LOCAL DRUG TASK FORCE STILL BEING REVAMPED AFTER SCANDAL, BUDGET CUTS

For at least a decade, Mobile County has enjoyed an uninterrupted flow of
federal grant money for fighting drug dealers, even though the local police
task force the grant pays for was inactive for parts of 2001 and 2002.

Mobile Police Chief Sam Cochran defended the grant, calling it
critical because it pays salaries for at least four officers who work
on the Mobile County Street Enforcement Narcotics Team, long the
area's most prominent locally run anti-drug unit.

"If you don't put the people on the task force, you don't get the
funding to fund their positions," the chief said.

This year the grant money for MCSENT will total $262,000, plus $87,000
in local matching funds, state officials announced last week.

Without that money, Cochran said, he would have to pull officers from
elsewhere in the cash-strapped department or leave MCSENT (pronounced
MAC-sent) unstaffed. The squad has undergone a near-total makeover in
the wake of a 2001 corruption scandal, including a house-cleaning and
a change of address to the Drug Enforcement Administration's local
offices.

Through it all, city officials insist, MCSENT never really went
away.

"MCSENT is alive and well," said Richard Cashdollar, Mobile's public
safety director.

Not if you ask Sam Houston, resident agent in charge of the local
DEA.

"My contention has been that MCSENT doesn't exist as far as I'm
concerned out here," Houston said.

To an extent, the difference of opinion amounts to little more than
semantics in a culture of alphabet soup. But the distinctions are
crucial when the right phrasing on a grant application can mean more
funding for agencies that desperately need it.

Success and scandal

Launched in 1990, MCSENT was aimed at mid-level drug interdiction. It
was to target not the street-corner dealer so much as the guy who
supplies him. The unit came about amid a national trend toward pooling
narcotics officers from local law enforcement agencies, which helps
the departments share information and eases jurisdictional obstacles.

In Mobile, the squad was administered by the Mobile Police Department
and at various times included officers from the Mobile County
Sheriff's Department and every police department in the county. MCSENT
has notched some 5,000 arrests and seized $190 million in drugs,
officials said. Often those cases led to higher-level arrests, and
many MCSENT cases have ended up in federal court.

As chairman of the Mobile City Council's public safety committee,
Councilman Thomas Sullivan has proposed the resolution for each grant
application going back several years.

"I think the idea of the MCSENT program was excellent," said Sullivan,
who represents downtown, Plateau, portions of Toulminville, the
Oakleigh Garden Historic District and the Old Dauphin Way Historic
District. "I think it did a lot of good for certain neighborhoods in
the city that had serious problems, including some in my district."

However, allegations of cowboy police tactics and lack of supervision
occasionally popped up. In 1995, a federal civil jury found that
negligent training contributed to an embarrassing episode in which
MCSENT officers inappropriately cursed and strip-searched a trio of
bystanders at gunpoint while making a drug arrest. The three men
claimed the officers made them spread their buttocks and jump up and
down to see whether they were hiding drugs, all in full view of
neighbors. None of the men was charged with a crime.

The jury awarded them a small judgment but stopped short of saying
their civil rights were violated.

Despite the incident, local authorities still considered MCSENT a
success at that point.

Between 2001 and 2002, though, MCSENT ground to a halt. Suspects began
to complain that MCSENT officers were illegally taking cash from them.
The Mobile Police Department's Internal Affairs unit launched an
investigation into Rodney Patrick, who had been the department's
officer of the year just two years earlier. The district attorney's
office reviewed dozens of drug cases that he was involved in and
dropped at least one after Patrick failed to turn over evidence that
prosecutors needed.

Patrick resigned in August 2001. Prosecutors brought theft charges
against him the following January, accusing him of pocketing nearly
$6,000 in funds from MCSENT and other local law enforcement entities,
money that was supposed to be used in controlled drug buys. His
partner, deputy Anthony Gardner, was charged with perjury. A grand
jury accused Gardner of lying to a judge to get a search warrant.

Patrick was convicted at trial and sentenced to serve three years of a
10-year prison term. A judge threw out Gardner's case after
determining that Gardner's supervisors coerced him into giving a statement.

>From the summer of 2001 through the spring of 2002, the duration of
the Patrick-Gardner episode, authorities retooled MCSENT. Cochran
installed a new supervisor. The squad, which had worked out of the
City Hall North building on St. Joseph Street that houses other Mobile
narcotics officers, was relocated to the Drug Enforcement
Administration's offices near Airport Boulevard and Interstate 65.
Eventually every officer on the unit was replaced.

The changes, according to Cochran and Cashdollar, were part reaction
to the corruption fiasco, part effort to reorganize the way MCSENT was
supervised and part attempt to trim overhead.

During the shuffle, MCSENT did not refer a single case to District
Attorney John Tyson Jr.'s office for prosecution, Tyson said.

Yet in April 2002, Sullivan and the rest of the City Council
rubber-stamped their annual application for the grant, which is
Department of Justice money delivered through the Alabama Department
of Economic and Community Affairs. As grant-seekers often do, they
requested for more than they expected to get. And just as in years
past, that's exactly what happened -- the council asked for $416,000
and got about $300,000.

Task force within a task force

When MCSENT switched offices, its members were deputized as federal
agents and went to work under the Gulf Coast High-Intensity Drug
Trafficking Area, or HIDTA, task force. The White House's Office of
National Drug Control Policy funds 32 such areas, all of which
consequently have a HIDTA (pronounced HIDE-uh) task force made up of
federal, state and local agencies, a task force that targets regional
and interstate drug trafficking.

In Mobile, the HIDTA task force is administered by the DEA. There is
also a third task force funded and operated directly through the DEA,
but it is a separate entity from HIDTA and MCSENT.

Houston said it was his understanding that MCSENT ceased to be when
its officers moved out to west Mobile.

"The name stuck, but they did not come out to my office as a MCSENT
group. They came out as part of a HIDTA task force," he said. "MCSENT
had nothing to do with it."

Cochran remembered it slightly differently.

"They went out there as sort of an integral unit, a MCSENT unit, but
they were working with HIDTA," the chief said.

"There's a little bit of a disagreement between HIDTA and Sam Cochran
and Sam Houston as to what the specific role of MCSENT should be,"
Cashdollar said. "MCSENT traditionally has been more of a mid-level
dealer, street ops kind of organization that worked county-wide. I
think Sam Houston pointed the DEA credentials at them to point them
toward the higher-level drug organizations. And that issue is still an
open question."

Houston said there is at least some conflict between HIDTA and ADECA
as to MCSENT's goals.

"When you start looking at some of the things that the grants require
and that HIDTA requires, they don't always go hand-in-hand," he said.

Cochran said he and Houston sat down with ADECA officials around the
time of the reorganization to make sure the grant money could continue
to fund MCSENT's efforts against local drug dealers, even as its
officers worked to meet HIDTA task force requirements. The chief said
ADECA officials approved the arrangement.

"ADECA obviously was happy enough with the results that they continued
funding it," Cashdollar said.

Even before the Patrick investigation, MCSENT had fewer than 10
officers, Cochran said. Since then, the ADECA grant has shrunk
slightly, as have budgets for law enforcement agencies everywhere.
Smaller police departments like Prichard's have had to pull officers
off MCSENT and other task forces, but so has the sheriff's department.

Christina Bowersox, a spokeswoman for the sheriff's department, said
that agency has no deputies assigned to any of the three drug task
forces in the area. Retirements and military call-ups have the
department's narcotics unit running on half its normal staffing, she
said.

Cochran said MCSENT had just four officers at one point, though that
number has risen again to six -- four Mobile officers, one from
Chickasaw and one from Saraland. MCSENT also has a civilian employee,
the chief said.

The reductions have left MCSENT a far less productive unit than it was
in its heyday, Cochran said, adding that the group's efficiency has
improved as the newer squad members gain experience.

"It's still a smaller unit and it's not gonna be able to do as much as
a unit with twice as many officers," he said.

Fighting for the dollars to keep a program like MCSENT running is
simply part of a larger struggle facing chiefs across the country, who
have had to cope with reductions in their forces. Cochran, for
instance, recently helped convince the City Council to give his troops
take-home cars in an attempt to boost morale and keep officers from
leaving for higher-paying jobs. The exodus of veteran officers has
been such that even if he could get the grant money to fund more
MCSENT slots, Cochran said he wouldn't have the officers to fill them
anyway.

How thin would MCSENT's staffing have to get before officials decided
it wasn't worthwhile?

"If it went much below where it's at now, we'd probably have to take a
hard look at it," Cashdollar said.

Still, he called the task force "a valuable tool. Even if it's small,
it still remains of value."

About a month ago, Houston pulled the DEA credentials from the MCSENT
officers under his roof, apparently with Cochran's consent.

"They're no longer deputized, let me put it like that," he said.
"They're becoming MCSENT again, for grant purposes."

Cochran, a member of the executive board for the New Orleans-based
Gulf Coast HIDTA, which includes Mobile, said he envisions MCSENT
remaining its own entity operating under local HIDTA auspices. That
means it would continue to answer to the DEA as it has for the past
two years rather than answer to a Mobile police captain -- and
ultimately, Cochran -- as it did for years before that.

"HIDTA's an organization with units within it, and this is just one
unit," he said.

Houston stepped delicately around the question of what's next.

"It's kind of hard to define right now," he said, "because there are
some changes being made. They need to fulfill their grant. So it's
really kind of hard to say where this is gonna end up."

Said Tyson, the district attorney: "What's not changed is that they're
chasing drugs, and that's good for this community, whether it's DEA or
MCSENT or HIDTA or whomever."