Did the authorities wrongly raid the home of Gertetta Green-Page? Lawyers from the Hogan-Willig firm, who have filed a lawsuit on behalf of her and her grandson, obtained the search warrant. Signed by Erie County Court Judge Kenneth Case, it allowed a search of the lower apartment at 43 Schauf, Green-Page’s residence.
 
But the warrant mentions neither Green-Page nor Anthony. The target was Burt, 36 at the time. Burt, also known as Lamar, was known to authorities. In 2014, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty in federal court to a cocaine-distribution charge. Drug-related convictions sent him to state prison, too, and he was released just months before the raid, state records show.

Green-Page, who has lived in the apartment since 2013, and her grandson say they do not know Burt. The warrant also let the authorities search a white Cadillac Escalade registered to a woman named Tamara Burnett, whose residence was blocks away. Both the grandmother and grandson say they have never met Burnett, either.

When asked for the affidavit that laid out the need for a search warrant, the DEA referred The Buffalo News to the Erie County District Attorney's Office. The newspaper's Freedom of Information Law request for the affidavit is now pending with the district attorney's staff.

The warrant let the authorities enter the lower apartment “without giving notice of authority and purpose.” Such “no-knock” warrants are under public scrutiny as the Black Lives Matter movement and public activists protest heavy-handed police tactics. Louisville has banned no-knock warrants after a resident there, Breonna Taylor, was killed during a police raid.
 
While no-knock warrants can surprise suspects, the officers typically enter with weapons drawn, barking orders and frightening anyone inside. Green-Page said she now needs sleeping pills to get through the night, and her grandson said he, too, takes medications to deal with the stress he still feels and his inability to sleep. He no longer lives with his grandmother.
 
"I think a ban on no-knock warrants is an excellent idea, ideally I think as part of a more comprehensive look at searches," said Sam Magavern, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Partnership for the Public Good, which has been studying and presenting proposals to change police practices.

"No-knock warrants are certainly a problem nationwide, and they seem to be a problem in Buffalo as well,'' he said, "but they are definitely part of this broader issue of the militarization of police and the use of SWAT teams and the explosive growth in search and seizure operations in general."
 
In addition to Louisville, Oregon, Florida and Utah have bans or limits on no-knock warrants. Magavern acknowledged that if local efforts succeed in freezing the use of no-knocks in and around Buffalo, the restrictions cannot be imposed on the federal law enforcement agencies that operate here. But he said just freezing their use by the Buffalo police "would be worthwhile."
A New York Times analysis found 81 civilians and 13 law enforcement officers were killed in forcible-entry raids nationwide from 2010-16. "So that's a lot of life," he said.

Gertetta Green-Page and her grandson Ka'Sean Anthony in their Schauf Ave home on Thursday, June 25, 2020. DEA agents burst into their home June 19, 2019 with a no-knock warrant, looking for drugs. The warrant targeted someone whom they said they had never heard of and who did not live there.

The lawsuit names as defendants the Buffalo Police Department and the Erie County Sheriff’s Office, among others. But Hogan-Willig attorney William A. Lorenz Jr. says lawyers for both the city and county say their law enforcement personnel were not present during the raid.
 
The suit also names the FBI and the DEA, but Anthony said the only agency he saw represented, based on the clothing worn, was the DEA.

The search warrant was based on an affidavit by an Erie County deputy, Paul McMahon. Court documents in other cases describe McMahon as a member of Buffalo’s DEA Task Force.
The lawsuit was filed in State Supreme Court but most likely will move to federal court because it names federal agencies as defendants.
 

Read the full article on the Buffalo News website here.