Might the answer to Los Angeles’ present emergency — how to stop masked federal agents from seizing its people — lie in a half-century-old story from Humboldt County?
On April 4, 1972, a young hippie couple — Dirk Dickenson and Judy Arnold — were in their remote cabin near unincorporated Garberville when federal drug agents and county sheriff’s personnel, assisted by a U.S. Army helicopter, launched a raid. The sheriff promised reporters, who came along, that this would be “biggest bust” in California history.
Lloyd Clifton, an agent of the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (now the DEA), broke down the cabin door without knocking or announcing himself as law enforcement. He and other agents wore jeans and tie-dyed shirts instead of uniforms, and kept their hair long. Arnold and Dickenson thought they were being robbed.
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Dickenson, unarmed, ran out the back door. Clifton gave chase and shot him in the back. Dickenson died on the way to a Eureka hospital.
What happened next caused a scandal.
The agents couldn’t find the PCP lab or any evidence of a drug enterprise on the property, or inside a cabin without electricity or running water.
The U.S. Department of Justice defended the federal agent, quickly declaring Dickenson’s execution a “justifiable homicide.” But Humboldt County district attorney William Ferroggiaro, nothing that federal agents must obey state and local laws, investigated and took his case to a grand jury, which charged Clifton with second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter.
Clifton’s indictment spurred a court fight, which ended up establishing a legal path for holding federal agents accountable for abuses.
The existence of such a path may surprise today’s Californians. That’s because our police insist that they are powerless to challenge unlawful actions or abuses by federal agents. Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell advised officers that, when called to a scene where citizens allege federal abuses, all they can do is verify the identities of federal agents.
In this position, McDonnell and police are not just wrong — they are violating their oaths to enforce state and local laws. The Clifton case makes this plain.
In 1973, agent Clifton first asked state courts to drop the prosecution, but multiple judges refused. With the trial about to start, Clifton appealed to the federal courts, arguing that as a federal agent, he was beyond the reach of state law.
The federal courts did not accept Clifton’s argument. But in 1977, Clifton succeeded in convincing the U.S. Ninth Circuit to free him, on the argument that he “reasonably and honestly” believed Dickenson was dangerous.
In his Clifton v. Cox ruling, U.S. Judge Stanley Conti wrote that federal law enforcements officials could be prosecuted for state and local crimes when “the official employs means which he cannot honestly consider reasonable in discharging his duties or otherwise acts out of malice or with some criminal intent.”
Establishing malice and criminal intent is a high bar, but Californians eager to pursue ICE personnel are revisiting the Clifton standard. Recent federal abuses, captured on video, would seem to meet the Clifton test for prosecution.
The Clifton standard should open the door for local police to investigate and document every single ICE raid. Given the scale of the federal assault, police departments should create a joint task force.
Little has changed since the 1970s.
In those Northern California drug raids, as with today’s immigration raids, federal agents seized people on little evidence, failed to identify themselves, received military assistance (that helicopter!), and dressed like criminals rather than law enforcement. The Nixon administration, like the Trump regime, justified its own lawlessness by claiming that the targets of raids were “radicals.”
After the case, Clifton continued his federal career. He died in 2013.
Dickenson was buried outside Sacramento. His precedent-setting case remains very much alive.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
