SEATTLE POLICE DEPARTMENT'S APPROACH TO DRUG ENFORCEMENT IS A BUST

SEATTLE and King County face a worsening budget crisis, one that will
force difficult decisions on how to allocate scarce resources. Often,
when these choices confront us, public safety is made a priority. It
is hard for many to imagine cutting funds from those agencies,
especially the police, that help ensure our security.

But to frame the decision as whether to cut or not to cut ignores the
issue of how police resources are currently used. It may be possible
to fund pressing public-safety needs by reallocating existing
resources. Take, for instance, drug-law enforcement.

It is not easy to assess police practices because the Seattle Police
Department does not make detailed arrest data publicly available, as
do most police departments. However, as a result of ongoing litigation
by local public defenders, the department was compelled to provide
records of its drug-policing efforts from 1999 to 2001.

During the past year, I have served as a consultant to the Defender
Association Racial Disparity Project. In that capacity, I have
analyzed more than 15,000 Seattle police records of police-citizen
encounters involving alleged drug activity, many of which resulted in
arrest.

The findings are quite striking. The SPD conducts significantly more
drug arrests than many comparably sized cities. Many of these are the
result of buy-bust operations. In buy-bust operations, an officer
poses as a drug user to identify and arrests drug sellers.

Buy-busts are quite expensive. In the year 2000, SPD officers spent an
estimated 25,000 officer-hours conducting buy-bust operations. About
one-third of these hours were overtime hours.

The payoff for this effort was minimal. Buy-busts yielded an average
of one-tenth of a gram of drugs per officer hour. By contrast, search
warrant arrests yielded an average of 19.9 grams of narcotics per
officer hour.

Buy-busts are problematic for other reasons. They are a leading cause
of racial disproportionality in drug arrests in Seattle -- roughly 65
percent of buy-bust arrestees are black. They capture only the
lowest-level dealers, many of whom are addicts, and who are quickly
replaced by others on the streets. Although buy-busts are concentrated
overwhelmingly downtown, there has been no notable reduction of drug
activity in the Seattle downtown area.

The concentration of buy-busts downtown is not justified by citizen
complaints regarding suspected drug activity. In fact, the West
Precinct, which includes the downtown area, receives the smallest
number of citizen complaints compared with the rest of the city.

Allocating so many police resources to arrest huge numbers of
low-level drug offenders carries opportunity costs. These resources
are not devoted to patrol officers who can respond to calls for
service and provide a visible deterrent. Nor are they used to solve
other crimes. As it happens, the SPD solves a significantly lower
percentage of murders, rapes, aggravated assaults, robberies, thefts,
burglaries and auto thefts than the average mid-sized city police
department, according to 2002 clearance rate data.

Although the SPD has unilaterally decided to invest in buy-busts, the
costs of this choice are also borne by county taxpayers. Defending,
prosecuting and jailing so many low-level drug dealers is quite
expensive, and these expenditures significantly impact the county budget.

These policies also adversely impact Seattle's communities. Resources
devoted to buy-busts are not devoted to human services. Furthermore,
many recent studies document the negative consequences of
incarceration. Researchers have found, for example, that incarcerating
many nonviolent offenders may increase rather than decrease crime
rates. The long-term effects of jailing are severe: loss of income to
the offender and his/her family; disruptions to families; prolonged
difficulties in accessing work, housing and education. Incarceration
is a scarce resource that should be reserved for the truly dangerous.

The question of how best to respond to street-level drug activity is
by no means simple. Alternatives to arrest do exist, such as
residential and day treatment centers. These and other possibilities
deserve an open and public debate. This ongoing conversation should
include assessments of current police priorities. This will require
greater disclosure from the police about their drug-law-enforcement
practices.

In the meantime, the data I analyzed strongly suggest a need for
reallocation of existing police resources to increase public safety
and community well-being.

Katherine Beckett is an associate professor in the Department of
Sociology at the University of Washington. She is author of the
report, "Race and Drug Law Enforcement in Seattle."