like securing the animal control officers’ safety and the availability of such an officer when the raid occurs make it difficult.

“I hate to say, ‘Yes, we should have had them there,’ because that may not be true,” McMahon said. “If you’re going in there because you think there’s a danger and you think there may be weapons in the house, we need to be very careful about who else we bring into the threshold of that event until it’s secure.”

McMahon said his seven-member tactical team consists of some of the most highly trained officers in the department. He said the team is sometimes backed up by a 16-member support team.

“We want people that have proven sound judgment, sound use-of-force decisions, sound decision-making, maturity, responsibility,” he said. “Just because you’re a great shooter or you’re a 6-foot-4, 280-pound bodybuilder, that’s not getting you on the team.”

In Howard County and nationwide, the use of police tactical teams has expanded in the past few decades.

Tim Lynch, an attorney and director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s project on criminal justice, said tactical teams originated in the 1970s to be used in hostage and barricade situations. They were modeled after a team assembled by the Los Angeles Police Department, he said.

Gradually, Lynch said, the teams began to be used in more and more situations, such as when serving warrants.
 
“The original idea was to have in place specialized teams in extraordinary situations that went beyond the expertise of the average patrolmen,” he said.
 
Lynch said the expanded use of tactical teams is troubling because it has increased the “militarization” of the police, which creates a battlefield mentality.

“We think that when police adopt the tactics of the military, there’s a disdain towards constitutional rights and a mentality of looking towards the public as the enemy, rather than people who have constitutional rights,” he said.

In 2008, the Howard County police tactical team was used 108 times, according to police spokeswoman Sherry Llewellyn.
 
The team was used in hostage or barricade situations, when serving search and seizure warrants and in vehicle entries, which could occur when tactical officers remove violent crime suspects under surveillance from a car at a traffic stop.

Figures on the use of tactical teams in previous years were not immediately available.

McMahon said that since Howard County began its tactical team in 1975, “probably there’s been  some expanded use, but I think there’s reason for that. There’s a higher propensity for violence.

“Many of these search warrants are drug-related. And I think there’s a higher correlation now between drug activity, drug transactions and weapons.”

McMahon himself was on the team in the early and mid-1990s, and later came back to supervise it, he said.

“I’ve certainly seen the term ‘cowboy’ thrown around and I think that’s completely inaccurate and insulting,” he said.

By Mike Santa Rita
msantarita@patuxent.com
Posted 2/24/09