BY LOOK AND BY DEED COPS' TACTICS CAN CAST SUSPICION ON INNOCENT

To police, Mickel Morales behaved like a drug dealer after he flew into
Tucson on a one-way airline ticket bought at the last minute.

However, a two-day investigation that included following him and finally
asking to search his belongings revealed the actions of a fiber optics
repairman sent to Tucson on an emergency repair job.

"The more I thought about it, the more I got mad," the 27-year-old Texan
said. "How many people have last-minute plans and have to change your
flight? How many people have to change cars or have packages arrive late at
FedEx?"

Morales said Friday that he was considering filing a harassment complaint
against police here.

The repairman's recent experience shows the pitfalls of judging people by
their appearance and actions. And he is not alone.

Last month, a 19-year Border Patrol veteran filed a claim against his own
agency claiming a colleague illegally stopped and searched him on a New
Mexico highway because of his Mexican appearance. The agent said it was the
seventh time he had been stopped by fellow agents when driving his own
vehicle.

In December, a black woman from Chicago joined a civil rights lawsuit
against the U.S. Customs Service after she was strip-searched, handcuffed,
X- rayed and probed internally by a doctor because an inspector suspected
she might be smuggling drugs from Jamaica. The agents found nothing.

"Isn't it interesting that the people who usually (are) profiled are people
of color?" asked Tucson attorney Paul Gattone, executive vice president of
the National Lawyers Guild, a public interest law organization.

"Also what's very outrageous about it and scary are how subjective these
profiles are," Gattone said. "They're based on assumptions and stereotypes
and as such they give 'way too much discretion to individual law enforcement
officers to determine who is suspicious and who they're going to stop.

"I think they are a real threat to our constitutional rights and we need to
hopefully have some public outcry against them," he said. "It certainly
doesn't make us any safer. It has the opposite effect."

The guild's office here has looked into complaints in recent years, he said,
but has no case before it now.

Jim Molesa, special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said his
agency does not use profiles to identify those who may be criminals.

"But if somebody does a set of circumstances that a reasonable person would
find suspicious, it goes along with the theory that if it walks like a duck,
quacks like a duck and has feathers, it must be a duck," he said.

Molesa refused to comment on specific techniques.

"This is an art; it's not even a science. You're dealing with people and
looking at people's behavior and trying to make a determination of what's
usual and what's unusual," he said. "It's obviously not going to be 100
percent perfect."

Though he said investigators' suspicions are correct most of the time, he
acknowledged it is not unusual for honest citizens to get upset when their
actions come under government scrutiny.

Airports and other travel hubs draw special attention.

"Dope smugglers and money launderers have to travel around," he said.

Some businesses including car rental agencies and airlines may cooperate
with law enforcement agencies by giving client information without a
subpoena, he said.

Those who cooperate, said Tucson Airport Authority Police Chief John
Carlson, "all have an interest in not having narcotics in their cars or in
their airplanes."

The airport force's 24 sworn employees, who wear uniforms or plain clothes,
work closely with other airports around the nation as well as local police.

"We don't use any kind of stereotype. It's been my experience that people
who have been trafficking in narcotics don't fit any stereotype. . . . They
seem to encompass all aspects of life," Carlson said.

Officers try to remain low-key. "We're very public-relations oriented at the
airport. When we talk to people we go to great lengths not to interfere with
their travel plans, disturb them or upset them," Carlson said, saying that
his department receives few complaints.

The Customs Service is allowed to search anyone entering the United States.
Agents may follow suspected smugglers after they enter the country "but we
have to keep (them) under watch the entire time," customs spokesman Roger
Maier said.

"We really don't have any specific profile. We've intercepted smugglers of
all ages, all ethnic groups. . . . If we knew what a drug smuggler looked
like, our job would be easy. Nothing is beyond the realm of comprehension,"
Maier said.

Maier would not comment on behavior that catches an agent's eye. "It could
be a variety of things. We're not going to discuss them publicly; criminals
read newspapers, also," he said.

Customs officers last year ordered partial or full strip searches or X-rays
of 2,447 airline passengers and found drugs on 27 percent, according to an
Associated Press account of the Chicago woman's lawsuit. Sixty percent of
those searched were black or Hispanic.

Customs officials said race was not a factor. A Customs Service handbook
advises officers that reasonable suspicion requires a combination of
factors, including appearing nervous, baggy clothing, vague or contradictory
answers about travel plans and being unusually polite or argumentative.

Morales said narcotics detectives told him actions including his last-minute
flight, renting a car separate from his business colleague, staying at a
motel a distance from the airport and arranging to pick up packages at
Federal Express on his arrival made him appear to be a drug dealer.

He said he believes he was targeted also for being "a young Hispanic male
traveling with an older white gentleman."

Tucson police Capt. Kermit Miller, who supervises the Metropolitan Area
Narcotics Trafficking and Interdiction Squad, said his detectives
investigated Morales after he caught the attention of another law
enforcement agency whose agents were at the airport on an unrelated matter.

"There were some characteristics similar to people who smuggle drugs," he
said, denying that race was a factor. "Our guys started doing follow-up and
found some other information that didn't make sense," he said, such as
business names and phone numbers that didn't match Morales' car rental
information.

Detectives started watching Morales and saw him try to pick up a package,
Miller said. "What they noticed that was interesting was there was another
male in the parking lot of the business. It appeared to the officers they
were acting like they didn't know each other. The officers did some
checking, found out the other person had flown in with Mr. Morales and had
probably sat next to him" on the airplane, Miller said.

"It turned out there's logical explanations for all this," Miller said.

For example, company policy required Morales and his business colleague to
rent separate cars. The pair stayed at a motel where they had coupons. The
boxes Morales received included eight latched cases of fiber optics tools
and two sealed packages of paper and ink cartridges.

Miller said he was surprised to learn later that Morales was upset.

"Normally if someone's upset about it we'll know at the time of the
contact," he said. The detectives' contact with Morales, which was tape
recorded, seemed amicable. "They shook hands with them and said goodbye," he
said. "To (detectives), it was a non-event. It's something we do all the
time."

Morales said allowing police to search boxes of equipment his company had
shipped made him and his colleague late at their work site.

"We had to explain we had just been raided," said the colleague, who did not
want his name published.

"It seemed kind of nerve-wracking to me," he said. "They knew we left the
airport at Dallas. . . . They knew we bought (the ticket) that same day,
which is not unusual because we go all over the country to work at a
moment's notice," he said.

Morales said he feared he was still being followed in Tucson. "This incident
left me a prisoner of my (motel) room all weekend," he said. "I thought
McCarthyism no longer existed. But apparently it still does in the
Southwest; only you're not considered a communist but a drug trafficker."

Arizona Daily Star reporter L. Anne Newell contributed to this story.