Copyright The Intercept
In June 2010, Las Vegas police conducted a no-knock raid on Trevon Cole’s apartment, where he lived with his nine-months-pregnant fiancée. Cole, who occasionally sold small amounts of marijuana, rushed to the bathroom to flush a bag down the toilet. An officer followed and shot him in the head, killing him. Cole was unarmed. The officer claimed Cole made a “furtive” movement, but others present, including Cole’s fiancée, never heard any warning. Cole had no prior criminal record, but police secured the warrant by falsely linking him to a different Trevon Cole with a criminal history in Texas. Despite the clear misidentification and Cole’s lack of threat, a coroner’s inquest cleared the officer, who had previously shot two other men, killing one. This episode of Collateral Damage, hosted by Radley Balko, examines how the courts have failed to protect the Fourth Amendment in drug cases, featuring interviews with constitutional law scholars, Cole’s fiancée, and the daughter she was carrying during the raid, now a teenager. Transcript Radley Balko: At the time Trevon Cole was shot and killed by a Las Vegas police officer, he and his fiancée Sequoia Pearce were sketching out plans for a life together. The couple was engaged, and she was 40 weeks pregnant with their first child. Sequoia Pearce: We were high school sweethearts. I was 40 weeks pregnant, so my due date was any day. Radley Balko: They had moved to Vegas from Los Angeles so Pearce could be closer to her mother. With a baby on the way, it seemed important to be close to family. Sequoia Pearce: He was a family man. Like, he loved his mother. He was the person who got me more family-oriented — that’s what moved us to Vegas. Radley Balko: Cole was 21 years old and worked at a “True Religion” clothing store. Pearce was just 20. Sequoia Pearce: Trevon was just full of life. Like, he was full of life. Everyone knew him. He was very popular. Radley Balko: On the night of June 11, 2010, Cole and Pearce were watching TV in their home. At around 9 p.m., their peaceful evening was abruptly interrupted. Sequoia Pearce: We were hanging out, watching TV, laying in bed. We heard like an aggressive knock on the door. And then we heard like glass shatter. So we kind of like, felt like someone was coming in on us, and we didn’t know like if we were being robbed. Radley Balko: The couple jumped from the bed. Cole soon realized that the men breaking into their home were the police. Sequoia Pearce: He was like, “Babe, where, where’s my weed?” And I was like, “I don’t know.” Radley Balko: Cole had a bag of marijuana, about 7 grams’ worth — a typical amount for personal use. At the time, in 2010, cannabis was legal in Nevada for medicinal purposes but not for recreational use. Cole wanted to get rid of his pot before the cops could find it. Sequoia Pearce: I ran into the closet, and then he ran into the restroom. Radley Balko: As the raid team battered down the door and made their way through the house, Cole knelt down by the toilet and tried to flush the marijuana. Sequoia Pearce: So I was in the furthest room of the apartment. So the first officers had their guns drawn and told me to get out the closet. And then as I got out of the closet, I stepped into our bedroom. The way, the facing of where I was in the bedroom, I can see inside the restroom. So when the officer kicked the door open and said “Freeze” and when Trevon raised his hands, it was just — the guys just shot him, and then the whole house just went silent. Radley Balko: Las Vegas Metro Police Officer Bryan Yant had shot Trevon Cole in the face. The bullet pierced Cole’s cheek before burrowing into his neck. He died at the scene. Sequoia Pearce: After they kicked the door in and shot Trevon, they dragged me out of the house. I had on shorts and a tank top. And initially, I was sitting in front of the apartment, and one of the officers just kept staring at me. I’ll never forget this guy’s face. Radley Balko: Pearce was shocked, angry, and confused. Sequoia Pearce: He’s like, “I believe they did say there’s someone in the house deceased.” I’m like, “No, it’s not. No, it’s not.” I was like, “No, it’s not.” At some point, I figured something went wrong. And then from there, I don’t know if mentally I kind of shut out because I literally — I can say, like, when my mom came to get me from the scene, I really kind of wasn’t really aware of what just had happened before my eyes. Radley Balko: Pearce had just watched the father of her soon-to-be born daughter, shot to death, right in front of her, while he knelt beside a toilet. She didn’t understand. Why had the police raided their home? Why didn’t they knock and let someone answer the door? Why had they opened fire so quickly? Reporter: It wasn’t long after the shooting at this apartment complex that the family of the victim started having questions. Sequoia Pearce [in news spot]: There was no weapons, no, like, Level 4 drugs. The only thing in there was marijuana because I knew he smoked. Radley Balko: It would be bad enough if this had been your typical, hyped-up, no-knock raid by overly gung ho cops relying on sketchy information. Or another example of cops misconstruing an innocent gesture for a “furtive” one, then shooting an unarmed man, as Yant claimed. That was common enough at the time, particularly in Las Vegas. But in this case, Yant had also misled a judge to get permission for their violent raid by pointing to the criminal history of an entirely different Trevon Cole. 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 defeat drug addiction, but the “war” part 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 had 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 is Episode 5, “What Fourth Amendment? How the Killing of Trevon Cole Almost Made Prime-Time TV.” Andre Lagomarsino: I remember first hearing about this incident because I was watching the NBA finals at the time, and a newsflash came over television about the shooting that involved Trevon Cole. Newscaster: Tonight, Action News is learning new details in the Metro shooting death of a suspected drug dealer last week. Andre Lagomarsino: Trevon Cole’s family was driving in from California. They were Googling attorneys, and somehow they came across this article where my name was in, and they reached out to us to represent them. Radley Balko: Las Vegas area attorney Andre Lagomarsino. Andre Lagomarsino: And as soon as they got into town, they just came to my office, and that’s where we first met. So we not only became involved in the case and the investigation but trying to figure out, how do we deal with funeral arrangements, and how do we help the family get counseling, and how do we comfort them? Radley Balko: Pearce spoke briefly to the press after Cole’s death. But with her baby arriving the following week, Lagomarsino stepped in as the family’s spokesperson. News reporter: The family’s attorney tells me Trevon Cole had his hands in the air following officers instructions for several seconds before he was shot. But sources close to the investigation say that while they respect the family’s mourning, they stand by their case. Andre Lagomarsino: It was my second case involving the police department. I had been practicing law for about 12 years. And I thought we would get a lot of blowback for representing somebody against the police department. I quickly learned the opposite. Radley Balko: There’s a familiar debate that unfolds after police kill an unarmed person — about whether these sorts of cases are systemic problems, or merely the fault of a few “bad apples.” That can serve as a way for police to minimize abuse and misconduct. But there are a couple important points that get lost in the discourse: First, the aphorism is “A few bad apples spoil the bunch.” The point being, when you fail to remove the rotting apples, the rot eventually takes over the entire barrel. This brings us to the second point: Any system that lets the “bad apples” continue working — or that even rewards or promotes them — is a fundamentally broken system. And in this case, the Las Vegas police department continued to coddle an incredibly rotten apple. Andre Lagomarsino: We got a lot of anonymous calls, actually, from people within the department sharing information. They wouldn’t reveal their names, but they would provide information to us about Mr. Yant. Radley Balko: Bryan Yant, the officer who shot and killed Trevon Cole. Andre Lagomarsino: Detective Yant had a prior history of including false information and documentation that he would submit to the police department. The way we found out about that in this case was other lawyers had contacted me about information that they had discovered in their cases, which involved criminal investigations conducted by Detective Yant, where he would make statements and affidavits that weren’t true. For example, in one case, he made an allegation that somebody was verified to be in Las Vegas at the time a particular incident occurred, and travel records proved that that person was out of the country at the time. Radley Balko: Detective Yant has denied these allegations. We reached out to him for comment, and he didn’t reply. Yant had previously shot three other people — two of them fatally. So in the months after Cole was killed, Lagomarsino had two lines of investigation to pursue: the policies and practices of the Las Vegas police department, and the history of Detective Yant himself. There was one other variable in the raid that took Cole’s life. The week police raided his home, they were being filmed by a crew from the long-running reality TV show “Cops.” [“Cops” theme song “Bad Boys”] Radley Balko: “Cops” first aired in 1989; it features high-drama footage of police making arrests, chasing suspects, negotiating domestic disputes, and so on. It’s one of the longest running TV shows ever. And it has always been controversial for its unrealistic portrayals of policing and for perpetuating racial stereotypes. The show has also been criticized for the effect it can have on the agencies that agree to be filmed — that the prospect of making the final cut can prompt officers and deputies to be more confrontational and aggressive. [“Cops” theme song continues] Narrator: “Cops” is filmed on location as it happens. All suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty, in a court of law. Radley Balko: As it turned out, the “Cops” crew was on another police bust the night Cole was killed, so the actual raid on his home wasn’t filmed. But the week prior, they did record an undercover drug buy from Cole. So there was an incentive for the officers investigating Cole to follow up — and to create the sort of drama that makes for good TV. Andre Lagomarsino: In many cases, police officers love to kick down doors with AR-15s and big guns. They don’t need the show “Cops” to be able to do that, but in this case, we believe there was extra motivation that “Cops” had originally planned to videotape this raid. So they wanted to make it as glamorous and as ratings-worthy as it could be, by using the type of raid that they did to go in and bust somebody who had just sold them a little weed. Radley Balko: And it really wasn’t much pot at all. Over the course of three controlled purchases, Cole had sold undercover police about 2 ounces of marijuana in total. In one instance, Cole didn’t even have an ounce on hand to sell. Sequoia Pearce: When they raided our apartment, we had 7 grams of weed. And like, I can say today, at 34 — like, I wasn’t big on like smoking, so I didn’t really know like how much weed that was — but like, that’s not a lot of weed. That’s like a sitting consumption at some point, if you have a habit. He never had large quantities, like he never had a pound in the house. He never had that. Radley Balko: In order to get a search warrant, Detective Yant had to convince a judge that there was probable cause of a crime. And in order to get a no-knock warrant, he’d have to show that Cole was dangerous. Yant did submit a sworn affidavit claiming that Cole had a lengthy criminal history of sales, possession, and trafficking narcotics in Los Angeles and Houston. But it turns out, that was an entirely different Trevon Cole. Andre Lagomarsino: That statement was completely false. The Trevon Cole whom Yant was interacting with and whom he had allegedly identified had no history of sales and trafficking anywhere. Radley Balko: There was a Trevon Cole in the police database with charges in Texas and California. And in the affidavit, Yant attributed this other man’s criminal history to the Las Vegas Trevon Cole, even though they had different ages, heights, and weights. Andre Lagomarsino: Detective Yant used the criminal history of a different Trevon Cole to be able to get a search warrant approved for basically a break-in of the apartment. Radley Balko: Detective Yant later claimed that it was an accidental case of mistaken identity. Truth be told, Cole probably didn’t even need to be a dangerous kingpin in order for the cops to get a warrant. The legal bar for police to conduct these violent raids has been getting lower and lower for decades, and even when they fail to clear that bar, there’s rarely any accountability. To understand how easy it was for police to conduct the raid that ended Cole’s life, we need to take a quick detour and look at the recent evolution of the Fourth Amendment. David Moran: The election in 1968 is pivotal. Richard Nixon becomes president. He’s running on a tough-on-crime platform. Radley Balko: That’s David Moran. He’s the co-director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic and a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School. He also argued one of the most important cases governing the police use of no-knock raids. David Moran: Richard Nixon becomes president, and he immediately changes the composition of the Supreme Court. He gets to make a series of appointments in his first term that changed the balance of the Supreme Court. Radley Balko: Nixon’s appointment of William Rehnquist in particular was important. Rehnquist would later become chief justice, and under his watch, the court would begin to roll back many of the civil liberties protections it had articulated under Chief Justice Earl Warren. But it was Nixon’s policies that really paved the way for a more aggressive, militarized form of drug policing. In 1968, Nixon ran for president on a platform of cracking down on crime, as well as on anti-war and civil rights activists. Richard Nixon advertisement: We owe it to the decent and law-abiding citizens of America to take the offensive against the criminal forces that threaten their peace and their security, and to rebuild the respect for law across this country. Radley Balko: His campaign attempted to paint all three groups as a public menace by declaring war on drugs — and by targeting marijuana in particular. Richard Nixon: America’s public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage an all-out offensive. Radley Balko: Here’s an excerpt from a 1994 interview of Nixon senior policy adviser John Ehrlichman. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. Radley Balko: One way Nixon planned to crack down on drug offenders was by chipping away at the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. Conservatives at the time — and still today — were particularly angry about the Warren Court’s expansion of the exclusionary rule. This rule states that when police conduct an illegal search, they can’t use any evidence they find in that search against you in court. Proponents of the rule argue that because lawsuits against police officers are so difficult to win, the exclusionary rule is the only real deterrent forcing cops to adhere to the Fourth Amendment. David Moran: The theory being that the police don’t care if money damages are assessed against the state because of a knock-and-announce or other Fourth Amendment violation. The only way to enforce the Fourth Amendment is by telling the police that they’re going to lose the thing they care about, which is the collar — the conviction — or at least the evidence that they seize will be suppressed if they violate the Fourth Amendment. Radley Balko: The knock-and-announce concept Moran references has been a part of American jurisprudence since the country was founded. In fact, it stems from centuries of English common law. The idea is that the home should be a place of peace and sanctuary. If the police want to violate that peace, they should first be required to knock on the door, announce their presence, and give those inside a reasonable amount of time to answer and let them in peacefully. But there have always been exceptions to the rule — special circumstances that allow the police to barge right in. If, for example, the cops determine at the scene that knocking and announcing themselves would put them or somebody in the home at risk, or that it would give a suspect time to destroy evidence, they could enter without knocking. But the Nixon administration pushed a proposal that would allow police to get a judge’s permission ahead of time to enter a home without announcing themselves. The idea was that drug dealers didn’t deserve that sort of consideration. Congress passed a version of Nixon’s no-knock raid into law during his presidency, though the law was ultimately repealed following a series of botched and mistaken raids. But then in the 1980s, the Reagan administration reinvigorated the drug war. Americans were continually fed fearsome, racially coded images of people involved in the use and sale of drugs. Ronald Reagan: This rise in crime, this growth of a hardened criminal class, has partly been the result of misplaced government priorities and a misguided social philosophy. At the root of this philosophy lies utopian presumptions about human nature that see man as primarily a creature of his material environment. By changing this environment through expensive social programs, this philosophy holds that government can permanently change man and usher in an era of prosperity and virtue. Radley Balko: Though Congress never formally reauthorized the no-knock raid policy, state and federal courts allowed them anyway, and so violent entry into private homes to serve narcotics warrants became a primary tool in the drug war. The increase of violent drug raids even became a TV news trope. Police would invite camera crews to join raid teams as they busted into homes. This footage would then be broadcast to millions of Americans, first on the evening national and local news, then in reality police shows like “Cops,” and the various “SWAT” series. News anchor: This kind of break-in is routine in Miami drug raids. [Glass breaking] “Police search warrant, open the door!” [Pounding, smashing, gunshots] Radley Balko: These raids proliferated from a few thousand per year in the late 1980s to 45,000 per year by the mid-2000s. Meanwhile, the courts steadily chipped away at the Fourth Amendment protections that were supposed to govern these kinds of police activity. The entire purpose of the knock-and-announce rule, for example, was to give residents of a home time to come to the door and let police in peacefully. But the courts had slowly been giving police more and more authority to dispense with that rule, or allowed them to break down doors within seconds of announcing. David Moran: So I think there was a consensus that a few eggs have to be cracked in order to get at the drug war. You can’t run an effective war without some casualties. And one of those casualties was the right to be left alone in your home unless something really bad was going on. Radley Balko: In 2006, Moran personally argued a seminal Fourth Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court. It was called Hudson v. Michigan. David Moran: One of the fascinating things that I learned from doing my research when I was preparing to argue Hudson was how venerable the knock-and-announce doctrine was. It came from the era of English common law, not long after the Magna Carta. It was really medieval. I found cases and references by treatise writers from the Middle Ages about how a man’s home is his castle. And the concern with the knock-and-announce rule that planted it firmly in English common law was, if the constable came by or the sheriff came by and knocked your door down, that was really a bad thing. There was no Home Depot you could go to to get your door quickly rebuilt. Your door would then be open to highwaymen and common thieves and wolves and whatever was roaming the moor. So a man’s home is his castle really is a deeply held venerable part of English common law, which we inherited. Radley Balko: The case involved a man named Booker T. Hudson, who was convicted of drug and firearm possession. The police had entered his home without knocking, announcing their presence, or waiting for a response. Hudson argued that, based on the exclusionary rule, the police should not have been permitted to use the incriminating evidence they found against him. The state of Michigan argued that police had violated the rule, but that the contraband they found should still be fair game. Moran was hopeful that the U.S. Supreme Court would make a strong ruling in defense of the exclusionary rule, which he argued was the best way to get police to comply with the knock-and-announce rule. David Moran: And the arguments went very well. I had the strong impression that we had at least five, and probably six, of the justices. Justice O’Connor in particular had spoken out during the arguments in a way that indicated she was leaning in our direction. After the break, a pivotal ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court. [Break] Radley Balko: Three weeks after oral arguments in Hudson v. Michigan, but before the court issued its decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor retired — and was replaced by Samuel Alito. David Moran: And then very shortly after that, in a number of cases, the court ordered reargument. And what that means is that, with Justice O’Connor gone, there’s a 4-4 split, and so the case would have to be reargued in front of Justice Alito, who could make the deciding vote. Radley Balko: Moran would have to go back to the U.S. Supreme Court a second time and argue the same case, four months later. Chief Justice Roberts: We’ll hear reargument this morning in Hudson v. Michigan. Mr. Moran. David Moran [in court]: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: For centuries, the knock-and-announce rule has been a core part of the right of the people to be secure in their houses from unreasonable searches and seizures. It reflects the notion … Radley Balko: The court’s political alignment had been reconfigured by President George W. Bush’s appointee. Alito was far more conservative than O’Connor. David Moran: And we lost 5-4, in an opinion written by Justice Scalia. Radley Balko: The new majority ruled that even if police violate the knock-and-announce rule, the evidence they seize can still be used in court. The ruling didn’t change police behavior overnight, in part because the courts had already been lax in enforcing the Fourth Amendment. But in the two decades since, we’ve seen police departments, prosecutors, and even judges pay less and less attention to the knock-and-announce requirement. Because there’s no longer any real way to enforce it, it’s basically become a right that really only exists on paper. Police departments can be less cautious about corroborating information, about checking to see if there are children or other uninvolved people in a home before conducting one of these violent, volatile raids. Some departments have grown careless, cutting and pasting boilerplate language into search warrant affidavits instead of taking the time to show why an exception is justified in each particular case. I have found numerous examples of this around the country in my own reporting. David Moran: The Fourth Amendment itself hasn’t changed. There hasn’t been a constitutional amendment. The text is exactly the same as it was. But what we’ve seen is that the definition of “unreasonable” has changed. The court has decided that lots of things that we thought were unreasonable before are now reasonable. So I really don’t think the framers or 19th-century or early 20th-century Americans would think, for example, that the police using a piece of military equipment like a tank to conduct an entry into a home would have been a reasonable search and seizure. But now it is. Now, courts have held that the use of overwhelming force — the use of flash-bang grenades, entries that terrify the homeowners, maybe even cause some of them to suffer cardiac arrest — that’s all reasonable. Radley Balko: By 2010, four years after the Hudson decision, Las Vegas Metro police officers conducting narcotics investigation had every incentive to conduct their raids as quickly as possible — to get to the illicit drugs before they could be sold or moved to another location. But there was also no punishment for going too fast. For getting careless or for taking shortcuts. Even if those shortcuts violated the Constitution, any incriminating evidence the officers found could still be used against their suspect. They’d still get their seizure, they’d still get their collar, they’d still get their conviction. Andre Lagomarsino: The Fourth Amendment in Nevada has been severely degraded with the way that the drug war has been pursued. Radley Balko: Lagomarsino took on Cole’s case hoping to hold someone accountable for his death. But as he began investigating, he learned that the killing was about much more than just one problem officer. Andre Lagomarsino: It’s my further view that it’s a systemic issue, meaning that you have overzealous police officers providing evidence to overzealous district attorneys. A lot of those district attorneys then become rubber-stamp judges who may not look at the evidence with the same lens and perspective that a neutral judge or a judge with a criminal defense background may look at it. And so the rights of individual citizens have been degraded along with the Fourth Amendment protections that they’re supposed to protect them with. Radley Balko: When Detective Yant shot and killed Cole, Las Vegas used a process called a coroner’s inquest to investigate deaths in police custody. It’s a somewhat antiquated system in which an appointed county coroner assembles a jury to determine whether a death was justified, excusable, or criminal. Lagomarsino knew the odds were stacked against him. In Clark County, such inquests had nearly always found killings by police officers to be justified. But he also had some reason to hope the inquest would rule against Yant. It wasn’t just that Cole was unarmed, or even that he wasn’t the same Trevon Cole claimed in the search warrant. It was also because Yant’s story just didn’t match the evidence. Yant said Cole stood up and moved as if he was drawing a weapon. But that story was inconsistent with the autopsy results, which showed that the bullet had moved downward through Cole’s body. The medical examiner concluded that Cole was likely “crouched over the toilet,” just as Sequioa Pearce had told the police. Yant also said he was sure he saw something shiny in Cole’s hand — what he thought was a gun. After he was killed, though, the only thing in Cole’s hand was a tube of lip balm. Andre Lagomarsino: No officers ever heard Yant say, “Put your hands up, let me see your hands.” Nobody ever heard anyone yell “gun,” even though it’s Metro policy to do so when a gun is spotted. Radley Balko: In fact, the more information that came out about Cole’s death, the worse it began to look for the police — and for Yant in particular. Then, less than a month after Cole’s death, Las Vegas police killed another man outside of a Costco, a military veteran named Erik Scott. Scott, carrying a permitted gun in his holster, was asked to leave the store. Police confronted him after a Costco employee reported that he was acting erratically. Douglas Gillespie: In the past 34 days, we at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department have had more than 325,000 calls for service. In that time, we have had five officer-involved shootings. Radley Balko: Sheriff Doug Gillespe tried to reassure the public with a video statement. Douglas Gillespie: I need to allow the investigation to take place and the inquest process to be completed before I speak. I know some lack confidence in the coroner’s inquest process. But it is the process that we have. Radley Balko: There were plenty of reasons to be skeptical. Clark County’s inquest system was instituted in response to public outrage after a white police officer killed a Black teenager in 1969. That killing was deemed justified. But so have nearly all of the others. In an investigative series published a year after Cole’s death, the Las Vegas Review-Journal found that the city’s police were responsible for a disproportionately high number of killings, and that many could have been prevented. Yet in the 40 years since the inquest system was implemented, just once had it found a police officer killing unjustified, and even that officer was never criminally charged. Andre Lagomarsino: Trevon Cole’s case followed decades of shootings, decades of police misconduct that went unpunished. Of all the officer-involved shootings, nobody was ever held accountable. Radley Balko: The inquest system is unique to Las Vegas and mirrors an antiquated system once used in England. Under the rules of the inquest, family members and attorneys can submit written questions as part of the process, but a prosecutor ultimately conducts the questioning. There’s no cross-examination and only limited follow-up. Ultimately, the prosecutor decides whether the officer in question will be charged. Cole’s inquest came first and lasted two days. The outcome was the same as nearly all the others. Newscaster: Good evening, and thanks for joining us tonight. A Metro officer at the center of his third shooting was found justified in the latest coroner’s inquest. An eight-person jury said Officer Bryan Yant was within his rights to kill 21-year-old Trevon Cole while executing a search warrant back in June. Radley Balko: A few months later, Metro police’s Use of Force board — the department’s internal disciplinary system — also cleared Yant of any wrongdoing in Cole’s death. As for Erik Scott, the inquest had ruled police were justified in killing him too. But the department’s prolific rate of killing people combined with the county’s prolific rate of clearing police officers was starting to draw scrutiny. The county ultimately decided that the inquest system needed reform. Sheriff Gillespie pledged that he was listening — that the department was evolving. Douglas Gillespie: We saw opportunities to improve and created the Critical Incident Review Team, CIRT. The findings of the CIRT team and the use of force board help us continue to learn from these incidents and how to improve upon our tactics, training, and decision-making in the future. We’re also making a change to how we respond to officer-involved shootings by creating a force investigation team. This team, made up of experienced homicide investigators, will only respond to officer-involved shootings and other use-of-force incidents. Radley Balko: But then, in late 2011, another police killing. Las Vegas police shot and killed Stanley Gibson, a veteran experiencing mental illness, as he sat in his car. The U.S. Department of Justice finally stepped in and opened a six-month investigation of the department and focused specifically on the use of force. Bernard Melekian: We went back to the year 2007, with a careful eye on the history of how the department instructed officers on use of force. Radley Balko: Here’s Bernard Melekian, director of the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Police Services office. Bernard Melekian: That review has culminated in a report being distributed today. An extensive analysis that identifies 75 findings and recommendations. Radley Balko: The report included a number of recommendations, from better training on racial profiling and deescalation, to analyzing use of force data, to being more transparent with the public. Sheriff Gillespie said the department “embraced the report.” Douglas Gillespie: I think we have already seen the transformation taking place. I think we as a police department are being more critical of our use of force. And we are admitting when we don’t do things well. Andre Lagomarsino: Inch by inch there is progress. And there have been somewhat reduced-officer involved shootings because of the reforms. So reforms do work, but progress takes a really long time. And it’s almost like whack-a-mole where, yes, you might stop and prevent some more officer-involved shootings, but other problems arise with unwarranted stops, detentions, arrests, and beatings. Radley Balko: In 2013, the county replaced the coroner’s inquest system with a fact-finding review process led by the district attorney’s office. By most accounts, Las Vegas Metro police are less violent today than they were back in 2010, when they killed Trevon Cole. That year there were 25 officer-involved shootings. In 2023, there were only 10. But last year there was a slight uptick, despite a decline in crime. Progress has been slow. In 2021, the Internal Affairs Bureau released its first-ever accountability report, detailing complaints against police officers and the outcomes of internal investigations. The police had promised to make this an annual report. But the department then decided the report didn’t meet its “business needs.” And so the department hasn’t published another report since. Andre Lagomarsino: This case happened in 2010, but even today, whether it’s a raid or just an arrest or a stop, the police department continues to stop, detain, and arrest individuals without probable cause. We have several cases in our office now that are captured on body cam, where the officers will stop, for example, motorists, who may look “shady,” in their words, or pedestrians who may look like “rappers,” in their words, and just stop, detain, search, and rough up these citizens. Radley Balko: The Las Vegas criminal justice system has continued to routinely violate the rights of suspected drug offenders in other ways too. In 2016, the journalism nonprofit ProPublica published a damning report. It found that since the 1990s, Vegas metro police was one of several law enforcement agencies across the country that had been using drug field test kits known to produce false positives. These false positives were then used to arrest people, confiscate property under asset forfeiture laws, obtain search warrants, and coerce people into plea bargains. Reporter: Here is how the field drug tests work. Officers drop the substance into this small bag. If a vial changes color, that indicates the presence of an illegal drug. Radley Balko: In 2024, NBC reported on a Quattrone Center study with Penn university revealing that nearly half of the 1.5 million annual drug-related arrests involve field tests. Of those, approximately 30,000 arrests came from false positives. Reporter: How significant is that number? Ross Miller: For one thing, it’s not a number. It’s 30,000 people. That’s 30,000 times a year that the criminal justice system is getting it wrong. Radley Balko: The really damning part is that ProPublica uncovered communications showing that in Las Vegas, city officials knew about the false positives. By 2010, the city crime lab wanted to abandon the test kits, and in 2014 it documented the problem in a report to the U.S. Department of Justice. Yet the city continued using the tests. Between 2013 and 2015 alone, they were used to help win more than 10,000 drug convictions — 99 percent of those were through guilty pleas. Here’s ProPublica reporter Ryan Gabrielson, discussing the problem in an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Ryan Gabrielson: Wrongful convictions on a level we don’t know. because the Las Vegas crime lab does not retest the field test results after somebody pleads guilty — and more than two-thirds of cases are ended by guilty plea at the first hearing. So the vast majority of drug evidence in Las Vegas never gets tested, these field tests never get rechecked even though they’re known to produce false positives. Radley Balko: Four years later, even as the city had begun overturning some of these convictions, police told ProPublica that they were still using the faulty kits. While the field tests weren’t a factor in Cole’s case, they highlight a broader problem: a department that views the rights of suspected drug offenders as negotiable barriers to work around rather than fundamental protections enshrined in the Constitution. In 2011, Trevon Cole’s family sued the police department. They eventually settled with the county for $1.7 million. And as for Detective Yant? Andre Lagomarsino: He was moved over to the police union, where he now advises officers who are involved in officer-involved shootings. Radley Balko: In fact, Yant’s bio on the police union website proudly notes that he was trained by the Force Science Institute, an organization profiled in the New York Times for routinely justifying police shootings and misconduct. The Justice Department has criticized the group’s theories as “lacking in both foundation and reliability.” Most officers never fire their guns over the course of an entire career. Yet after shooting three people on duty, one of whom was unarmed, Yant now makes his living as an expert in police shootings. Here’s a clip from a Las Vegas police union video. LVPPA: As you can imagine, that officer is in a very difficult predicament, in as much as the officer doesn’t believe that he used reportable force at all. So, we have use-of-force experts at PPA. We have Detective Brian Yant who has been certified by Force Science. Andre Lagomarsino: It’s often asked why detective Yant was still allowed to be an officer after his prior shootings and his prior false statements. And nobody really has a straight answer to that. The best answer that I could ever come up with is that the police union in Las Vegas, and particularly Nevada, is extremely strong. They have an officer’s bill of rights, even, enshrined in the Nevada revised statutes. And so it’s my belief that the union’s power was able to allow Detective Yant to continue to be an officer, even though he had no business being a police officer. Sequoia Pearce: It’s just crazy how you can just get away with murder on more than one occasion just because you have a badge. I just feel like they can do whatever they want to do. They can break all the rules and still end up winning in the end. Radley Balko: Incredibly, in 2022 Yant and the police union sued the Metropolitan Police Department for violating the rights of police officers who were under investigation for misconduct. We reached out to the Metro police and the police union for comment. They’ve declined. Sequioa Pearce doesn’t live in Las Vegas anymore. But Trevon Cole will never be far from her life. He was, of course, her fiancée. And she endured the trauma of witnessing his death. But she also sees a part of him every day. Kalynn: I wouldn’t consider myself an activist, but I would consider myself an example. Radley Balko: That’s the voice of Trevon Cole and Sequoia Pearce’s daughter, Kalynn. We didn’t expect to talk to her for this podcast. But while we were interviewing Pearce, Kalynn dropped by the recording studio and, with her mother’s permission, she was happy to talk about her dad — and at the time we talked, police in Illinois had just killed a woman named Sonya Massey in her home. Kalynn brought up the case. Kalynn: OK, so I’m Kalynn and I’m 14. Radley Balko: Hi, Kalynn, I’m Radley. Thanks for talking to us. Yeah, we were just talking about what happened to your dad. And your mom was telling us when you first heard about it, she said, I think, you were 3. I guess I’m just curious — we’ve heard lots of great things about your dad and that he was really full of life and a really kind person. How does his memory play into your life? Do you think about him often? Kalynn: I mean, it’s not that I think about him often, it’s that I wonder very often, especially because I didn’t really get to meet him. You see pictures, people tell you stories and stuff like that. And a lot of people tell me I remind them of him. Even though I know what he looks like and things of that sort, it’s still a — I’m looking for the word. It’s still a mystery in a way. Radley Balko: Knowing what happened to him, has that made you at all interested in learning about police abuse and cases like that, or is it just too difficult? Kalynn: Honestly, the story about Sonya Massey, is that her name? Radley Balko: The most recent case, yeah. Kalynn: The most recent case. When I heard about it, it was just like it was, it was kind of, I wouldn’t say triggering for me, but it was just like, “Dang, it happened again.” News Anchor: People who attended rallies and vigils across the country yesterday are demanding justice for Sonya Massey. The 36-year-old is dead after calling 9-1-1 for help earlier this month and getting shot by a sheriff’s deputy in her own home. Reporter: Dozens gathered for a Justice for Sonya Massey rally after the mother of two was shot and killed by a downstate deputy earlier this month. Demonstrators coming together demanding Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill that aims to combat police misconduct, excessive force, and racial bias in law enforcement. Kalynn: It was a similar story, but it wasn’t a similar story. And it was just — it was just really something that happens way too often. Radley Balko: Because she was born so soon after her father was killed, Kalynn’s birthday celebrations will always be somewhat muted by her dad’s death. Here’s her mom, Sequoia Pearce. Sequoia Pearce: I could honestly say I never really grieved because shortly after, I was a mom five days later. So I didn’t really — I beat myself up to not sink into postpartum because at that time I had newly started hearing about people having postpartum, and I just like had to force myself to like grow up. Radley Balko: The 20-year-old Sequioa Pearce was forced to grow up fast after her fiancee’s death. Kalynn grew up without her biological dad. And we’ll never know what kind of father Trevon Cole may have been. When we talk about the collateral damage of the drug war, it’s not just those who were killed. It’s the friends and family left behind. It’s the intergenerational trauma, and family ties hacked off before they can bloom. Sequoia Pearce: I don’t want anyone to forget about him. But I do want people to know that there are injustices and there are real victims. We are the real victims here. We have to figure life out, and we’re still figuring it out, after they could just do what they want to do. They can falsify things and come after the wrong person and create this character and do what they want to do. I just feel like people need to know. They need to know. Radley Balko: Next time on Collateral Damage. Pilot 1: We’re trying to remain covert at this point. Pilot 2: See, I don’t know if this is Bandido or if it’s Amigo. Pilot 1: I recommend we follow him. I do not recommend Phase 3 at this time. Ian Vasquez: The drug war creates all sorts of innocent victims. Jan Schakowsky: We have spent billions of taxpayer dollars, employed personnel from numerous agencies around the world, and the drugs continue to flow into the United States. Are the Bowers acceptable collateral damage in this war on drugs? Radley Balko: Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept. It was reported and written by me, Radley Balko. Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer, who also served as producer and editor. Laura Flynn is our show runner. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief: The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal. We had editing support from Maryam Saleh. Truc Nguyen mixed our show. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow. Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan. Art direction by Fei Liu. Illustrations by Tara Anand. Copy editing by Nara Shin. Social and video media by Chelsey B. Coombs. Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance. This series was made possible by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund. If you want to send us a message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com To continue to follow my work and reporting, check out my newsletter, The Watch, at radleybalko.substack.com. Thank you for listening.
