FIGHTING DRUG WAR IS TOUGH AND TEDIOUS

Officers on multicounty force say work involves a lot of 'waiting and watching'

FAYETTEVILLE, Tenn. - Of all the scenes that James Whitsett, now a
detective at the Lewisburg, Tenn., Police Department, remembers from his 18
months in the area Drug Task Force, of all those arrests and stakeouts,
chases and undercover buys, the one that still haunts him didn't involve
guns or drugs.

Whitsett went to a house to arrest a man and a woman on charges of drug
trafficking. In a bedroom lay an asthmatic child on a bed rigged with a
plastic tent to help her breathe. When Whitsett pulled back the blanket to
check on the toddler, a roach ran out from under the child.

"The mama and daddy were messed up on cocaine," Whitsett said as he and
Detective Shane Dougherty recounted their work for the task force from
their office in Lewisburg. "And they didn't care.

Whitsett cares. So does Dougherty, who spent five years on the Task Force
as a representative from the Fayetteville Police Department. So does Tim
Lane, director of the 17th Judicial Drug Task Force.

"The average citizen doesn't have a clue to what the Drug Task Force does,"
Lane said last month from his Shelbyville office. "There are still drugs
out there, but we've done some really great things for the people of
Fayetteville and Lincoln County.

"Used to be 15 or 20 crack dealers in Fayetteville would rush the car when
we drove through the projects, trying to sell," said Lane. "Now we have to
drive through five times before we can make a buy. We have made a
difference."

Multicounty Drug Task Force

The Task Force, organized in the 1980s, combines officers from most of the
city and county law enforcement offices in Lincoln, Bedford, Moore and
Marshall counties to investigate drug cases. About a third of the force's
money comes from a federal grant, Lane said. The remaining money for
equipment, cars and gasoline, pagers and weapons must come from fines,
forfeitures, donations and seizures of property used during a crime.

"Unfortunately, we have to be an income-producing agency," Lane said.

Some police or sheriff's departments choose not to participate, claiming
that one county or another is getting more attention than theirs. Lincoln
County did not participate under Sheriff Ray Rhoton, but current Sheriff
Jimmy Mullins put a deputy back on the force.

The Fayetteville Police Department, one of the original sponsors of the
Task Force, expects eventually to name a replacement officer for Shane
Dougherty, who resigned from the Task Force for the Lewisburg detective
position this month, Fayetteville Police Chief Doug Carver said last week.

Participating departments pay the salary for their officer. Those officers
then report to work with Lane, and in the course of an average day could
help with operations in a couple of counties.

The investigations are among the most difficult and unpredictable in police
work, Dougherty says.

"A lot of people don't understand drug work," Dougherty said, discussing
the work he did undercover. "For example on a street-level buy, where you
ride through an area and make a buy, it takes hours of preparation and
organization."

"It may take 15 minutes to buy the drugs, but two hours to do the paper
work for the fund tracking - where that money went - and to catalog the
evidence," Dougherty said. "And if the seller is not identified, that's
extra hours to try to get the ID. And for midlevel dealers, it takes even
more manpower. Sometimes I've been sitting for days waiting and watching."

"And the drug dealers are not very cooperative," Whitsett said
sarcastically. "Sometimes they don't show up when they're supposed to."

"They don't wear watches," Dougherty said.

And even if one case goes on schedule, one arrest could bring a tip to
another dealer or supplier who needs to be tracked down immediately. And
officers on undercover duty always have a backup officer nearby, so each
operation involves a minimum of two or three officers from the five or
six-member team.

"Some days I'd go to work, tell my wife 'See you tonight' - and show up
three days later," Whitsett said.

Sometimes those three days would have been spent tracking down a drug
dealer and ended in an arrest. Most times, those three days would just
become part of a longer project. Officers in the Task Force, with help from
Fayetteville police, spent more than two years gathering evidence and
building a case against drug dealers who worked together here from a base
they called the Dogg Pound.

The 16 men arrested in that case were tried this spring in federal court,
where standards for evidence are a little higher and sentences longer than
in state courts. The resulting convictions of all those arrested put the 16
in federal prison with average sentences of 11 years apiece.

The convictions gave Lincoln County the dubious distinction last year of
providing 26 percent of the state's federal convictions for cocaine
trafficking, according to a report by Donal Campbell, commissioner of
corrections.

"And then the Task Force went on up the pipeline and took down some big
guys in Nashville, too," Chief Carver said from his office last week.
"Since then, it's been very quiet here. We see signs of some activity
starting up again, but our real problem now is illegal sales of
prescription pain killers."

That drug dealing will start up again is about the only thing certain in
his work, Lane said.

"If we could rid society of the addict population, I could assure you that
the dealers won't be there," Lane said, scooping some artificial crack
cocaine he'd pulled out for a demonstration back into a tiny glass vial.
"But if we don't have people out there, we will never help society get
better. We need the war on drugs - and we could use 10 times as many people
as we have in drug enforcement."