TACTICS QUESTIONED AFTER SOME OFFICERS EXCHANGE DRUGS FOR INFORMATION

The Seattle Police Department's Drug Abatement Program was established to
get drugs off the streets, but some undercover cops have an odd way of doing
it: They've given junkies narcotics for helping set up drug deals.

The deal is called a "buy-bust." It involves an undercover officer
soliciting drugs and buying them with marked money. The undercover cop then
leaves the area, and uniformed or plainclothes officers swoop in and arrest
the seller. The confiscated money is proof the deal went down.

Sometimes, undercover officers will work through an unsuspecting middleman -
a "cluck" in police parlance - to lead them to someone who might sell them
drugs. Street etiquette demands the cluck gets paid.

In at least one instance last year, that payment was made in crack cocaine.

In Seattle, according to a sworn declaration from one narcotics detective,
it's "not uncommon" for that to happen.

The detective and her commanders insist that, more often than not, the
cluck, along with the seller, is usually soon arrested by the other
officers. But not always - and that practice is abhorrent to many police
experts and ethicists.

"How can you give drugs out as a police officer and then go out and arrest
someone for doing the same thing?" asked Henry Degeneste, a professor and
former superintendent of the New York Port Authority Police.

What you wind up with, he said, is cops breaking the law to enforce the law.
And Degeneste believes the practice exposes the city to civil liability.
Suppose the cluck overdosed from drugs provided by police? What if the drugs
were passed on to a child?

"You are really then starting down a slippery slope that will become an
avalanche of corruption," said Degeneste, who teaches at the John Jay School
of Criminal Justice in New York.

Seattle police say they perform more than 2,000 buy-busts every year. Though
department officials say the practice of paying clucks with drugs in these
deals is not sanctioned or common, they did not discipline two officers who
rewarded a drug middleman with crack cocaine last year.

"It is a violation of our policy and procedures to reward or offer as part
of a compensation, drugs for undercover information or services as a
confidential informant," said Assistant Chief Clark Kimerer, who was the
Narcotics Division captain at the time.

Cash is OK. But giving out drugs, he said, is prohibited.

Chalked up to inexperience

Still, on Jan. 24, 1998, at a Central Area club called Deano's Cafe and
Lounge, a pair of Seattle officers, working undercover, approached a woman
known only as "Genie" and asked her if she could find them some drugs. Genie
went outside and returned with a man who sold the officers a small rock of
crack cocaine for $20.

Neither the seller nor Genie was arrested - why is not clear - and the
undercover officers left the club and got into their car. What happened
next, documented in a police report, elicited groans from professional
law-enforcement officers who were told of it.

"As they were driving away, (Genie) stopped them in traffic and asked for a
piece of cocaine for her part in the transaction." The officer, whose name
was removed from the police report, "gave her a piece of cocaine that he had
just purchased."

"It's a bad thing," said Kimerer, who said the case was referred to the
department's Internal Investigations Section and reviewed by the King County
Prosecutor's Office, which declined to file charges. The officers were
ordered into retraining, without additional discipline, and the department
reinforced its policy to other undercover officers and trainees.

Kimerer wrote the incident off as isolated and the result of a
"self-initiated and good-faith mistake" on the part of a couple of officers
without much undercover experience. Both were patrolmen assigned to the
Anti-Crime Team, whose officers target high-crime areas.

The department's more experienced full-time narcotics detectives, he said,
would not have made such a mistake.

Yet, the sworn declaration, filed in a civil drug-abatement action at
another Central Area club called Oscars II, indicates otherwise.

In it, Detective Linda Diaz, who has worked narcotics since 1992, stated
that undercover officers "must behave in a manner similar to an authentic
drug purchaser so that they do not blow their cover."

"As a result, it is not uncommon for officers, posing as undercover drug
buyers, to reward a middleman for setting up a drug deal by giving him a
small piece of narcotics.

Anomaly or usual practice?

"While this doesn't happen with every transaction, the officers would raise
suspicion if they did not conform to typical behavior in the drug culture,"
Diaz said.

Kimerer said clucks usually are arrested as soon as the undercover detective
is safely out of sight. That, he said, is an "unstated" truth in Diaz's
court declaration. The incident at Deano's, he insisted, was an anomaly.

"On rare occasions, drugs are allowed to walk," Kimerer said. "Usually only
to ensure an officer's safety."

But Diaz's declaration doesn't say that. And Diaz reluctantly reiterated in
an interview that sometimes clucks are rewarded with drugs.

"I can't put a percentage on it. But it is certainly something we have done
in the past," she said. "Most of the time, the person is arrested. But, no,
not always."

Moreover, she said she was unaware of any written policy prohibiting such
transactions, even though Kimerer insisted policy and procedures strictly
banned drug payoffs.

Kimerer did, however, point out that the transaction - one-time or not - was
not against the law. The Revised Code of Washington specifically allows
police to violate some laws in order to enforce others.

What is troubling to Degeneste and others who observe the police culture is
that such practices can result in a slow erosion of the barriers that
separate the good guys from the bad. "It's called noble-cause corruption,"
said John Kleinig, a professor of philosophy and director of the Institute
for Criminal Justice Ethics at the John Jay College.

"It's a feeling that what they're doing is justified by certain ends,
ameliorated, perhaps, by the plight of the informant and ambivalence about
the job they are doing."

The problem, though, is that breaking the law once, regardless of the
motive, makes it easier to justify doing it again.

"And if you do it just a little bit, the question becomes how far are you
going and how can we know how far you are going," said Kleinig, who authored
"The Ethics of Policing," published by Cambridge University Press.

"Still, concern over this, even if it isn't widespread, is legitimate," he
said. "It raises larger questions."

Unlike Degeneste, however, Kleinig does not see a landslide of corruption
resulting from such practices.

Flat places on slippery slope

"It may be a slippery slope. But there are places on that slope where it
flattens out," he said. He referred to the Knapp Commission report on New
York police corruption in the 1970s, which distinguished between
"meat-eaters" and "grass-eaters" - the difference between bad cops who
aggressively sought out gambling and narcotics payoffs vs. officers whose
involvement was far less sinister.

"It's a very tough issue," he said. "Think of it like this: Is there a
difference between a police officer giving an informant money, which he
knows will be used to buy drugs, and giving him the drugs themselves?

"Strictly speaking, it is inappropriate and beyond the balance," he said.
"But it is not black and white. There is a dilemma."

Degeneste believes that, if it happened once, chances are it has happened
more often. Usually, such practices are hidden and conducted with a wink and
nod among officers, and are not necessarily known to administrators.

That the two Seattle police officers were comfortable enough to record their
action in a police report means they were either arrogant or - as Kimerer
insists - ignorant, said Degeneste.

What is clear is that the practice of rewarding informants or middlemen with
drugs is universally frowned upon among law-enforcement officers.

"Within the DEA, it's not a common practice - it's not a practice at all,"
said Terry Parham, acting chief of public affairs at the Drug Enforcement
Administration in Washington, D.C. It "is expressly prohibited, and in fact,
it's against the law."

Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran, whose office has prosecuted civil
drug-abatement cases and defends the city against lawsuits, says the civil
liability issue is not much of a concern.

"Is there liability of exposure? I suppose. But there are risks of liability
whenever police do their jobs," he said. "But I'm not sure it's an easy
thing to parse these lines in terms of engaging people who are engaged in
criminal activity," he said.

What's the difference, he asked, between a cop giving a cluck a piece of
crack cocaine vs. that person just keeping some portion of the narcotics
they secured for the undercover officer?

"What I will agree to is that these are issues the police need to be careful
about," he said.