Police trick drugtoting motorists

Salt Lake Tribune

SALT LAKE CITY Paranoia was the police's greatest ally at the
beginning of the Fourth of July weekend, when dozens of people on
Interstate 80 threw out baggies of drugs from their car windows after
seeing ominous signs on the side of the road.

``Drug Dog, 1 Mile,'' flashed a sign. ``Narcotics Officers Ahead,''
read another.

Both warnings were true. Technically.

What the drivers were not told was the ``narcotics officers'' were
hiding in the bushes with binoculars, looking for motorists jettisoning
drugs.

Those cars were the only ones pulled over by Utah Highway Patrol
troopers. The littering gave police the legal license to stop the
vehicle, smell the driver's breath for alcohol and ask permission to
search the car. The discarded drugs were picked up and used as
evidence.

There was no mandatory search on the road ahead only the vaguely
worded threat. But it was enough to generate four felony drug arrests,
21 alcohol violations including drunken driving and 57 misdemeanor
citations.

Questions about the pseudoroadblock are coming at a time when the
limits of policesponsored deception are under debate in Utah. Police
in North Salt Lake recently admitted to distributing a phony ``witness
description'' of a murder suspect to the public.

``It isn't quite on the level of the North Salt Lake police, but it's
in the neighborhood,'' attorney Brian Barnard said of the roadblock.
``The ends don't always justify the means.''

But troopers weren't lying when they said there was a drugsniffing dog
on Interstate 80, said Sgt. Keith Squires. They had borrowed one from
the Salt Lake City Police Department to search cars stopped for
littering.

``Every vehicle we stopped that day was one we clearly observed in
violation of state statutes,'' said Squires. ``Obviously people saw the
sign and were concerned about being apprehended and began to react by
throwing out their drugs. . . . You could say this was a ruse. But I
didn't put anything up on the signs that was false.''

Squires called it a proactive attempt to get drunken drivers and drug
users off the roads before they could get into an accident and hurt
somebody. ``This was accomplished with very minimal inconvenience to
our regular motoring public,'' he said.