The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, also known as the ACLU, released a statement Feb. 25 in opposition to a proposal by the Wisconsin State Assembly that would interfere with local municipalities’ ability to limit no-knock search warrants.
Assembly Bill 834 states that “No city, village, town, or county may adopt an ordinance or policy” in order to prevent law enforcement officers from entering a person’s home before announcing their entrance. The bill also prevents fire and police commissioners from creating regulations to limit officers’ unannounced entries.
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Milwaukee Police and Fire Commission banned the use of no-knock warrants Nov. 18, 2021, after Gov. Tony Evers called for the removal of police chokeholds and no-knock warrants in his Juneteenth announcement the previous year.
Dane County’s District 8 supervisor Carousel Bayrd said in an email statement to The Badger Herald that the Dane County Sheriff’s office told the board it’s committed to not using no-knock search warrants for the preservation of evidence. According to Bayrd, the county follows the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and doesn’t use them to secure evidence.
Bayrd said though AB 834 would allow search warrants to be used for the preservation of evidence, Dane County does not use warrants for drug searches and seizure of evidence.
“I don’t expect anything in this law to change that. But this law goes in the wrong direction,” Bayrd.
The ACLU’s Deputy Executive Director Shaadie Ali said Milwaukee is the only city in Wisconsin to ban the policy. Ali said he considered the proposal to be a reaction to local movements that pushed for ‘Breonna’s Law,’ legislation proposed by Rep. LaKeshia Myers, D – Milwaukee, in 2021 to ban no-knock warrants in Wisconsin.
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“Some of the folks that were looking to pass this bill had even explicitly cited in those terms that they’re doing this in response to what’s happening in Milwaukee, essentially, that they need to rein in these localities and municipalities from passing something like ‘Breonna’s Law,’” Ali said.
Brett Hankison, the only officer who was charged for the police raid that killed Breonna Taylor in 2020, was found not guilty of endangering Taylor’s three neighbors March 3. None of the officers responsible for the raid were charged for the murder of Taylor.
Ali said he views the progress that has been made in Milwaukee in an optimistic light and that there have been versions of Breonna’s laws reaching discussions in the state legislature.
“But I think seeing this bill get introduced in the legislature is a really difficult reminder of how fragile that progress can be,” Ali said. “This really is a move to roll back the admittedly … modest, but important progress that’s been made around police raids and police violence in the execution of warrants.”
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ACLU’s denouncement of AB 834 came a month after the murder of Amir Locke, a Black man a team of SWAT officers killed after entering his apartment in Minneapolis to serve a no-knock search warrant.
The Hennepin County medical examiner said Locke died of multiple gunshot wounds and ruled the death a homicide. NPR reported the officer in charge of the case has been put on administrative leave during the investigation.
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According to an investigation conducted by the ACLU based on data from 2011-2012, 62% of SWAT deployments are for the purpose of drug searches. The report also found that 42% of people affected by no-knock warrants were Black and 12% were Latinine — meaning at least 54% of everyone subject to no-knock warrants were racial minorities.
“There’s an abundance of data showing how no-knock warrants are much more likely to be applied for and executed against people of color, especially Black people,” Ali said. “And then beyond that, we also know that Black people, when no-knock warrants are executed, are much more likely to have something tragic happen to them.”
Ali said no-knock warrants are related to the history of the war on drugs, as it allows law enforcement to focus on “maintaining evidence integrity” by raiding a home that may be possessing drugs. No-knock search warrants were first authorized in Wisconsin in 1997, in Richards v. Wisconsin case.
“Whenever we see a tragedy as a result of [no-knock warrants], I think it’s important to keep in mind that this is us prioritizing the criminalization of drugs over people’s lives — especially Black people’s lives — in a material way.”
