Episode One: Dirty Business

In 2006, a 93-year-old Atlanta woman was gunned down in her own home by police during a drug raid. The police initially claimed the woman is a marijuana dealer who fired a gun at them. The story might have ended there. But a shady informant bravely came forward to set the record straight. Subsequent investigations and reports revealed that the police had raided the wrong home, killed an innocent woman, then planted marijuana in her basement to cover up their mistake.

In the ensuing months, we’d learn that the Atlanta police department’s narcotics unit routinely conducted mistaken raids on terrified people. The problem was driven by perverse federal, state, and local financial incentives that pushed cops to take shortcuts in procuring warrants for drug raids in order to boost their arrest and seizure statistics. Most of those incentives are still in place today.

The raids haven’t stopped. And neither have the deaths.

Transcript

Radley Balko: It’s November 22, 2006, the day before Thanksgiving. Alex White, a hustler and small-time drug dealer sits in the back of an Atlanta Police Department squad car.

As the car stops in front of The Varsity — a burger joint in downtown Atlanta — White rolls down the window, grabs the exterior handle, and pops open the door. Then he runs. The officers abandon their car in the middle of the street and give chase. 

White rushes into the burger spot and exits out the back. The officers follow. White eventually loses them long enough to duck behind a gas station. He then makes this remarkable phone call to 911.

Operator: [Unintelligible] How can I help you? 

Alex White: Yes, yes. I have two, two cops chasing me. They, they, they on the dirty side. I have two undercover police officers chasing me. One of ’em name is Detective — 

Operator: Are they chasing you now? 

Alex White: Yes. I just jumped out the car with ’em. See, I’m working with —

Operator: OK. Are you wanted?

Alex White: Huh? 

Operator: Are you wanted, sir?

Alex White: No, no, ma’am. No, ma’am. I’m not wanted at all. You —

Operator: OK. So you’re calling the police to the police …

Radley Balko: Alex White was calling 911 on the police officers who had detained him. His years as a narcotics informant had just taken a dangerous turn. And he was scared.

Operator: OK, sir, hold on. I can send you an officer. What’s your location? There’s nothing — 

Alex White: I can’t tell you that. I can’t tell you that. 

Operator: OK, sir. This is the police. We send officers out when you dial 911. 

Alex White: OK. OK. 

Operator: You want to talk to someone at a precinct? 

Alex White: I’m waiting on the ATF, I mean, I’m on North Avenue, waiting on ATF to come pick me up.

Operator: You waiting for ATF? 

Radley Balko: White’s work as an informant usually went like this: In exchange for a small payout, he would tip the cops off to other drug dealers. According to White, the police let him continue to sell drugs, as long as he cut them in. He’d also occasionally go undercover to buy drugs on behalf of law enforcement. He’s said the cops had him buy illegal guns too. He’d done these jobs for several police agencies, including the Atlanta Police Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, or ATF — a federal agency. 

During this panicked call, White told the dispatcher he was waiting for the ATF to come rescue him — to rescue him from the Atlanta Police.

Alex White: I don’t know who on whose side, man. They playing dirty.

Operator: [Crosstalk] Do you want to talk to someone at the precinct? 

Alex White: [Crosstalk] You see what happened yesterday that was on the news, yeah, they involved me in there, I had nothing to do with it. … They keep talking in code, saying they had to take me down there, then once I told them ATF was on the way to pick me up.

Radley Balko: White referenced seeing a news report he had seen on TV, and how the police who picked him up were speaking in code. It made him nervous enough to flee.

Alex White: I jumped out of the car. So they around here looking for me right now. [Unintelligible]

Operator: OK. The most I can do is send a police officer to come pick you up, sir. I don’t know what else you think I can do. 

Alex White: All right, cool. 

White had received an urgent phone call from one of his handlers at the Atlanta Police Department. They needed him to lie for them.

Radley Balko: The dispatcher was pretty confused, and who could blame her? White himself was still trying to figure out what was going on, and who, if anyone, he could trust. The previous evening, White had received an urgent phone call from one of his handlers at the Atlanta Police Department. They needed him to lie for them. That wasn’t unusual. White had lied for the cops before. 

But this time, Atlanta narcotics detectives wanted White to say he had bought drugs from a house at 933 Neal Street, in a rough section of Atlanta called “The Bluff.” The detective offered to pay White more than the $30 they usually gave him. So he agreed. But later, White saw a breaking news story on TV that would change his mind — and eventually his life.

Alan Dreher: It was a very tragic and unfortunate incident. 

News reporter: That’s how Assistant Police Chief Alan Dreher describes the botched drug raid that left a 92-year-old woman dead and three officers with non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. Police say those shots were fired by the elderly victim, Kathryn Johnston.

Radley Balko: The same narcotics officers who were asking White to lie had raided that same house on Neal Street. 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston lived inside. When Johnston heard the officers break open the burglar bars on her front door, she rose from her bed and grabbed the revolver she kept in her nightstand.

News reporter: Investigators say 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston fired a handgun at officers who entered her home November 21, using a no-knock warrant, injuring three officers. The officers responded by opening fire, killing Johnston. Angry relatives called for justice. 

Sarah Dozier: They shot her down like a dog! She is 92 years old! 

Radley Balko: After the officers forced open her door, Johnston fired a single shot that hit no one. The officers responded with a swarm of 39 bullets screaming through Johnston’s living room. They shot her five or six times.

Three cops were struck too — but by shrapnel from bullets fired by their fellow officers. They would eventually call an ambulance for those wounded colleagues. 

They would not call an ambulance for Kathryn Johnston.

News reporter: Neighbors of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston are devastated.

Neighbor: It’s insane. I’ve been crying all night for this lady, man, her family.

News reporter: Atlanta police say there was an undercover drug buy at Johnston’s Neal Street home. People who live nearby say no way. 

Neighbor: Never. Never. This is a 92-year-old lady that lives by herself. She don’t know no young folks like that. 

Radley Balko: The police had acted on a bad tip — one they hadn’t bothered to corroborate. Upon realizing their mistake — that Kathryn Johnston was no drug dealer — the officers decided to cover it all up. They left Johnston to bleed to death on the floor of her own home, while one officer planted marijuana in her basement. 

When the informant Alex White saw the report about Johnston’s death on TV, he made the connection and quickly decided he wanted no part in concealing the killing of an innocent elderly woman. In the days that followed, Alex White — petty thief, two-bit drug dealer, hustler, snitch — would come forward with allegations that would posthumously vindicate Kathryn Johnston. They would also bring down the Atlanta police department’s entire narcotics division. 

Alex White: I think justice was served, and it couldn’t have came at a better time. I’m glad that the truth came out, and I got to clear my name out of all this.

News reporter: After five months of living in a hotel room and looking over his shoulder for those who might do him harm, professional informant Alex White is ready to fight publicly against police practices, which drew him into the center of the deadly Neal Street shooting investigation. 

Radley Balko: White’s story would launch an investigation that sent shockwaves throughout the country. It exposed widespread corruption and abuses in the Atlanta Police Department, and resulted in the disbanding of the agency’s entire narcotics division. The incident would prove damning not just for Atlanta police, but the city’s courts, prosecutors, and its political leadership.

When the raid on Kathryn Johnston’s house happened, I was just a few years into my career in journalism. I had been covering the rise of violent drug raids on my blog and as a freelance reporter. Kathryn Johnston’s death had every red flag. The idea that this 92-year-old woman was dealing drugs and knowingly took on a team of police officers — well, I guess it was possible. But even at that point in my career, it was clear to me that something had gone terribly wrong. 

I started to write about what seemed to be holes in the police account of what happened. The story quickly made national headlines. Then, slowly, we started to learn that, sure enough, things really didn’t happen the way the police had claimed.

News reporter: There are a lot of questions police have yet to answer.

Markel Hutchins (speaking to the news): Assistant Police Chief Alan Dreher, I think, really insulted and offended this family by saying that proper procedure was followed. What kind of proper procedure would lead to the death of a 92-year-old woman in her own home?

Kathryn Johnston’s death illustrates the disregard the drug war nurtures in police for the very people that they claim to be serving.

Radley Balko: The Kathryn Johnston case embodies the worst excesses of the war on drugs. It has militarized and aggressive policing. Abuse of informants. A no-knock “dynamic entry” raid. Rampant police corruption. Perverse incentives and well-intentioned policies with horrific unintended consequences. Her killing is a case study in how the drug war is fought. 

Her death illustrates the disregard the drug war nurtures in police for the very people that they claim to be serving, and the people politicians claim to be protecting when they pass and enforce these laws in the first place.

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 defeating drug addiction, but the “war” part of that metaphor 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 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 podcast will look at people who died because of the war on drugs, but didn’t need to. We’ll tell the stories of completely innocent people caught in the drug war crossfire. We’ll also look at the unnecessary deaths of small-time users and offenders, and of people who legitimately used illicit drugs as medication. We’ll look at cops who were needlessly killed. And we’ll look into the thousands of people U.S. drug policy has unnecessarily killed in other countries. 

The legacy of the drug war now rests in the hands of Donald Trump, whose administration has wasted no time expanding law enforcement power with little regard for the human cost. 

This is Episode One: Dirty Business: The Atlanta narcotics unit’s deadly raid on Kathryn Johnston.

Markel Hutchins: Ms. Johnston was clearly a person that was full of life. She was vivacious. Although she was 92 years old, she was not someone that was broken down.

Radley Balko: That’s Rev. Markel Hutchins, a civil rights activist who became a spokesperson for Kathryn Johnston’s family after her death. Today, he’s the head of MovementForward Inc., a civil rights group in Atlanta.

Markel Hutchins: She didn’t have a lot of illness. She’d not been in the hospital. She wasn’t sick. She would dance and like music. 

Radley Balko: Johnston had no children and was fiercely independent. Even in her 90s, she did her own cooking and cleaning. 

Markel Hutchins: Ms. Johnston would regularly work at the daycare. And she was not some meek little woman that needed somebody to protect her, somebody to care for her, anything like that. She was full of life, which is what made Kathryn Johnston’s death so tragic.

Radley Balko: In 1989, Johnston moved into a small, yellow brick house on Neal Street owned by her niece. The house was in a neighborhood known as The Bluff, named for the narrow streets that run up and down its hills. It’s a historically Black part of town, where graduates of Morehouse and Spelman colleges bought houses and made lives for themselves in the late 1800s. But The Bluff and adjacent neighborhoods hit hard times in the 1970s as the city’s wealth fled to the suburbs. 

News archive: The Atlanta Planning Department has warned that if this trend continues, it’s just a matter of time until Atlanta will become an island of Negroes surrounded by a sea of white suburbanites.

Radley Balko: Then, in the late 1980s, the city cleared an adjacent Black neighborhood to make way for a football stadium and a convention hall. Despite promises of a spillover economic benefit, the development only served as a barrier between those Black neighborhoods and downtown. Poverty, blight, and crime festered. 

Markel Hutchins: The community that Kathryn Johnston lived in was a community that had for decades been under-resourced and under-supported and under-invested in.

Radley Balko: Four years after Johnston’s death, the website NeighborhoodScout.com ranked The Bluff as the fifth most dangerous neighborhood in the United States. Locals joked that “BLUFF” was actually an acronym for “Better Leave, You Fucking Fool.”

Markel Hutchins: Quite frankly, it was a community that was and still is suffering with the vestiges of drugs and despair and poverty and lack of opportunity. So with those things come crime and violence.

Radley Balko: Because of the crime in her neighborhood, Kathryn Johnston took precautions to keep herself safe. She typically only came to the door to meet visitors if they called ahead and she knew they were coming. She installed security bars on the front door. And Johnston’s niece, Sarah Dozier, gave her aunt an additional bit of protection: a .38 revolver.

Markel Hutchins: We were riding along in Ms. Dozier’s Mercedes Benz. And I asked, I said, “Did Ms. Johnston have a gun?” And Ms. Dozier said, “You’re damn right she had a gun.” She said, “She had a gun because I gave it to her.” And I said, “What kind of gun was it?” And Ms. Dozier opened her glove compartment and she showed me a .38. And she said, “She had one just like this. I gave her one just like mine.”

Radley Balko: Tragically, the measures Johnston had taken to protect herself would ultimately contribute to her death: The burglar bars delayed police just long enough to allow her to retrieve her gun. 

Markel Hutchins: Ms. Johnston did not actually shoot at the police. Ms. Johnston shot at the eave of the house. She shot up in an effort to scare those who were trying to break in her home, which is a clear indication of what kind of person she was. She was not eager to shoot anyone. She simply wanted to stop who she thought was burglars from breaking down her door and entering into her home.

Radley Balko: The cover-up started almost immediately. The police first claimed they killed Johnston in self-defense.

Alan Dreher: Once the door was forced, the female inside began shooting at the police officers.

Radley Balko: That’s Atlanta PD’s assistant chief at the time, Alan Dreher. The police chief happened to be out of town, so Dreher became the face of the department at press conferences as reporters started asking questions.

Alan Dreher: Investigator Junior was shot three times. Once in the bulletproof vest in his chest, once to the side of his face, and once in the leg. Investigator Smith received one gunshot wound to his left leg. And Investigator Bond received a gunshot wound to his left arm.

Radley Balko: It turned out that the cops weren’t hit by Johnston; instead, they were injured by shrapnel from their own bullets. That was probably the biggest fallacy about what happened during the incident. But the planning for the raid — or lack thereof — was riddled with shortcuts, lies, and insufficient oversight. These would turn out to be problems not just unique to this case, but systemic patterns within the Atlanta Police Department, and indeed in too many narcotics divisions around the country.

We’re going to tell you this story in two ways. First, we’ll give you the story as told by the officers who killed Kathryn Johnston. Then we’ll tell you what really happened. 

So, here’s the police version of events. 

And I should note here that if it weren’t for informant Alex White’s refusal to go along with the cover-up, this is the narrative that may well still be accepted as fact today.

At some point on November 21, police claimed, Alex White called one of his APD handlers to report a large supply of cocaine at 933 Neal Street. The officer met up with White and took him to the house, where White then bought some cocaine from a Black man named “Sam.” 

Alan Dreher: The narcotics were purchased from a male inside that residence.

Radley Balko: While he was there, White saw a gun, and he noticed security cameras on the outside of the house, a possible sign of a sophisticated drug operation. The police then obtained a no-knock search warrant and raided the home. 

News reporter: District Attorney Paul Howard says no-knock warrants are common, especially in suspected drug cases.

Paul Howard: Under certain circumstances, policemen are given the opportunity to go into a residence without announcing themselves. And the reason that that happens is because in many places where drugs are found, the drug dealers or the drug possessers would flush or destroy drugs before the police would get a chance to obtain them.

Radley Balko: As the front door flew open, someone appeared with a gun, fired, and struck three officers. The other officers then opened fire, killing the assailant, who happened to be an elderly Black woman. The police then searched the home and found a substantial supply of marijuana in the basement. 

Alan Dreher: Anytime we get information or a tip that someone is selling drugs out of a residence, we certainly want to make sure we investigate that thoroughly and investigate it.

Radley Balko: Other than the age and gender of the suspect, this narrative sounds like a typical drug raid: The cops got a tip. They investigated. They performed a drug buy using an informant. They raided. The suspect opened fire. The cops fired back. 

Drugs and violence go hand in hand, we’re told. A discerning listener might figure, OK, maybe a detail or two was exaggerated, or got confused in the chaos. But overall, the story makes sense. It matches the narrative we’ve heard hundreds of times, over and over.

The entire story was fiction.

But in reality, there was no call from Alex White. There was no cocaine purchase. There was no one named Sam. There were no surveillance cameras. And the police officers did not fire their weapons in self-defense. There was also no marijuana “found” in the basement. 

The entire story was fiction.

Markel Hutchins: On the evening that Kathryn Johnston was killed, I was sitting on the couch watching the evening news with my then-girlfriend and her son. I got a call shortly after the news broke from a young man who had been active in the community as a community activist. And this young man named Tony reached out to me and said there’d been this tragedy that happened in his community, and he thought that it was something that I needed to respond to. 

One of the clips that they showed on the news about Ms. Johnston’s death that evening was of her family members that were on the scene. They’d gotten there and Ms. Johnston’s niece, whose name is Sarah Dozier, was irate, cursing and screaming.

News reporter: Sarah Dozier made clear last night that she is holding the Atlanta Police Department responsible for her aunt’s death. 

Sarah Dozier: There are no drugs in that house. And they realize now they done the wrong house. And they killed her. Now they didn’t have to shoot that old lady down like a dog. They didn’t have to do that. It’s one old woman in that house. I’m as mad as hell, and somebody is going to answer to that. 

Markel Hutchins: So I literally went to the scene that night, and when I arrived, I encountered and met the lady that I’d seen. And after several conversations, I met with other members of the family on the scene that night.

And Ms. Dozier said to me, first thing, I’ll never forget this, I said, “Miss, Miss Dozier, let me pray with you.” And she said, “I don’t need no goddamn prayer. I need somebody” — that is, in her words — “gonna kick ass and take names.” And pardon my language, but that’s exactly what she said to me.

And I’d never heard anybody refuse prayer. And I’d been preaching my entire adult life — a long time. And I never heard anyone speak that way. But that was Ms. Dozier’s response. It was certainly understandable, knowing what we now know about what actually happened to Ms. Johnston. Her family had every right to be as angry and as irate as they were.

Radley Balko: Over the next several years, multiple investigations would uncover what really happened. And we’ll get into the true story of Kathryn Johnston’s killing in a little bit. But first let’s take a step back and take stock of what was going on at the Atlanta Police Department — what the Department of Justice would later describe as a “culture of misconduct.”

Cristina Beamud: One of the things that if you talk about systemic problems is whether officers in general feel as if they have to follow the rules. And I submit that in Atlanta, at the time of Kathryn Johnston, they were not.

Radley Balko: That’s Cristina Beamud. In the wake of Kathryn Johnston’s death, Atlanta created a civilian review board for the police department. Beamud was its first director. Beamud also held similar positions in Boston, Cambridge, Eugene, and Miami. Over the course of her career, she says she’s seen some familiar patterns.

Cristina Beamud: Where this type of misconduct reaches this level and creates such a problem, a city needs to look at not only just the actors, but at the systems that created the bad situation that allowed for this to happen. And indeed, that rarely happens.

Radley Balko: In the aftermath of Johnston’s death, the FBI conducted an investigation of the Atlanta Police Department. One of the problematic policies they honed in on was quotas.

In Atlanta, there was a quasi-official quota for narcotics cops known as “9 and 2.” The FBI’s report described “a rule that required narcotics officers to obtain at least two narcotics search warrants and make nine narcotics related arrests per month. Some officers indicated that their performance appraisals were tied directly to the nine and two requirement.”

So, if an officer didn’t meet the quota, they risked being removed from a highly desired position. Some were threatened with a transfer to work at the airport — not a sought-after assignment.

This pressure to produce numbers went straight up the chain of command. Narcotics officers say that supervisors were also held accountable for their subordinates meeting quotas, and were aware that officers were taking shortcuts and lying on affidavits to meet them. APD supervisors themselves disputed those allegations.

Markel Hutchins: Quotas in law enforcement are very, very bad. They lead to very dangerous sets of circumstances. And we saw that as a contributing factor to Kathryn Johnston’s death. The narcotics unit, they got out of control and out of hand, because they were in fact trying to make drug arrests.

“Quotas in law enforcement are very, very bad. They lead to very dangerous sets of circumstances.”

Radley Balko: The quotas were so critical to job evaluations that supervisors encouraged officers who had met their monthly quotas to give their surplus cases to another officer who may have been running short. 

The problem is, the officer on the receiving end of the handoff then swore to a court that they had conducted an investigation that they hadn’t done, that they had witnessed a drug buy they had never seen, that they had worked with an informant to whom they’d never spoken. And that, of course, is illegal.

There was a very predictable reason why the department was so obsessed with numbers. And it’s not just an Atlanta thing. It’s money.

There were — and still are — a lot of federal dollars tied specifically to drug policing. Grants and funding are generally contingent on raw arrest and seizure numbers. Not on crime rates, addiction rates, or other criteria. The most well known of these are called Byrne grants. Since the late ’80s, a portion of these federal grants go to police departments specifically for fighting the drug war. Whether or not you get funding heavily depends on how many arrests and drug seizures you make.

Grants and funding are generally contingent on raw arrest and seizure numbers. Not on crime rates, addiction rates, or other criteria.

There’s another program called High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas. To qualify for this grant, you have to arrest a lot of people on drug charges. Once the federal government classifies you as a high–intensity drug trafficking area, you get more funding. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. And even if you accept that drug prohibition is a legitimate function of government, this just isn’t a successful way to stop people from using drugs.

Markel Hutchins: I think that anytime resources are tied to arrest, it leads to an environment where corruption is more likely and perhaps even probable and not just possible. I don’t think we should ever tie arrests and resources, particularly from the federal government.

Radley Balko: If you watch a lot of police movies and TV shows, you’re probably familiar with the pattern in which police bust small-time drug offenders, then flip them to move up the supply chain. But the sort of investigation that brings down a major drug distributor takes a lot more time, and typically results in fewer arrests.

The perverse thing about these grants is that because they’re tied to raw arrest numbers, officers are incentivized to go after low-level offenders. Because there are more of them. And they need the numbers.

And that’s exactly what Kathryn Johnston’s case shows was happening in Atlanta. 

Coming up: The real story behind what happened.

Break

Radley Balko: So let’s get back to November 21, 2006. Here’s the true story of what happened to Kathryn Johnston. At around 2 p.m., three APD narcotics officers were looking to make some busts in Northwest Atlanta. They decided to check out an apartment complex known for drug activity. Two of them — Gregg Junnier and Arthur Tesler — searched some vacant apartments. They found nothing. But a third officer named Jason Smith went into a grove of trees behind the apartments, where drug dealers occasionally hid their stashes. He found several bags of pot.

Later that afternoon, an informant called Detective Smith to tell him someone was selling crack in front of a neighborhood store about a mile away. Three officers drove to the site and saw a known drug dealer named Fabian Sheats standing outside. 

Detective Smith slipped around back and planted one of the baggies of pot he’d just found. Meanwhile, Detective Tesler grabbed Sheats by the throat and slammed his head into a fence. The officers then detained Sheats and told him that, given his record, they’d make sure he’d go to prison for a long time unless he could tell them where they could find some drugs.

To get the officers off his back, Sheats played along. He led them to 933 Neal Street. It was a distinctive house due to the disability ramp installed in front.

Normally, the next step in a narcotics investigation would be for the officers to have an informant attempt to purchase drugs from the house. This could then be used as justification to obtain a warrant. 

So at around 5 p.m., they called Alex White to see if he could make a controlled drug buy. These officers had used White frequently in the past. White told them he was available, but he didn’t have transportation. The officers were impatient. They were afraid that if they waited too long, someone might move the stash of cocaine — a stash Sheats had said was substantial. So instead, they fabricated the drug buy in their sworn affidavit.

Here’s APD Assistant Chief Alan Dreher reciting the “official” details shortly after the raid.

Alan Dreher: Late yesterday afternoon, we made an undercover purchase of narcotics from 933 Neal Street. As a result of that narcotic purchase, members of the narcotics team obtained a search warrant for that same address.

Radley Balko: This was all false. There was no “purchase of narcotics.” They had obtained the warrant under false pretenses.

Because drug crimes are consensual crimes — which is to say that all parties participate in the crime voluntarily — there’s typically no victim to report them to police, the way there is with a rape or a robbery. 

This means that law enforcement officers have to generate leads. And the most common way they generate leads is by working with informants. Informants are often addicts or involved in the drug trade themselves. Or they’re people who agree to work with police to get leniency on their own criminal charges. 

As you might expect, such people aren’t always the most reliable sources of information. So the information police do get is often dirty. In this case, the unreliable informant was Fabian Sheats, the drug dealer who police say provided them with Kathryn Johnston’s address.

News reporter: An investigative source tells Channel 2 that police officers told a magistrate judge that a man named Sam sold drugs from Kathryn Johnston’s house to their informant, a man later identified as Fabian Sheats. But Sheats later claimed he was pressured after the fact to go along with the officer’s story.

Radley Balko: Some time between 5 and 6:30 p.m. on the day Kathryn Johnston was killed, Detective Jason Smith called a magistrate to let her know he had just filed an electronic affidavit to request a no-knock search warrant. A search warrant affidavit is a sworn statement. Everything an officer asserts in it is considered to be under oath. Yet just about everything in Smith’s affidavit was false.

Smith claimed to have contacted a registered informant, patted him down, then sent him to 933 Neal Street, where the informant bought $50 worth of crack cocaine from a Black man named Sam. Smith claimed the informant told him there were security cameras in front of the house, which justified a no-knock raid. 

It was all a lie. There was no drug buy. The police never had an informant purchase crack, and there was no Black man named Sam. 

Even the most basic and perfunctory surveillance, which most police departments are required to do, would have revealed that there were no security cameras either. According to court records obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the magistrate signed the warrant four minutes after she received it.

Cristina Beamud: Not only was the acquisition of the search warrant flawed and the police officers lacking discipline, it was the response to the situation that showed the police lack of discipline.

Radley Balko: At 6:30 p.m., the raid team met in the parking lot outside of a fire station. Smith briefed eight other officers. Dusk had settled into darkness. 

A conscientious officer might have picked up on subtle clues suggesting that this was not the site of a major drug operation — for example, the disability ramp.

Instead, Smith advised the officers to avoid walking up the ramp so the noise of their feet treading on the hollow structure wouldn’t alert anyone inside. As the officers prepared to force entry, they had difficulty getting through the burglar bars on Johnston’s door. 

This gave Johnston time to hear them, retrieve her revolver, and fire off the warning shot just as the door opened. The officers returned fire with 39 bullets. 

At some point, the officers had to realize that they made a huge mistake — that this elderly woman was not some major drug distributor. At some point, they had to realize that they’d just taken an innocent life. And at that point, they had a decision to make.

Do they call an ambulance for her? Do they cop to their mistake and deal with the consequences? Or do they try to cover it all up?

And so as Johnston lay bleeding in her living room, the officers did not call an ambulance to save her. Instead, Officer Smith retrieved three of the remaining bags of marijuana he’d found in the woods earlier that day, and he planted them in Kathryn Johnston’s basement. 

A couple of hours later that evening, Rev. Markel Hutchins walked up to the crowd of angry family and neighbors gathered in front of the house, alongside TV cameras and news vans. 

Markel Hutchins: Ms. Dozier said to me, “I need somebody that’s going to do something to bring the killers of my aunt to justice.” And she said, “If you want to do something for my family, you go over there and talk to that media.” She said, “They’ve made me look like a fool, and I’ll never speak to them again. My family will never speak to them again. Go over there and talk to them.” So I addressed the media that night.

Markel Hutchins (speaking to the media): There should have been better investigative work done on the front side so that we didn’t have this kind of tragedy on the back side.

News reporter: Rev. Markel Hutchins says he’s heard from people in the community that there was drug activity in the neighborhood, but not at Johnston’s home.

Markel Hutchins: That was the first time that I ever met a member of the Johnston family. And that’s how I became involved in the case.

Radley Balko: Meanwhile, the narcotics officers went about their cover-up. At various times, Officers Smith, Junnier, and Tesler called Alex White and asked if he’d be willing to lie for them. Junnier offered White $150 to just leave town.

Detective Tesler drafted a report about the nonexistent drug buy from Johnston’s home. But he and his narcotics team had yet to work out the details, so he left portions of the report blank. That should have been an early red flag that something was wrong. 

Instead, their police lieutenant helped them draft a new report. Then, they destroyed the first draft. 

In the meantime, White was learning about Johnston’s death on TV. 

News reporter: Officers got a judge to sign a search warrant, and a narcotics team went to the home. The chief says as they arrived at the door, they screamed “Police.” 

Alan Dreher: They managed to force the door open, and once the door was opened, they were fired upon by the elderly female inside, by Ms. Johnston.

Radley Balko: White started having second thoughts. Since White was also an informant for the ATF, he called his handler at that agency to seek some advice. They met in person to discuss the situation. The ATF agent was alarmed. He told White that the situation was serious, and not to take any calls from Junnier, Tesler, or Smith. 

But White was afraid of the Atlanta Police Department, and of Detective Junnier in particular. White would later tell the New York Times Magazine that Junnier had threatened him. White said Junnier once showed him a picture of a Jamaican drug dealer who had been decapitated. It felt like an unsubtle warning not to cross the detective. Junnier, through his lawyer, denied all claims by White; the Atlanta Police Department would not comment.

White knew the officers were desperate. He feared that if he ignored them, they’d come looking for him. So when they called again, he answered his phone and played along. They sent a car to pick him up. This is the car that White would eventually flee, sparking that foot chase through downtown, and the frantic call to 911 we heard at the top of the show.

Operator: You said undercover, undercover cops had picked you up? 

Alex White: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They came and picked me up to ask me about the killing yesterday. But they tried to play it off. So ATF told me, don’t get in the car with them. By that time, man, I was already in the car with ’em. And then when I tried to talk to ’em in code to tell them where I was, they had me by the tail, they hurry up and pulled up. So we coming out north side, I I jumped out the car real quick. You know what I’m saying?

Operator: OK. All right. I’m gonna have someone out there for to help you. OK.

Alex White: ’Cause there’s a lot of dirty shit going on. 

Operator: I understand, but stay at the KFC, OK?

Radley Balko: Once he concluded the 911 operator couldn’t help him, White hung up, and he called his handler at the ATF. They sent a car to pick White up and take him to the local ATF office. The agent then called Atlanta PD’s internal affairs, who sent an officer for an interview.

While Alex White was scrambling to stay safe, Kathryn Johnston’s neighbors were talking to the media. They were angry at how she’d been portrayed on the news. They told reporters the notion that Johnston was some sort of drug dealer was just preposterous.

News reporter: Residents say the police side of all this just isn’t adding up.

Neighbor: Why would she just start firing if they said they were the police? Something’s not making sense in that gap right there.

Radley Balko: Yet for the first few days, APD officials attempted to maintain some neutrality. Here’s Dreher again, the assistant chief who was acting as department spokesperson while the police chief was on vacation.

News reporter: Was Johnston present when the undercover purchase was made? 

Alan Dreher: That’s still under investigation at this time. 

News reporter: Do you have any reason to suspect that Ms. Johnston might have somehow been involved in any suspected drug dealings at that residence? 

Alan Dreher: That’s still under investigation. 

Radley Balko: Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard spoke at the same press conference.

Paul Howard: Now, I’m not trying to insinuate that Ms. Johnston was involved. But the police have assured me that they had made a drug purchase from this very residence on this day.

Radley Balko: Meanwhile, Alex White was getting anxious. He had hoped that after interviewing him, APD’s internal affairs department would give him some protection. He was scared of retaliation. Instead, they just sent him home.

White, certain that he was a marked man, left an urgent voicemail for his ATF handler and on the hotline for the local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. No one called back; it was the night before Thanksgiving.

The next morning, two APD officers drove by to pick up White and pay him the $150. But still, he had his doubts. Over Thanksgiving dinner, White expressed his fears to his family. His uncle suggested he do something drastic: Go on TV and tell the entire story. If it was all out in the open, White wouldn’t need to rely on police officers to protect him from other police officers. Everyone would be watching. 

Although he was scared of outing himself as a snitch, White decided it was safer to come clean. So after dinner, he called the local Fox affiliate and told them his story. They sent a taxi to take him to the studio. And then he spilled it all out on the air. They pixelated his face and referred to him as “the man who claims to be the informant.”

News reporter: They say he bought drugs at the house. No way, says the man who claims to be the informant. 

Alex White: I never went to that house. I’m telling them, I never went to that house. 

News reporter: When police burst through Johnston’s door, she opened fire and was shot and killed. The police informant says he then got a call from officers.

Alex White: They called me immediately after the shooting and asked me, I mean, to tell me: This is what you need to do. You need to cover our ass.

Radley Balko: At some point, local news outlets began reporting on White by name. Meanwhile, not long after the Fox interview, Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington returned from his planned vacation and resumed his role as the public face of the department.

Richard Pennington (at press conference): They did find drugs in the house. And it wasn’t a large quantity, but they did find some drugs. 

Reporter: What kind? 

Richard Pennington: It was marijuana. 

Radley Balko: Pennington largely reiterated the same cover story. But his concession that police hadn’t found a large amount of marijuana was the first official acknowledgment of growing discrepancies between the raiding officers’ account and what actually happened.

Richard Pennington (at press conference): We don’t have anything to hide. We don’t have anything to cover up. The investigation will be transparent.

Radley Balko: By this point, the FBI had opened an investigation. So behind the scenes, a race was on. The FBI needed to collect evidence and interview witnesses before the narcotics officers could destroy the former and corrupt the latter. 

The FBI needed to collect evidence and interview witnesses before the narcotics officers could destroy the former and corrupt the latter.

Meanwhile, officers Tesler, Junnier, and Smith met up to hash out a narrative that would be consistent with what they thought investigators knew. At one point, Detective Smith even printed out scripts for each of them to memorize and recite when they were interviewed by internal affairs.

So simultaneously, APD officials were making the case to the public that the raid was legitimate and justified. The narcotics detectives were scheming to cover their tracks. And FBI investigators were chasing down incriminating evidence. 

News anchor: In Atlanta, the police shooting death of a 92-year-old woman in her home is now a federal case. The FBI now looking into the raid and what led police to make it.

Radley Balko: Alex White’s appearance on TV made national news. It had planted a seed, and the media were now digging not only into this incident, but the police department’s overall track record.

By early December, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other outlets began publishing stories about other botched raids. And as it turns out, 20 months before killing Kathryn Johnston, the same narcotics unit raided a house next door to Johnston’s. That too was a no-knock raid. 

It was also a raid for which the police claimed to have used an informant, but the officer who obtained the warrant never witnessed or supervised the drug buy. And in that case too, the police found no drugs and made no arrests. Days later, another woman told the local Fox affiliate that she had also been wrongly raided by Atlanta drug cops. 

At a town meeting held at a church just down the road from Johnston’s home, more residents told more stories about more mistaken raids.

Markel Hutchins: All that the police department had to do was rely on, as they did, rely on a fabricated word from a fictitious confidential informant and present that to a judge, and the judge would just sign the no-knock warrant. And they were kicking in people’s doors and violating people’s rights. It was Kathryn Johnston that made the news because of her tragic death. But there were dozens of families that came to me in the aftermath of Kathryn Johnston’s death to say that the police had done the same thing to them.

Radley Balko: The Journal-Constitution reported that many of APD’s no-knock raids had produced no suspect, no drugs, and no guns. The paper also found more examples of police making untruthful statements on affidavits for search warrants. 

One attorney and former police officer told the paper that judges in the city never questioned officers’ claims that informants were credible. They never even asked them to verify that an informant existed.

When police request a no-knock warrant, they are supposed to show specific evidence that the suspect is dangerous or may destroy their drug supply. But The Associated Press found that the city’s narcotics cops often provided only “cursory” information, and that judges signed those warrants anyway. 

In some cases, officers merely included boilerplate language about their own experience and training, and offered no evidence at all about why a particular suspect required a no-knock entry.

Markel Hutchins: We knew that this was not just an isolated incident. We knew that these police officers were doing this in that community to people that were not only undeserving, but were totally not connected to any kinds of crime.

Radley Balko: It’s worth taking a moment here to discuss the U.S. Supreme Court’s role in all of this, which is pretty significant. In 1995, a decade before the Kathryn Johnston raid, the court ruled that under the Fourth Amendment, police officers are required to knock and announce themselves before forcing entry into a private home. 

Hudson v. Michigan left officers with little incentive to conduct a search in a constitutional way.

But in June of 2006 — six months before Kathryn Johnston’s death — there was a case called Hudson v. Michigan. A 5-4 majority ruled that even if police violate the knock-and-announce rule — which of course means they’ve violated a suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights — they could still use evidence found during that illegal search. This left officers with little incentive to conduct a search in a constitutional way.

In early January 2007, about six weeks after the Johnston raid, officer Gregg Junnier retired. It was the first indication that the pact between officers Junnier, Smith, and Tesler may have started to crack. Indeed, Junnier would eventually start cooperating with federal investigators.

Then, in April …

News Reporter: Two of those officers, Gregg Junnier and Jason Smith, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and lying on Thursday. A third officer is awaiting trial.

Radley Balko: Officer Junnier was sentenced to six years in prison, Smith to 10 years. Tesler opted to go to trial on the state charges. He pleaded guilty to lying to investigators, although that conviction was later overturned on appeal. He then pleaded guilty on a federal civil rights charge and received a five-year sentence. It would take another three-and-a-half years before the full FBI report was unsealed. But when it dropped, it was damning.

FBI investigators found widespread corruption among Atlanta narcotics officers. Among the findings:

• Drug detectives routinely lied on search warrant affidavits. They described drug buys that never happened, and lied about conducting surveillance.
• Narcotics officers routinely under-reported the quantity of drugs seized from suspects, then used the “extra” to plant on other suspects in order to obtain leverage. They also paid informants less than what they reported, and used the extra money for other purposes.
• Officers often conducted violent, highly volatile no-knock raids based solely on a tip from a single informant, as they did with Kathryn Johnston.
• Judges routinely approved no-knock warrant applications without the required evidence.

APD often conducted what they called “thunder runs,” in which they’d go to a high-crime area, jump out of their vehicles, and randomly search anyone around. Finally, the report found that Junnier and other officers were basically running a protection racket — while on duty. They were collecting payments from local businesses to keep drug dealers away. This too isn’t uncommon among narcotics officers. When police are permitted to break the very laws they’re enforcing, their respect for the law in general can wear down over time. 

Again, here’s Cristina Beamud. 

Cristina Beamud: Once people begin to think that the rules are different for them, that they are different from the rest of the police department, they lose sight of all the other values that the police department imposes on the rest of the employees. They feel different. They feel protected, they feel safer bending rules or breaking rules, or in the case of what happened in Atlanta, of committing very serious crimes.

Radley Balko: Unlike far too many similar incidents, the shooting of Kathryn Johnston did result in some accountability. The three officers most responsible for her death were sent to prison. Her family eventually received about $5 million from the city of Atlanta. And to his credit, Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington would eventually disband the entire narcotics division and rebuild it from scratch. 

News Reporter: Lt. William Trivelpiece is in charge of 30 new members of the narcotics unit, who are now considered the city’s best trained detectives in town.

William Trivelpiece: They’re working side by side with the officers. Almost in the capacity of a training, they’re showing them this is how we do it; this is how it’s done right.

Radley Balko: But relative to the gravity of the FBI’s findings, the overall impact on the police department was pretty mild. The supervisor of the narcotics unit was sentenced to 18 months in prison for faking a burglary to cover up yet another illegal raid. Two other officers who were part of covering up the Johnston raid were eventually fired in 2010. But no one else involved in the raid, or previous botched raids, or the cover-up got more than a slap on the wrist.

The Kathryn Johnston raid made national news. So did the subsequent investigations. There were congressional hearings launched because of her death. Activists demanded substantive change and politicians promised reform. But ultimately things largely remained the same.

One law proposed by a Georgia legislator would have banned most no-knock raids in the state. But it was so watered down with amendments that, by the time it passed, it likely wouldn’t have prevented another death like Johnston’s — the very reason it was introduced in the first place.

One of the main reforms to emerge locally was the establishment of a civilian review board in Atlanta. Beamud was the first director of that board and says she faced resistance the moment she started the job. The first pushback came from the police union, which told officers to ignore the board’s efforts to question them.

Cristina Beamud: They instructed their members not to testify in either in interviews that were conducted by investigators in the office or to the board members. The city would’ve had the power to compel them; however, they chose not to.

Radley Balko: Beamud grew so frustrated with the lack of cooperation that she resigned in 2011.

“I feel as if I’m just writing letters to myself.”

Cristina Beamud: We spent an extraordinary amount of time investigating these cases, writing up the reports, submitting it to the board, and writing a report, based on the board’s recommendations to the chief of police. The responses were rarely thoughtful or really addressed the issues. So I found myself in a position, I remember saying something like, “I feel as if I’m just writing letters to myself, that there’s really no follow-up in terms of change or a real desire to want to address the concerns that were expressed by citizen representatives of their community.”

Radley Balko: The national attention to Johnston’s death didn’t bring much change outside of Georgia, either. The federal grants that gave rise to Atlanta’s drug arrest quotas have continued. 

In 2010, the Department of Justice audited Atlanta’s use of the $9 million in Byrne grants it had received the previous five years and. It was brutal. The audit found the city had badly mismanaged the grants, made little effort to oversee how they were used, and had no way to monitor whether the grants were actually improving public safety. 

Yet the city would receive over $2 million more over the next two years. In 2010, the Obama administration gave the Byrne grant program a massive $2.25 billion infusion as part of its economic stimulus package. 

Barack Obama: It invests in what works for our cities by funding programs like the Byrne Justice Assistance Grants, and the COPS program, which boosts public safety and bring down crime.

Radley Balko: Like many before hers, Johnston’s death could have prompted some contemplation and reconsideration of no-knock raids and the shortcuts police take to obtain warrants for them.

Instead, the raids continued in Georgia and across the country, with little oversight and little skepticism from the judiciary. 

News Collage: 

“A no-knock warrant.” 

“During a no-knock warrant raid.” 

“A no-knock raid.” 

“During a no-knock police raid.” 

Radley Balko: And then there was the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville in 2020. The language police used to obtain the no-knock warrant in her case was nearly identical to language they’d used in the warrant for their main suspect. A Justice Department investigation would later find that Louisville police routinely conducted illegal no-knock raids.

News Anchor: Today, Louisville’s mayor signed Breonna’s Law after the Metro Council unanimously banned the use of no-knock warrants. 

Radley Balko: But there’s at least some room for hope here. The anger over Breonna Taylor’s death, along with the protests after George Floyd’s, prompted the sort of response that many had hoped for after Kathryn Johnston. In some parts of the country, we have seen some real reform. 

Dozens of cities, towns, counties, and even the entire state of Virginia have now either banned or restricted no-knock raids, unless police can show that someone’s life is in imminent danger.

But that’s still decidedly a minority policy. The vast majority of Americans still live in a jurisdiction where police can kick down the door to your home without warning, as you’re sleeping, and storm your house with guns, all based on little more than a tip from an informant that you’re in possession of illegal drugs.

The vast majority of Americans still live in a jurisdiction where police can kick down the door to your home without warning, as you’re sleeping, and storm your house with guns, all based on little more than a tip from an informant that you’re in possession of illegal drugs.

We have one more important note about this story. I reached out to Alex White to ask if he’d do an interview for this podcast. He’s the informant that went to the press about the Atlanta police. White initially agreed to an interview, but he also asked that we pay him.

That’s a reasonable and understandable request. In a text message, White told me that he has a lot more to share. He pointed out that he has testified before Congress and his story made the cover of the New York Times magazine. Yet, as he put it, he is “still stuck in the Atlanta ghetto.”

Seventeen years after what was a risky and heroic act of truth-telling, White has largely been abandoned by law enforcement, and still lives in a rough part of Atlanta. 

Markel Hutchins: Had it not been for Alex White, the officers that killed Kathryn Johnston may very well have gotten away with their crime.

Radley Balko: Here’s Markel Hutchins again.

Markel Hutchins: While Alex White was a change agent, not much has changed for him. And that’s one of the tragedies of all of this. The city of Atlanta is different. The police department benefited, the family benefited, the community benefited, but Alex White is still in a lot of ways stuck in the same place that he was before Kathryn Johnson’s death. He sees that everybody from mayors to movie-makers benefited from his courage, but he has not.

Radley Balko: White’s frustration is entirely understandable. But there’s also a bright-line rule in journalism: You don’t pay sources. It just isn’t done. So unfortunately, we couldn’t interview White for this episode. But it’s important to emphasize that if it weren’t for Alex White, the official version of the Kathryn Johnston story would be much different. The truth likely would have never been known.

Next time on Collateral Damage. 

Neill Franklin: So when someone comes breaking into their home in the middle of the night, they’re not going to think that it is the police, they’re going to think that they’re getting robbed.

Ryan Frederick: They made me out to be like the devil, like psychotic like just ready to take on the world and shoot everybody cowboy wild wild West.

Neill Franklin: That’s dangerous for them. It’s dangerous for the police.

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 showrunner.

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. 

Thank you for listening.

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