METHODS, SAFETY SCRUTINIZED AFTER SHOOTOUT

The 'knock-and-talk' tactic for gaining entry to a suspect's house without a
warrant comes under renewed examination in light of last week's deadly
confrontation

Alane Loehr's grow light was perfect for nurturing her umbrella tree and
cactus in the dead of winter. The Northeast Portland plant lover never
expected her 1996 birthday present to lure marijuana detectives to her front
door.

Loehr was fair game under the Portland Police Bureau's "knock-and-talk'
method of confronting suspected pot growers when there's no probable cause
for a search warrant.

Prosecutors and police say innocent people such as Loehr are minor
casualties in the war on drugs. Knock-and-talks, they say, are the cheapest,
quickest and usually safest weapon in their arsenal. Residents don't have to
let police in, but most do and are accountable if any contraband is found.

In 1996, the last year for which statistics are available, the bureau's
marijuana task force arrested 733 people and confiscated cash and property,
including 42 houses, worth $2.1 million. They nabbed 14,425 pot plants worth
nearly $29 million.

Knock-and-talks can be triggered by confidential informants, calls from
angry neighbors, excessively high or low utility bills, or purchases of grow
lights.

The routine police tactic lost its innocence and obscurity Tuesday, however,
when Portland Officer Colleen Waibel and members of the bureau's marijuana
task force walked into an apparent ambush.

Waibel, 44, became the first Portland policewoman killed in the line of
duty. Two other officers were wounded. Police say they found marijuana in
the house where suspect Steven Douglas Dons, 37, lived. They also found a
large cache of dangerous weapons, including an SKS semiautomatic rifle that
allegedly was used to kill Waibel.

Her death has galvanized criminal defense attorneys and civil libertarians:
They want the bureau to end knock-and-talks. The technique leads officers to
drugs only half the time, according to court and bureau records, and is
nearly as likely to yield finds such as tomato plants, orchids and Loehr's
umbrella tree.

Critics also decry what they see as a financial incentive behind
knock-and-talks: Prosecutors generate city revenues by seizing the homes and
asses of convicted marijuana growers.

Sometimes, those homes belong to otherwise law-abiding, working hippies
caught in a time warp, said Philip Lewis, a Portland criminal defense
attorney. "It's like shooting fish in a barrel," he says. "Most of these
people are recreational growers who just want to get high."

But Assistant Police Chief Lynnae Berg, who heads the investigations branch,
defends the tactic. "We have found it to be a very valid and successful
technique, and we will continue to use it," Berg says.

As for forfeiture money being the driving force behind knock-and-talks, Berg
says: "I think that assertion is ludicrous. . . . The marijuana task force
is a unit recognized around the state for their professionalism. This is
really some of the cream of the crop of our officers, and I'm extremely
proud of them."

TACTIC ADAPTED TO CASES IN '80'S

Knock-and-talks are as old as crime and punishment.

The consent-search technique long has been used to gain access to vehicles
or to question murder suspects and witnesses. Consultant John Schlim, a
nationally known instructor of the method, says drug detectives adapted it
for use about 1985.

It has caught on nationwide and in Europe and Canada, says Schlim, a 30-year
police veteran in California who spent half his career enforcing narcotics
laws.

The concept is simple: If police suspect someone is dealing drugs, they
confront the suspect with a knock at the door and ask to search the
premises.

Schlim says nearly all residents, even those who have something to hide,
oblige. Waibel is only the second police officer to die as a result of a
knock-and-talk, he says; a Los Angeles officer died in 1996.

"You're making contact with dope dealers, for crying out loud," Schlim says.
"Sooner or later, bad things have to happen. It's just the law of averages."

Nothing suggests that the firefight Tuesday at 2612 S.E. 111th Ave, could
have been avoided. Dons refused to answer his door the first time drug
detectives knocked.

Then an officer reported the smell of marijuana plants and telephoned for a
search warrant. While police waited, Dons allegedly fed pot plants into his
wood stove.

Smelling their evidence and seeing it waft out the chimney, Waibel and four
other officers used a concrete stepping stone to bash down the front door.
They immediately were met by at least 10 shots. Dons was hit once in the
chest by return fire and remains in critical condition at OHSU Hospital.

John Bradley, the first assistant to Multnomah County District Attorney
Michael Schrunk, says knock-and-talks are the next best thing to search
warrants, which can be difficult to obtain.

"If you didn't have them, you'd have drug houses and little you could do
about it," Bradley says.

QUESTIONS ABOUT DETECTING SMELL

One of the criminal defense bar's chef complaints is that Portland police,
when they don't get the homeowner's consent to search, often get a warrant
by swearing to a judge they can smell marijuana plants.

Nashville chemist and smell expert Jim Woodford, a nationally recognized
court expert who has testified at several Portland drug trials, says police
sometimes can smell marijuana if the plants have bloomed.

But he once persuaded a federal judge in Portland to suppress marijuana
evidence by proving federal agents could not smell the plants upwind from
more than 300 feet. Woodford also is responsible for an Ohio case in which
that state has ruled smell alone is not probable cause for a warrant.

It's not that police are lying, he says, but a phenomenon known as Coueism,
named for Emile Coue, a psychologist who died in 1926. His theory is based
on the concept of selective perception: Narcotics officers smell marijuana
because their brains tell their noses to smell it, Woodford says.

"People think marijuana has a distinctive smell like bacon," he says, "It
has a very subtle plant odor."

Portland attorney David McDonald says knock-and-talks are a successful
police strategy but push civil rights to the brink.

"If I had a hound dog with this kind of a nose, then I'd be the most
successful raccoon hunter in the history of the Ozark bottomlands," McDonald
says.

The marijuana task force knocks on eight to 10 doors a week but on average
finds pot at only four or five, according to Portland Police Officer Kim
Keist, who testified to the figure during a July 29, 1996, deposition in an
asset forfeiture case.

Keist was wounded in Tuesday's shootout and is in fair condition at Legacy
Emanuel Hospital.

Defense lawyers particularly dislike a police tactic of staking out indoor
lighting and gardening stores -- a practice confirmed during a Nov. 13,
1995, deposition by task force Sgt. Jim Hudson, who was wounded in the hand
in Tuesday's raid.

Police also acknowledge in depositions and court cases that they receive
tips from Portland General Electric about customers who might be stealing
power to grow pot or those with wattage fluctuations. PGE spokeswoman Vickie
Rocker said the utility's diversion unit cooperates with police to curb
power theft.

Keith and Marlilee Tillstrom say task force members visited their Southeast
Portland home last month. The couple had suffered a power failure, and PGE
never relocked their meter after repairs. A meter reader might have
suspected the worst, speculates the couple, who complied with the police
search and, though innocent, felt violated.

"Is PGE an arm of the police department? I'm incensed," Marilee Tillstrom
says.

Oregon City lawyer John Henry Hingson III, former president of he National
Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, says the Fourth Amendment
prohibits unwarranted searches and seizures.

"Unfortunately, those who toil in the vineyards of criminal defense would
say that the Fourth Amendment has shrunk to the third and a half," he says.