Losing The War On Drugs: Drugs And The Police, Part 10

ASKING POLICE TO FIGHT A WAR THAT CAN'T BE WON

Trying To Enforce Drug Laws Can Sometimes Bring Out The Worst In Even The
Best Officers

One of the worst police corruption scandals in American history began with
3 1/2 kilograms of cocaine.

That's what Los Angeles police officer Rafael Perez stole from a police
evidence room. When he was caught, in August 1999, he agreed to talk, not
just about the theft, but also about the shootings, robberies, ferocious
beatings and other corrupt practices that were standard operating procedure
for many of the officers of his police station.

Mr. Perez's own crimes included the time he and his partner handcuffed an
18-year-old, shot him in the head and planted a gun to make it look like a
justified shooting.

The teenager survived but was paralysed -- and was promptly sent to prison
for 23 years. (He was freed when Mr. Perez confessed.)

Five police officers have been charged and 20 fired. More than 70 officers
are under investigation.

More than 100 convictions based on false testimony and planted evidence
have been overturned.

The scandal has yet to run its full course, but already, the name of Mr.
Perez's police station has become a watchword in the United States for
out-of-control cops: Rampart.

The behaviour exposed by the Rampart scandal was horrifying, but not unique.

In recent years, similar corruption scandals have exploded in Atlanta,
Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New Orleans, Detroit, Miami, Chicago and
other American cities. In the past seven years, the number of police
officers sentenced to federal prisons has totalled 668.

And it's not just an American phenomenon.

In Australia, a Royal Commission exposed profound corruption within the New
South Wales Police Service. In Britain, allegations of corruption surfaced
last year.

While Canada has been spared major police scandals, police departments,
particularly in Toronto, were embarrassed in the mid-1990s by a spate of
allegations and charges ranging from armed robbery to planting drugs.

Late in 1999, numerous charges against suspected drug dealers in Toronto
were dropped after allegations of wrongdoing by drug-squad officers. A
veteran officer of the Toronto Police Service was charged in August with
armed robbery and attempted murder for allegedly belonging to a gang that
robbed drug dealers.

The Toronto allegations provide what many experts feel is the common thread
that links most of this corruption: the War on Drugs.

The drug war is a Sisyphean struggle, this argument goes. It cannot be won.
Asking cops to fight an unwinnable war breeds frustration and cynicism in
their ranks. These feelings, combined with easy access to the criminal
wealth of the drug trade, have spawned a new form of corruption. Wherever
the drug war is being fought, that corruption can be found. Its degree
depends on how fiercely the drug war is pursued.

No country has fought the drug war harder than the United States, and it is
there that the most virulent strains of this corruption have been bred.

One of the leading experts making this case is Joe McNamara. Now a fellow
at the Hoover Institution, Mr. McNamara is a former police officer of many
decades' experience, including 10 years in Harlem and 18 years as chief of
police in Kansas City and San Jose.

Over the last two decades, Mr. McNamara argues, the War on Drugs has
produced a "sea change" in American policing. To understand that change, it
must be recognized that drug crimes aren't like most other crimes. "They're
consensual transactions," Mr. McNamara recently told a Washington
conference. "In other crimes, there's a victim, there are witnesses." These
don't exist for drug crimes because in most cases, the people present --
buyers and sellers -- want to be involved. That makes enforcement
difficult. When politicians who want to be tough on drugs push the police
to boost their drug arrests, the police are forced to take what Mr.
McNamara calls "shortcuts."

Those shortcuts run straight through the Fourth Amendment, the American
constitution's ban on unreasonable search and seizure. State and local
police made 1.4 million arrests last year for drug possession, Mr. McNamara
noted, "mostly very low amounts, mostly in very poor, minority neighbourhoods."

If the police were obeying the Fourth Amendment, it would be "pretty much
impossible" to make that many arrests. Dealers and users rarely make drugs
or cash visible on the street, so the police rarely have reasonable grounds
to stop and search someone.

There are exceptions, Mr. McNamara noted, where drugs are seen being passed
from hand to hand or are left in plain view on the dashboards of cars, but
"this doesn't happen a million times a year."

Having made illegal searches to find drugs, police then lie about it in
court. In New York, NYPD officers call it "testilying." In Los Angeles,
LAPD officers joke about it as "joining the liar's club."

Judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers often know the police are lying,
Mr. McNamara said, but it's expected, even accepted, as necessary to fight
the War on Drugs.

That's where the rot sets in. Constantly violating the U.S. Constitution
and lying about it corrodes the integrity of officers. If they rationalize
it to themselves with ends-justify-the-means thinking, they begin slipping
toward other illegal actions that can be rationalized in the same way.

Worse, new dealers and users constantly replace imprisoned offenders as
fast as the police can jail them. Their efforts seem to have little effect.
Cynicism about the effectiveness of the justice system grows.

In these fertile conditions, a far more profound corruption is bred. The
result is summed up in the title of Mr. McNamara's forthcoming book:
Gangster Cops.

In 1998, the General Accounting Office, the research arm of the U.S.
Congress, reviewed studies of police corruption and interviewed experts and
officers. The GAO reported clear trends.

Traditionally, police corruption mainly meant cops taking bribes to look
the other way. It usually involved isolated individuals, or, as in the case
of the NYPD in the 1970s when Frank Serpico famously blew the whistle on
corruption, it pervaded a whole chain of command.

Today, the GAO wrote, corrupt police aren't just ignoring crimes, they're
committing them. Police are stealing drugs and money from drug dealers,
selling drugs, planting evidence, assaulting suspects, protecting drug
networks, and lying under oath.

This sort of corruption tends to be rooted in small, tight-knit groups of
officers who work together to commit crimes and protect each other.
Narcotics units and other police squads directly involved in the War on
Drugs are most susceptible. Anti-gang units also seem to be heavily implicated.

This trend isn't unique to the United States. Justice James Wood, the head
of an Australian Royal Commission that reported on terrible police
corruption in New South Wales in 1997, pointed to New York City's 1994
Mollen Commission on police corruption, which described the change noted by
the GAO. "This was precisely what we found in New South Wales," he told a
conference.

The crimes committed by gangster cops can be as diverse and ruthless as
those of organized drug traffickers. One officer in the Bronx was found to
have committed 11 murders. Uniformed officers have guarded drug shipments,
even moved drugs themselves. Armed robbery of drug dealers (also while in
uniform) seems to be common among corrupt cops. Severe beatings and
shootings, as the Rampart scandal has exposed, have also occurred.

Barry King, chief of the Brockville Police Service and the long-serving
chairman of the committee on drug abuse of the Canadian Association of
Chiefs of Police, acknowledges that drug-related corruption exists among
Canadian police, but insists it is not a major problem.

"There are incidents that occur. But I certainly don't think it's on a
large scale," he says. "Certainly, they've had major, major problems in the
United States, in some areas in particular, and that's what we don't want
to get to."

Chief King agrees that the cash and valuable commodities involved in drug
policing do present unique enticements to corruption. But he argues that
Canadian police have taken steps to minimize the temptations.

Canadian police forces use fewer specialized drug units, he says, and they
keep those units better supervised. There are regular audits of money and
cash seized. And only the better officers are elevated to special drug units.

While it is true that Canadian police have never been involved in
misconduct of the magnitude revealed in Los Angeles, some Canadian defence
lawyers claim to have detected a similar pattern of drug-related corruption
on a much lesser scale.

Alan Young, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School who also works as a
defence lawyer, noted that, "It's only in the area of drug law enforcement
that myself as a lawyer, and many other lawyers" will look into the
disciplinary records of the police officers who laid the charges.

"When you're dealing with a murder investigation, or a sexual assault
investigation, you rarely ever intuitively think that you're going to get a
gold mine by trying to probe into the disciplinary records of the officers.
But in the drug area, it is a gold mine."

In a recent case, Mr. Young defended a woman who was charged with
possessing a small amount of marijuana after officers of a Toronto drug
squad raided her home. He looked into the records of some of the officers
involved and found that they had been involved in disciplinary actions.

"And surprise, surprise," Mr. Young said, "my client kept complaining about
$4,000 that had been taken during the raid and isn't in any inventory list
and is not in a police exhibit vault."

The combination of missing cash and prior police misconduct cast a pall
over the case. The Crown stayed the charge.

"There's something intrinsic about enforcing drug laws that brings out the
worst in police officers," Mr. Young feels.

Statistics cited in the GAO report seem to bear him out. Between 1993 and
1997, half of the 640 American police officers caught in FBI
anti-corruption operations and convicted, were found guilty of drug-related
crimes.

Joe McNamara says part of the explanation lies in the enormous temptations
that drug laws create. "Drug dealers can't just pop into the local police
station and say, `Hey, some cop just robbed me of a kilo of cocaine and
$25,000.' "

Police know that in some circumstances they can steal huge amounts of cash
and drugs with little chance of getting caught.

They also have an easy way to rationalize their actions: The only victims
are the Enemy. Pumped up by political rhetoric about making "war" on drugs,
it's not hard to convince yourself that rules and laws can't be allowed to
stand in the way of victory. As one convicted sergeant quoted by Mr.
McNamara put it, "The ends justified the means. These were bad guys. We did
what we had to do to get them."

The new police corruption, unlike the traditional variety, isn't just about
selfish officers wanting to make some money. As the GAO report noted,
corrupt cops are often cynical about the criminal justice system, believing
it incapable of making a difference. And they want to make the difference
they feel the system can't. So they break the law to get the bad guys.

Rafael Perez admitted to routinely carrying small amounts of crack cocaine
to plant on suspects. That sort of crime, like many of the shootings and
beatings that took place at Rampart, had nothing to do with making money.

As Mr. Perez testified in court, "The us-against-them ethos of the
overzealous cop began to consume me. And the ends justified the means. We
vaguely sensed that we were doing the wrong things for the right reasons."

It is perhaps not surprising, then, to find that "gangster cops" are often,
unlike the traditional "bad cop," not the sort of marginal officer who
probably shouldn't have been hired in the first place. They are often the
very best officers.

Police departments try to dismiss the problem of gangster cops, Mr.
McNamara said, by claiming they are just a few "rotten apples."

"Well, I've looked and it's not a few rotten apples, it's often the most
decorated cops in the department who have committed these (crimes). And
that's how they got into elite narcotics units to begin with," he said.

"Rafael Perez is a good example. He grew up in Philadelphia, hated drug
dealers. Served in the Marine Corps for four years, was so gung ho as a cop
that they put him into a special street crimes unit and into drug enforcement."

In Australia, Justice Wood came to the same conclusion. The most disturbing
discovery of his Royal Commission, he said, involved Australia's elite
anti-drug unit.

"This was a force comprised of detectives of supposedly high calibre,
integrity and experience, hand chosen from the New South Wales Police
Service and the Australian Federal Police, supported with the best
available resources and tasked with targeting high-level drug dealers.
Although it achieved a high conviction rate, it quickly became a hotbed of
corruption, and there were strong suggestions that participation in corrupt
practices became a rite of passage."

In Washington, Joe McNamara cautioned that even in American cities heavily
affected by corruption, the problem has to be kept in perspective. The
practice of conducting illegal searches and lying about it in court, he
said, is likely widespread, but the far worse corruption of the "gangster
cops" involves only a very small minority of officers.

The damage that corrupt minority does, however, can be profound. Any
justice system relies on a community's faith that it is fair and effective.
Revelations of serious police crime destroy that faith, and undermine the
justice system, as the justice system of Los Angeles is discovering in the
wake of the Rampart scandal.

Many police officials are increasingly concerned about this erosion of
faith. The International Association of Police Chiefs, the oldest and
largest organization of police executives, with 17,000 members in 100
countries, recently called for a national commission in the United States
to examine police corruption, brutality and other unethical or illegal
conduct. These issues must be addressed, the association claimed, because
many Americans feel these problems are "widespread and deeply rooted."

The fear of corruption, and the damage it does to public confidence, is as
old as governments' efforts to stamp out drug use. When alcohol prohibition
came into force in 1920, Fiorello La Guardia, the future legendary mayor of
New York City, predicted that enforcing Prohibition "will require a police
force of 250,000 men and a force of 250,000 men to police the police."

La Guardia was wrong about the first figure: No police force of any size
could have enforced Prohibition. But he was right about the corruption. In
the 13 years that Prohibition lasted, corruption saturated not only the
police departments, but also the judiciaries, the mayors' offices, the city
halls, even the White House administration. The worst offenders were the
Prohibition agents themselves, who were so notoriously corrupt that judges
openly mocked them in court and dismissed their testimony as unreliable.
The damage done to public faith in police and the law was enormous.

Mr. McNamara fears that the War on Drugs is doing the same today, wherever
drug prohibition is vigorously enforced. "In trying to do something that
really can't be done in the first place," he said, "we've created this
monster that's eating away at ... the integrity and belief in the criminal
justice system." The harms being inflicted on the justice system, he fears,
may be far worse than anything the drugs themselves could ever do.