Drug Law Enforcement On A Budget

STICKS AND STONES

Chief Kunkle Has To Fight Crime With The Tools The Council Will Give Him

Last weekend I'm watching the news on Channel 8, and I see this
amazing story. Gloria Campos leads the newscast: "Two men arrested in
one of the largest drug raids in Dallas history are back on the
street tonight, freed on a technicality." A technicality? That's no good.

The rest of the story is something about the cops going to one house
but spying suspicious activity at another house nearby, stumbling on
15 kilos of cocaine, grabbing some bad guys who are running around.
Then some kind of technical problem comes up with a search warrant.
So the D.A. puts all these major drug dealers back on the street.

The D.A. just sets them loose for no reason? I mean, I consider
myself to be professionally paranoid, and even I couldn't believe that one.

So I spent last week looking into it. I think I was pretty unbiased
going in. I considered on the one hand it could be a case of
egregious malfeasance, but I tried to keep my mind open to the
possibility it could also turn out to be a case of nefarious
misfeasance on the other. I try not to pre-judge.

I talked to the D.A.'s office. Talked to the cops. Talked to the
defense lawyers. Guess what. I don't think it's any of that. At the
very worst, this might be a case of flatfeasance.

This was not a case of cops making good arrests, then getting stabbed
in the back by lawyers. There was no way these arrests would have
stuck. The D.A.'s decision to kick out these charges was logical and
realistic. The sleazy political decision would have been to pursue
the charges in order to look tough on TV, knowing in advance that
everything will be thrown out before it ever gets to a jury.

So did the cops do bad? That's an even more complicated issue. It
gets into the city's severe shortage of officers and the police
chief's commitment to doing something about the crime rate anyway
with what he's got.

Chief David Kunkle has said publicly in recent weeks that Dallas
needs 800 more police officers in order to get to an effective ratio
of cops per citizens. We have 2,972 sworn officers on the force now,
according to the Police Public Information Office. So we need an
increase of 27 percent in order to get to where the police force
could significantly reduce crime.

Our courageous city council--busy sucking up to billionaires by
granting them $7 million tax cuts they don't need--is giving Kunkle
50 more cops this year. Fifty. Instead of 800. That's an increase of
less than 2 percent.

That's a joke. What can Kunkle do about the joke? Jack. So he's
trying to do something else. A work-around.

These drug arrests grew out of a crack-down campaign the chief is
calling "Operation Disruption." He takes 60 cops off regular duty and
sends them into targeted areas to do a kind of intensive rolling law
enforcement, turning over every rock to see what scurries out.

Maybe it just moves the crime around. But at least the criminals
can't do crimes on the days they're busy scurrying. This time what
scurried out was a $15 million drug ring, according to the account
books the police found. The cops scurried in after them. Things got messy.

But, you know, you can look at this and say that things also
definitely got disrupted. Come to think of it, I notice the chief
isn't calling it "Operation Conviction."

Eric Mountin, chief of the organized crime section of the D.A.'s
office, pointed out that the drug dealers freed from jail in this
deal didn't exactly get their 15 kilos of cocaine back, or their
$200,000 in cash and some dozen weapons seized from the scene.

"With the level of violence that has continued to escalate south of
the border," Mountin said, "somebody's on the hook for all 15 kilos
of coke, and somebody's going to have to pay for it. There's people
getting killed for a lot less than this.

"In some respects they were probably safer where they were [in the
jail] than where they probably are now," he said. "I mean, that's
kind of crass, but it's a practical reality."

It is crass. It is a reality. I think it's a crass reality most of us
can live with. These people make their money sucking down human souls.

In this case, there just never were going to be convictions, based on
the way the police mismanaged their search and the subsequent
arrests. And in order to call the issues here a technicality, you'd
have to say the entire Constitution of the United States is a
technicality, too. There was a reason we fought the Brits.

The Fourth Amendment protects our persons and our homes from search
and seizure unless there is probable cause. Two and a quarter
centuries of case law have defined probable cause and created a set
of rules the police must follow. And rules are rules.

On September 27, the Operation Disruption cops--who are from the
patrol division, not narcotics--were sent to investigate a complaint
at a house on Jonesboro Avenue, about two and a half miles southeast
of White Rock Lake between Ferguson Road and Interstate 30. While
there, they noticed a house nearby where a number of nervous-looking
Latino men were running around.

Here is where we get into trouble with "probable cause" and the
justification for searching the nearby house. One sworn affidavit
signed by police says the officers saw an amount of marijuana inside
the back door of the nearby house, went in and found 15 kilos of
cocaine and 137 kilos of marijuana inside. Most of the marijuana,
according to this affidavit, was inside two locked freezers. At a
bond hearing, a police officer testified that all of the cocaine was
hidden and not in plain view.

But in another sworn document, police said they entered the house
because they smelled marijuana through the open door, not because
they saw it. They said three kilos of cocaine were in plain view, and
they said the marijuana was scattered all over the house.

The two sworn statements diverge widely as to how many people were
running around and which ones were actually inside the house. I also
saw a photograph of a splintered backdoor casing that sure looked as
if somebody had kicked it in.

Ralph DelaGarza, one of several defense lawyers in the case, said the
police would have been in an awkward position had the case gone
forward. "I think our next step was to have what's called an
examining trial," he said, "and start committing people to what
happened. What you had in this case, from the officers' standpoint,
is three different version of the same thing."

Can't all be true. This case was never going to make it to a jury.
Too much of a mess. A judge would have had to kick it out long before
it got that far just on probable cause issues.

But why was this such a mess? I asked the police department about the
reforms called for in the Fake Drugs investigation. Why would
mistakes like these still be made if the reforms had taken effect?

Deputy Chief Julian Bernal, over the Narcotics Division, pointed out
to me that the reforms were all about narcotics. And narcotics only
got in on this case after the fact: "The Narcotics Division was
called out to the location after drugs and other evidence were found
at the scene," he said.

Bernal conceded there are problems with the various affidavits:
"There are some differences in the wording of some of the documents
regarding the affidavit for the search warrants and the arrest reports."

He said the department is taking those problems seriously: "There is
an investigation going on by the Public Integrity Unit to determine
exactly what happened. I don't know whether there were probable cause
issues or not, because we're still investigating, but that's one of
the issues were certainly going to look at."

He told me narcotics has undergone major changes since Fake Drugs.
Significant personnel changes and shifts have taken place, he said.
And there have been many policy and procedural changes. "There were
29 recommendations made by the panel," he said, "and all except one
were implemented."

So this was an Operation Disruption problem. I spoke with David
Davis, a defense attorney. Davis has nothing to do with this case,
but he has been an insightful analyst and critic of the police
department in the past. I asked him why the Operation Disruption
officers couldn't have been expected to do better with a major
cocaine and marijuana bust. He said it all goes back to training and
supervision.

You want to keep the patrol officers in the academy long enough to
teach them to do right. But even after they graduate, you still need
all kinds of supervisory personnel to monitor what they do in the field.

People. Personnel. Things would run much more smoothly with 800 more
cops in Dallas. In the meantime, Kunkle is trying to do what he can
with what he's got.

I feel better knowing that the D.A. and the defense lawyers and the
cops didn't just turn a bunch of serious drug dealers loose for fun.
The issues here were not technicalities. Serious mistakes were made.
But I also feel better knowing a $15 million drug operation got messed up.

We're kind of between a rock and a hard place. We don't want to scrap
the Constitution, or we'll all wind up with fake drugs in our car
trunks and the city council sentencing us to work on Ray Hunt's
estate for the rest of our lives.

But we don't want the drug dealers to have carte blanche, either. The
cops are fighting crime and corruption with smoke and mirrors. That's
better than not fighting crime.

I know what I need to do. Stop watching Channel 8.