Page One

When Almateen Tweedie heard someone pounding on her front door the morning of Oct. 30, she assumed the guests were friends of her young sons.  

Instead it was the Berkeley Police Department’s Special Enforcement Unit (SEU)—the force’s designated drug busters. Within seconds, Tweedie said, a team of five SEU officers had battered down her door, shoved her to the kitchen floor and pointed their M-40 carbine guns at her.  

“I felt so helpless,” said Tweedie, who was dressed only in a nightgown during the incident. “Guns were pointed to my head, all parts of my body. I told them I have diabetes and high blood pressure, but they just said, ‘shut up.’” 

Upstairs, officers, their guns drawn, ordered Tweedie’s husband, Jesse Burns and their two sons Jesse, 14, and James, 11, to the ground and handcuffed the father and elder son. 

“I was, like, ‘I’m only 14, don’t kill me,’” Jesse Jr. told investigators. 

Police herded the family into their living room, while officers rummaged through their apartment in search of drugs and James Coby, a convicted felon and known cocaine dealer. 

The police found Coby and a loaded .357 magnum revolver handgun next door at 1126 62nd St., Apt. 15 in Oakland. Tweedie, who has since moved, lived in apartment 16. Berkeley and Oakland have a mutual aid pact that allows Berkeley police to perform drug busts in Oakland. 

A Police Review Commission (PRC) hearing panel found that Tweedie and her family were victims of a faulty investigation and several PRC members said that the Tweedie case when coupled with a similar one involving many of the same officers indicated a possible pattern of abuses in SEU busts. 

“What made them bust into the home and terrorize a completely innocent family?” asked PRC Commissioner Jon Sternberg. “Either the confidential informant was lying or they made some other mistake.” 

Tweedie said SEU officers released her family after detaining them for about an hour, but not before they broke the family’s washing machine, dryer, stove and picture frames during their search and delivered one final indignity. Police, equipped with a video recorder, brought both Coby and Margaret Lott, a resident of apartment 15, who police arrested along with Coby, into the Tweedie home for questioning while Tweedie was still wearing only a gown.  

“I said, ‘how could you do this to me?’” she said. “You could see right through the gown. I felt like I was on display.” 

Then against Tweedie’s wishes, she said, a female officer took Lott upstairs into Tweedie’s bedroom and strip-searched her.  

In findings released last month, a PRC hearing panel sustained seven out of 22 allegations against Det. Jack Friedman and other officers involved, including failure to properly investigate, improper search, unnecessary display of weapons, failure to provide medical assistance, improper detention, abuse of discretion and damage to property. 

This week, in a separate case, a PRC hearing panel sustained three allegations against Det. Friedman and Sergeant David Reece, who also participated in the Tweedie raid, for their role in a sting operation against Roosevelt Oliver, a West Berkeley resident police suspect of dealing heroin. 

The officers were cited for using excessive force in apprehending Oliver, needlessly kicking down his front door which was already partly open and damaging his personal property during their search. Police found no evidence of drugs on Oliver or in his house and made no arrests in the bust. 

“We now have two cases of warrants being issued when nothing’s there and the information alleged is sketchy. It makes you wonder who the informants are,” said Commissioner David Ritchie at a PRC meeting Wednesday. “In [the Tweedie] case a warrant was issued for two apartments because they couldn’t tell which one had the drugs.”  

Berkeley Police Det. Friedman, however, insisted in an interview with a PRC investigator that he had good reason to seek a search warrant for both apartments 15 and 16. Friedman said a confidential informant alerted him that Coby was dealing drugs out of both homes and that during a surveillance operation he had seen Coby enter Tweedie’s home and then leave on his way to complete a drug deal.  

However when asked during the PRC hearing to pinpoint a location from which is was possible to distinguish between the two apartments, Det. Friedman refused to reveal the vantage point, claiming it would endanger his confidential informant. Police Chief Roy Meisner and City Manager Phil Kamlarz backed Det. Friedman’s position, PRC commissioners said.  

The PRC hearing panel toured the streets surrounding the apartment and determined it would have been impossible to identify either apartment unit. 

Ritchie also questioned SEU protocol in conducting the raids and searching homes. “One of their regulations is they’re not supposed to trash the place,” he said. “To a person who’s lying there with all of his belongings thrown in a pile, that’s what it looks like to them.” 

Berkeley officers defended their behavior in interviews with PRC investigator Dan Silva. Det. Friedman insisted the SEU unit announced themselves as police and waited 20 seconds before breaking down Tweedie’s door. Asked about entering with their guns drawn, he replied, “There is a very well known common correlation between narcotics dealing and violence. And Mr. Coby’s history is a violent one. 

Friedman also insisted that Tweedie had never alerted him that she had a medical condition and that she gave her permission to bring Coby and Lott into her house and strip search Lott in her bedroom. Asked why he made the request, Friedman said he didn’t have enough officers to detain people in two different homes. 

Sergeant Reece, the officer who kicked down Roosevelt Oliver’s open door explained it this way: “I saw the interior wood door was slightly ajar, but I had this thing in my hand (a pry metal/ring, used for prying open doors) so I just kicked the door open. When I did that, the door opened obviously but later on somebody found out that the top hinge came undone.” 

Beyond failing to compel Det. Friedman to testify to his surveillance location, the PRC reported other problems getting information from the police department. In both the Oliver and Tweedie cases the commission asked for copies of search warrant requests originally sent to a judge for approval. However, both warrant request copies the BPD delivered to the PRC had key sections of text erased. 

“The police department should never be able to redact information on a search warrant,” said PRC Commissioner and retired Alameda County prosecutor Jack Radisch. “The instant a search warrant is delivered it is a public document. The idea of it being redacted is a little humorous.” 

Yet on the Oliver case many of the redactions had nothing to do with protecting personal information about the defendant or the identity of the confidential informant. One sentence read: “On each occasion (the informant) returned directly to an SEU detective giving them an amount of narcotics, which had been purchased (redacted)...” The missing words included in the original request for a warrant, signed by a magistrate and obtained by the Planet, read that the narcotics had been purchased “by the SEU”. 

Jim Chanin, a Berkeley attorney representing both Oliver and Tweedie and a former PRC chairperson, said that in the past few years BPD redactions often have defied reason. “It all depends on who the censor is,” he said.  

Chanin connected what he perceived as Berkeley’s increasingly permissive attitude towards the police department with a surge in his caseload of police misconduct.  

“I’ve gotten more cases out of Berkeley in the last four years than I have in the previous two decades,” he said. “That’s a pretty good indicator that something is wrong.” 

Chanin has filed a complaint with the city in both cases, but said he hasn’t determined yet if he will file a lawsuit in superior court. 

.