DETECTIVE MURDER HIGHLIGHTS RISK OF 'BUY AND BUST'

NEW YORK -- Its war on crime increasingly focused on ridding neighborhoods
of drugs, the New York City Police Department finds itself forced to
confront drug dealers at their last sanctuary: inside apartment buildings,
where suspicious sellers now commonly pat down their customers and subject
them to intense scrutiny.

Monday night, the dangers of that new battleground became all too apparent,
when an undercover officer not wearing a bulletproof vest was fatally shot
in a gun battle with dealers.

Law enforcement experts say that undercover drug detectives, who are
overwhelmingly black or Hispanic, have become the cannon fodder of the
city's war on crime. They have replaced street officers as targets because
the department's vigorous street policing has forced drug sales indoors.
Equipped with elaborate disguises, but no bulletproof vests, more than
1,000 detectives are assigned to risk their lives by conning some of the
city's most vicious, savvy, heavily armed criminals.

But as police have intensified their assault, the dealers have also adopted
more perilous tactics. Five or six times each month, undercover
investigators are now forced to use cocaine or heroin at gunpoint, to prove
to dealers that they can be trusted. At least twice a month, an officer is
shot or otherwise wounded during a staged purchase, say police commanders,
who spoke on condition of anonymity.

With New York a national laboratory for effective policing techniques,
Monday's slaying of Officer Sean Carrington highlights the perils of the
"buy and bust" strategy, which police departments routinely employ in
fighting drugs.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called Carrington's death a tragedy, but fiercely
defended the value of the buy-and-bust operations. The mayor, who credits
aggressive drug enforcement with contributing to the city's steep decrease
in crime, said he has no plans to curtail such operations and may actually
increase them during new initiatives against drugs planned for the Bronx
and Queens.

Giuliani said Tuesday: "This was not only a buy and bust operation, it was
an attempt by the police to gather evidence about a murder which took place
in January, which is a very legitimate law enforcement technique and
something that has to be done. If you want to put responsibility somewhere,
don't put it on the Police Department. Put it on the people who are selling
the drugs and the people who are doing the murders."

But some undercover detectives ask whether the department is taking enough
precautions to protect its most vulnerable employees. Nearly 70 percent of
those detectives are black or Hispanic, said the president of the Guardians
Association, which represents black police officers, and some feel they are
given outdated equipment and little institutional support.

Guardians president Jacqueline Parris said many young officers are
nevertheless lured to undercover assignments, mainly because they offer a
fast track to the coveted detective's shield, in 18 months instead of
several years on patrol.

Once inside the unit, the officers can find themselves faced with
life-or-death situations they are unprepared for, and are led by commanders
who pressure them to keep arrest numbers high.

"They're not getting the training or the protection they need," Ms. Parris
said. "The department is asking them to risk their lives, but they're not
backing them up."

New York, perhaps more than any other city, has swept its drug problem off
the streets, forcing it into more dangerous territory indoors.

In the field, police officials try to stage their undercover buys in such a
scripted manner that the site of the transaction is called "the set." An
undercover detective, disguised as a drug buyer and equipped with a hidden
transmitter called a "Kell," is assigned to make the purchase, using cash
which has had its serial numbers pre-recorded. Two "ghosts" are assigned to
pose as passers-by, to keep watch over the buyer and track the seller once
the buy has been made.

Hidden in the vicinity is a sergeant and another 5 to 10 back-up officers
and a whose job is to converge on the suspects, en masse, once the sale has
been completed.

During the vast majority of the estimated 5,000 buy-and-busts conducted
annually, the script works perfectly: the buyer exchanges cash for drugs,
the ghost tracks the suspects and the back-up teams make the arrests
without firing a shot.

But the volatile mixture of guns, drugs and felons means that any operation
can become violent, or fatal, at any moment, particularly indoors.

"You never have control of these situations," said Robert Strang, a former
Drug Enforcement Administration agent who know heads Strang-Hayes security
consulting firm. "Especially when you have an aggressive move to take them
out. You have to fight them on their own turf. These kinds of things happen
every now and then. I wish there were a better way to do it. But there
isn't."

For the rank-and-file officer, however, there are many rewards to
undercover work. Successful ones can advance more quickly in the
department, and can make $10,000 more a year in overtime in a force that
has otherwise curtailed such pay.

But police officials say that the city's "zero-tolerance" drug policies of
the last five years has fueled a kind of race between dealers and the
detectives as they try to outsmart each other, with detectives increasingly
aggressive and dealers more suspicious.

Undercover investigators are now trained to detect booby traps in drug
locations and are constantly updated on the latest slang, street colors,
and drug brands -- information culled from arrested drug buyers.

But the meticulous legal requirements of making a criminal case have also
spawned more subtle maneuvers by dealers.

Dealers now commonly use cellular phones to establish a network of lookout
posts around their places of business, detectives say. Another tactic is to
use a division of labor -- one person who hands over the drugs, the other
collects the money -- to make it more difficult for the police to meet the
legal standard for a drug sale arrest.

"The drug dealers have gotten smarter," said Vic Cipullo, a former
undercover who is now the borough director for the Detectives' Endowment
Association." After a while you bust them and bust them and they eventually
learn what we have to do to make a case. Then they make it hard for you."

To detectives in the field, the most dangerous new tactics involve the
narcotics themselves. During the last two years, police officials have seen
a steep increase in "forced ingestions," incidents in which dealers compel
undercovers to sample the drugs before buying them.

In such cases, which number as many as six a month, detectives are
instructed to avoid taking the drugs unless their lives are in danger.
Those officers who do ingest the drugs are immediately taken to a hospital,
placed on sick leave and temporarily excused from the police drug testing
program.

By moving their operations indoors in recent years, drug dealers have also
become far more likely to frisk potential buyers, police officials say,
making it nearly impossible for detectives to wear a bulletproof vest.
While all city patrol officers are required to wear vests, most undercover
detectives dare not, for fear that they will destroy their own cover.

Carrington, who was acting as a ghost during the fatal raid, was hit in the
shoulder, where a vest would have been likely to save his life.

"It's such a waste," said the investigator, who spoke on condition of
anonymity. "When I was out there, I didn't worry about my own safety, I was
more worried that my bosses would get mad at me if I couldn't make a buy.
But this guy, 28 years old, for him to have lost his life for a $10 bottle
of crack in a building which has been infested for years. It doesn't make
any sense."

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company