DRUG RAIDS

Solid Teamwork Involving 30 Police Agencies Pays Off Internationally

This one, Buffalo Police Commissioner Rocco Diina claims, will reverberate
throughout the drug world. He's probably right. The
internationally-coordinated investigation that triggered nearly 70 arrests
Thursday was undoubtedly the "heavy hit" on drug trafficking he describes,
but it's also notable as a solid piece of police work that is not yet over.

It's also a praiseworthy effort by local law enforcement agencies -
including a Buffalo narcotics squad that has been hit hard by corruption
charges against a few of its detectives in recent years, but this week drew
national commendations for its work on this case.

"The real credit goes to the troops," Diina said after top law enforcement
brass - including federal Drug Enforcement Agency acting administrator John
Brown, a former federal drug agent here in the 1970s - announced the
arrests here in Buffalo.

That credit includes key cooperation between the city narcotics detectives
and the DEA, after a city investigation uncovered links to drug operations
under investigation in Boston and New York City. At a time when budget
problems have led some departments to cut back on inter-agency task force
cooperation in some cities, Buffalo committed even more detectives to
Operation Deja Vu, which also drew strong involvement from the State Police
and eventually involved 30 law enforcement agencies including federal units
coordinating with anti-drug efforts in Colombia and Puerto Rico. The
operation was so extensive there was initial concern that the loss of a
drug surveillance plane in Colombia Thursday, later attributed to engine
failure, might have been linked to the raids here.

Thursday's raids in Buffalo, Niagara Falls and a half-dozen other Western
New York locations were mirrored by arrests in the New York City area,
Rochester, Massachusetts, Colombia and Puerto Rico. The results indicate a
major take-out of an entire drug production, distribution and sales network
involving both cocaine and heroin.

So long as demand for drugs is not curtailed, or overseas production is not
cut off, another such network will develop to fill the gap. But Diina,
perhaps optimistically, thinks that will take a long time because this
effort was so extensive, covering a drug trail that one top DEA official
described as "from farm to arm." Besides, the Buffalo commissioner adds,
"this will have "legs' from a law enforcement perspective," as Thursday's
arrests lead to even more information and arrests.

We hope he's right, but for now it's worth simply celebrating the blow to a
major drug operation that helped ruin lives here and elsewhere, and the
chance for improvement in neighborhoods that had been overrun with drug dealing.