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53 Year old Brian Malinowski was killed in an ATF raid. He was a director at the Clinton National Airport in Little Rock. (This airport was named for the Clintons but is unconnected to them personally so we can put our tinfoil hats away for now.) We have no body camera footage of the shooting, they claimed he fired at them and they fired back during their 6am raid.
The search warrant, partially redacted, was released to the public. In it we find they raided him due to his frequent activity of buying and selling firearms without the required FFL licence.
Selling your private gun collection without involving the state is something that has been legal in the US forever, but buying and selling as a business is not. The law is written such that Grandma may sell her deceased husbands musket collection without fear of state reprisal, but you cannot buy bulk AR's and distribute them to the local gang for a big profit. What counts as a business? How many guns can you sell from your collection before you cross the threshold? How fast can you turn around and sell a gun after you buy without fear of breaking the law? This law is ambiguous on this, it is what politicians have referred to as "The gun show loophole". The idea being that you can take your personal firearms and sell them at a gunshow booth (or anywhere) without having to do a background check on potential buyers.
Brian Malinowski is a novel case. He bought and sold 150 guns over a two year period, some of them sold fairly quickly after he purchased them. This was high enough to get him on the ATF's watch list - they tailed his vehicle and observed him at his job at the airport. His job seems unconnected to his firearm hobby as the warrant never accuses him of smuggling through the airport. It heavily implies this is what was happening, mentioning the airport frequently throughout the warrant, but they never suggest that he actually did. It does, however, mention his selling his collection through booths at a gun show to undercover ATF agents.
So what of downstream crimes that have occurred from Malinowski selling these firearms "off the books"? Here the ATF's case seems very weak. Out of the 150 guns sold, only 3 have been directly tied to crimes stated in the warrant. The crimes? All three are marijuana possession during routine traffic stops (marijuana still being very illegal and heavily policed in Arkansas). Personally I think this is extremely petty and very favorable to the late Malinowski's case. There is one other mention of an undercover informant in Canada having a photo of a firearm with a serial number that ties back to Malinowski, with no additional details given.
In my opinion, I believe Malinowski was technically legally in the right despite the high volume of sales. There is no indication he was attempting to profit from selling to criminals/gangs etc. Many people collect firearms and enjoy buying and selling them as others would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on motorcycles or pokemon cards. There is no law in Arkansas against purchasing a handgun and deciding you don't like it for whatever reason and selling it to your neighbor the next day. That said, Malinowski is reported to have been somewhat of an asshole by those who knew him, having previously lost a lawsuit in 2018 in which he sued someone over a mailbox in front of an empty lot after confronting them pretending to be an attorney. Given this and that he was on record stating that his activity was legally protected private collection sales when pressed, and the ATF suggests he continued his activity after he knew they were tailing him, I think it's highly probable he knew what he was doing and was intentionally skirting the boundary of the law in order to provoke a legal confrontation.
This is a good culture war inflection point in the gun control debate. Leftists can point this case as an example that the Gun Show Loophole is in fact, real, and is being exploited by so-called hobbyists selling bulk firearms. Rightist can point to rogue federal agencies abusing ambiguous laws in order to infringe 2A rights by routing around political representation.
*Disclaimer: IANAL etc.
So uh, I hate to ask this, but even accepting the premise entirely the ATF being totally wrong and everything, did he actually open fire on agents serving a warrant?
Are we gonna get body-cam footage and be able to come to an independent judgment on the conduct of the government in the course of the raid?
I doubt it.
I wish that we held public servants (particularly ones authorized to use deadly force) to a "duty to proactively gather proof of innocence". That way, if an officer couldn't decisively clear his own name then he would be at risk of being fired, even if the evidence that exists is too weak for criminal charges.
Instead, they get cover for bad decisions, like in this case (paraphrased and dramatized):
I think we're talking at cross-terms here. There is a difference between
Regardless of the first prong, every arrest has to be carried out with the animating purpose of bringing the suspect to face justice and with use of deadly force as an absolute last resort. Of course, most of the time deadly force is justified -- the meme about police routinely shooting the unarmed is widely overblown. So in this case, what kind of shoot was it?
I don't think that the officer's behaviour in the weeks leading up to the raids was objectionable in either case (or at least I'm not objecting to it). It's just what happened in the time between showing up at the street and knocking on/down the door that's at issue.
We don't know and the government feels no need to inform us. If there was exculpatory bodycam footage I'm guessing we would see it, but they don't have enough foresight to gather that evidence.
The thread that links ___'s case to mine is that the officers feel no need to be accountable for their actions. Malinowski's shooters didn't feel the need to defend their (upcoming) actions, and Parks' invaders weren't required to confirm that the address was correct. Ranking the credibility of different decision making styles:
checks and balancesauditable controls in a verifiable way.I'm pushing for the police to meet standard #3 whenever practical. Regardless of whether Malinowski was a shot well or not, the decision is not verifiable. The warrant is largely verifiable, and we can debate as to whether it's good or not, but apparently they don't care as much about proving that the shot was good. Maybe the officer could meet standard #4, maybe #7. Who knows.
Lt. Mike Lewis was held to standard #6 in his wrong-house raid.
You would think that police would be on top of releasing exculpatory footage ASAP, but only a few agencies have actually gotten that kind of turnaround time.
But perhaps you're right. At the same time, maybe the footage will come out showing Malinowski clearly raising a gun and firing at officers before they fired back.
I have no particular objection to this as the standard.
But again, you're now talking about conduct prior to the raid and not the conduct during the raid. Or else maybe I'm confused because it makes no sense to have a check and balance during an arrest.
Huh? The decision to shoot taken at the time was either reasonable (the officer had an objective and well-founded need for lethal self defense or defense of other innocent life) or not.
Sorry, that's my mistake. TIL that "checks and balances" is a very specific term of art that only applies to the government. I meant something like "Establish critical control point monitoring requirements" or "quality assurance via preventive actions".
We don't accept someone's word that food isn't contaminated or that a part is manufactured correctly. We have implemented recordkeeping and inspection requirements ("checks" on the procedure) that provide sufficient safety without compromising productivity ("balances" between those goals...oops).
You can't go "Trust me, bro. This food is good." because we value the safety that those procedures bring. Meanwhile cops are like "Trust me, bro. It was a good raid." and we just collectively shrug our shoulders and move on. Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but we don't care enough about (future) raids to make it easy to answer.
The uncertainty is the problem. I don't just want it to be a good decision based on the facts, I want it to clearly be a good decision based on the available evidence (or alternatively clearly be a bad decision that's guaranteed to lead to punishment). I can't tell if it was a good decision or not, and nobody else can either.
Well, I guess the rise of body cams since BLM has done more for this than anything else in living memory.
Seems like a fine goal.
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