STATE DRUG DATA INADEQUATE

Allowing Local Law Enforcement Agencies To Turn In Incomplete Numbers Skews
FBI Uniform Crime Statistics.

How well has the state performed in reducing one of its biggest public
health threats -- the trafficking of cocaine?

It's difficult to tell because Georgia does such a poor job collecting and
analyzing the data that policy-makers rely on to prioritize goals and
concentrate resources.

Want to know how many illegal drugs were seized in Georgia last year and
where? Forget it. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation doesn't collect that
information.

What about drug arrests?

The GBI has those figures -- but they're incomplete, and useless for
examining drug trafficking patterns and trends.

State law requires the more than 600 law enforcement agencies in Georgia to
report annual drug arrests for the FBI's Uniform Crime Report.

But there is no uniformity in what the many agencies turn in, even though
that jeopardizes their ability to receive grant funds. The GBI and Attorney
General's Office lets this happen.

So the crime reports are neither accurate nor uniform -- making impossible
the year-to-year comparisons envisioned when the FBI set up the program
decades ago.

Four years ago, Kelly McKutchen, executive vice president of the nonprofit
Georgia Public Policy Foundation, discovered the data problem while trying
to compile crime trends across the state. He found that while the Georgia
Bureau of Investigation collected data from all local law enforcement
agencies, state law only allowed the bureau to make public crime statistics
at the county level. City by city comparisons could not be made.

McKutchen turned to the federal Uniform Crime Report to fill in the gaps,
but found that only 92 Georgia communities had volunteered their data.

"It was the most frustrating thing," he said. "It's asinine that Georgia,
by law, is forbidden from breaking down the data by jurisdiction."

He ended up sending surveys out to every police agency in Georgia, and
cross-tablulating the data they provided with the information he gleaned
from from the GBI and FBI. The Georgia Report Card on Crime the foundation
compiled contains crime information over 12 years from 350 law-enforcement
agencies in the state. It's the most comprehensive Georgia crime data set
available to the public, and the only one that tracks historical trends
over time.

Since 1998, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation has unsuccessfully lobbied
the legislature to change the law and make the crime statistics public.

"I don't know the exact reasons why it's this way, but I suspect it's to
protect police chiefs from looking bad," he said. "If you are not doing
your job, you certainly don't want that out. Information is power. If you
have it and nobody else does, you have that power."

Rooney L. Bowen, chairman of the Georgia Senate Public Safety Committee,
said he wasn't aware of the issue. "That's something we need to look into,"
he said.

Burke Day, a Tybee Island legislator who serves on the House Public Safety
Committee, wondered if a paperwork crunch at the GBI contributed to the
confusion. But getting the numbers right is important, he said.

"I think that statistics are the only barometer that we have whether law
enforcement is doing its job," he said. "It helps you pinpoint areas of
activity, and then decide if there is a proper number of law enforcement in
those areas."

In contrast, arrest and seizure figures are available at the federal level.

The Drug Enforcement Administration compiles annual data from all federal
agencies in Georgia.

Will Glaspy, a DEA spokesman in Washington, D.C., said it seemed "kinda
strange" that the GBI wouldn't do the same. "It surprises me that an agency
doesn't keep their own statistics."

GBI spokesman John Bankhead said no one has ever asked him for state
figures on drug seizures, and putting those figures together could mean
higher taxes. Local agencies have the information and can use it as they
see fit.

"We're an assisting agency, we're not the state police," he said.

Doug McVay, research coordinator for Washington-based Common Sense for Drug
Policy, said reporting gaps like those in Georgia make it harder to
evaluate how well police are using their resources.

"No one likes to have their performance measured, especially if they're
doing a failing job," he said. "The way they get away with this stuff is
that no one ever looks at the numbers."

The major statistics touted on the GBI's Web site -- investigative hours
expended -- don't relate to performance. The agency said 109,532 hours were
spent working drug cases in 2001, compared with 114,778 in 2000. The site
also gives a drugs seized total for its narcotics divisions, but no
breakdown on which drugs, or how the figure was compiled.

One of the numbers that warrants analysis, McVay said, is how many arrests
there were for possession of marijuana. That accounts for about half of the
40,000 arrests the GBI reported in the year 2000.

"That's body count -- an easy way to generate numbers," he said. "They get
more credit for generating numbers."

Indeed, the state's drug problems go far beyond marijuana, federal
officials say.

Meanwhile, Mexico-based drug traffickers use Georgia as both a
trans-shipment center and a local distribution center for cocaine,
marijuana and methamphetamine, according to the DEA. Interstate highways,
airports, trains and buses allow easy access to other drug markets and
stash sites.

Yet less than 10 percent of the people arrested in Georgia were involved
with the sale and manufacturing of opium, cocaine and their derivatives.

Of those people, how many had significant amounts of cocaine?

It's impossible to know without seizure information.

Day said he hopes the GBI isn't deliberately misrepresenting drug data.

"These guys know how to put the spin on these numbers, too," he said. "That
is why I am not impressed with government figures, because I know how
easily they can be misreported."

Do the numbers matter?

It's common for agencies to use drug arrest and seizure information to
justify their growing law enforcement budgets.

But the real value of the data comes when officials analyze the numbers and
use them to develop strategies to address specific drug threats. They can
then concentrate resources, make busts that matter and follow the money trail.

Scott M. Burns, a deputy director for the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy, knows that many states, including Georgia, aren't
keeping good numbers. He would like to see a state-by-state analysis of the
enforcement figures and standardized, non-duplicated figures.

"What you're talking about is very relevant," he said. "The numbers are
important."

Without accountability and a strong, coordinated drug enforcement, cynicism
grows. Beyond the long-standing groups advocating drug legalization are
those who believe the drug war is lost, or simply an illusionary waste of
money.

Burns is a former prosecutor from a small area of southern Utah, which was
close enough to interstate highways to have a cocaine trafficking problem.
He agreed that making arrests for small amounts of drugs isn't as important
as interrupting the flow of large drug shipments.

But without accurate and complete information from state and local
agencies, it's impossible to know what's happening.

"All politics are local and all crime is local," he said. "It's very
important to get the local information. That's where it all happens."