DRIVING UNDER THE INFLUENCE

Are The Boulder Police Profiling You?

Next time you attend a reggae concert or perhaps a movie about reggae icon
Bob Marley, drive carefully on your way home: The cops might be profiling
you for driving under the influence of dreadlocks.

Take, for instance, the case of one Ras Marcus Benjamin, known legally as
Marc Lawrence Deutsch, manager of a local reggae band and the proud wearer
of five-foot-long dreadlocks. Although he knows plenty of people who smoke
pot, it has been five years since Benjy (as his friends call him) got high.
He was surprised Sept. 26 while driving home from a movie at Boulder
Theater about Marley, when a gang of five law enforcement officers
converged on him and accused him-without any solid evidence-of driving
under the influence of drugs.

Urinalysis conducted by the Colorado Department of Public Health and
Environment showed that Benjy had no alcohol, marijuana or other drugs in
his system that night. Presented with that urinalysis report, the Boulder
County District Attorney's office dismissed the DUI/drugs charge against
Benjy... leaving the Boulder Police Department stammering to explain the
apparent profiling and false arrest.

"We have a policy that absolutely prohibits racial profiling," said Deputy
Chief Dave Hayes. "We have investigated this arrest and believe there was
no instance of racial profiling."

Benjy is white. His most noticeable physical characteristic is the
five-foot-long dreadlocks that hang to the backs of his knees. He says he
had two or three sips from a beer that evening, and that the only thing he
smoked was tobacco.

"I was at the Bob Marley movie that Roger Steffens put on. I stepped out
between shows and smoked a cigarette-it wasn't hand-rolled, it was a
regular cigarette," Benjy recalls. It was while he was smoking his
cigarette that Benjy noticed a Boulder police vehicle pull up in front of
the Boulder Theater and disgorge two officers as well as a German Shepherd dog.

"They got out and walked in front of the Boulder Theater. They pulled up
right in front," Benjy says.

Deputy Chief Hayes says there's nothing unusual about that. "The K-9
officers can go anywhere in the city. They could very well have been in
that neighborhood."

Benjy got a good look at the two officers, and they got a good long look at
him. After the arrest later that night, "they definitely said that they
remembered me being outside," Benjy explains.

When he left the Boulder Theater, Benjy tried to drive to Broadway but
found his way blocked by construction. So he took an alternate route that
led him to Canyon-he was going to take 17th through campus and onto
Broadway. But he took a left turn a little too widely.

"I saw the cop behind me," Benjy continues. "I was definitely guilty of
making a wide left turn. I didn't know that was illegal."

The officer, Steve Faber, asked for Benjy's driver's license, proof of
insurance and vehicle registration. Benjy complied, and Officer Faber went
back to his patrol car to radio in, no doubt discovering Benjy's
four-year-old, almost complete probation.

"I'm on probation... probation I'm sure came up," Benjy says. A single
father, Benjy prefers not to talk about why he's on probation, but he's
very willing to talk about the things he has done to get off of probation:
90 days in jail; 300 hours of community service; five months of urinalysis
(which found nothing); and, one month of home detention with an ankle
bracelet. Benjy says he has met all conditions of his probation ahead of time.

When Officer Faber returned to Benjy's car, he announced that he smelled
"the very faint odor of an alcoholic beverage" and "a faint odor of
marijuana." He asked Benjy to step out of the car to perform roadside
maneuvers. Meanwhile, the two K-9 cops, BPD's Sgt. Tom Trujillo and a
Boulder County sheriff's deputy, J. Oehlker, arrived at the scene.

According to Benjy, while he was trying to stand on one foot or touch his
finger to his nose with his eyes closed, one of the officers kept asking,
repeatedly, "Are you on probation? What are you on probation for?"

"I told him, 'I'm already nervous and you're making me more nervous,'"
Benjy remembers. Officer Faber determined that Benjy failed the roadside
maneuvers. The sheriff's deputy, a "drug recognition expert," pronounced
Benjy stoned on cannabis. Benjy was offered a chance to take a urinalysis
test, and told that if he refused he would lose his driver's license for
one year.

Benjy is fortunate that he complied and took the test. "I just disproved
it. They can't tell if people are high or not," he observes.

Marijuana can be smelled at just about any rock, country, blues or even
jazz concert, but police at Moody Blues concerts or Garth Brooks gigs
aren't searching concert goers' pockets and cigarette packs like they do
before reggae shows at the Fillmore in Denver.

At a recent Fillmore show, "they were patting down pockets, and they
weren't looking for weapons," says Eddie Delisio, drummer for Boulder's Jah
Family Band. A combined effort of the Fillmore security guards and Denver
police resulted in several arrests for possessing small amounts of
marijuana. "It was a dragnet," Delisio says.

All of this comes as the Office of National Drug Control Policy is
encouraging local police departments to target "stoner" drivers (despite
the absence of a reliable field test that will determine how recently a
driver smoked marijuana or snorted cocaine). So how is an officer going to
tell if an impaired driver is stoned on drugs other than alcohol? By
looking for tell-tale signs, like dreads, Grateful Dead bumper stickers or
old VW vans?

"I can tell you if there is an allegation of profiling, we will investigate
it and look into it," stated Boulder Police Commander Joe Pelle, who is
waiting to be sworn in as the next Boulder County sheriff. "We've done some
education and training regarding the issue."

A 2001 study undertaken by the Boulder Police Department looked at all
traffic tickets issued with an eye toward race, and concluded that
profiling was not a problem in Boulder.

If Benjy thinks he was profiled, "I'd like to encourage him to come into
our Professional Standards Unit and file a complaint," Pelle offers. "It's
basically impossible to conduct an investigation without his help."

But Rastas are a cultural and religious community, rather than racial or
ethnic. They wear their hair long and matted, Benjy says, as a sign of love
for God. Benjy says they're Old Testament Christians who believe Jesus will
come back as a "conquering lion, not as a lamb," and they consider
marijuana to be holy.

Marijuana is a sacrament, but not every Rasta smokes marijuana. I know lots
of Rastas who don't smoke," Benjy says. They pay a lot of attention to the
Bible's Revelations and seem happy to be expecting Armageddon.

"It's a logical and natural occurrence that Rasta has come to the forefront
in this day and age," Benjy says. "Jesus Christ said never to fight over
him, or to do what Columbus did, over him."

The Rastas consider themselves to be the lost tribe of Israelites, unified
in Ethiopia by Haile Selassie (the late Ethiopian ruler who was always
mystified by, but fond of, the Rastas). According to Benjy, Selassie was
the 225th direct descendant of King Solomon.

In Boulder, the Rasta community numbers a couple hundred. It's a small
enough community that Benjy knew murder victim Antonio "Wachen" Vieria, who
died of a shotgun blast July 26. Benjy's working with other local music
archivists to compile and release Wachen's recorded hip-hop songs. The
Angolan refugee seems to have left individual songs on individual CD
burners all over town.

According to Benjy, Wachen died because he stood up to a Rasta poser who
was attracted to Rastafarian culture but had none of the Jah spirit in him.
Kirk Roland Palmer, the man accused of killing Wachen, faces arraignment on
charges of first-degree murder and first-degree burglary in Boulder County
district court on Friday, Dec. 13.

Not all Rasta admirers or people who wear dreadlocks are Rastas, Benjy
says; dreads have just become a cool hairstyle among youth. "There's lots
of dreadlocks, but I wouldn't say there's lots of Rastas," Benjy comments.

Rastas can be black, white, Indian, Hispanic or even Asian, but they all
tend to look alike as their uncombed, untreated hair grows and grows. Benjy
has been letting his locks grow for 17 years, and he's grown accustomed to
people staring at him.

"I definitely see them looking at people like me," he says. "You feel like
they're staring at you more than they're staring at other people."

Leon Arguello, the bassist for Jah Family Band, says undue attention from
police and the public is just part and parcel of being in a reggae band.

"Getting pulled over late at night coming from shows, you're tired and kind
of obvious. There's not a lot of people out there at that time of night, so
you kind of stick out," Arguello says. "Being pulled over is fine. But once
(the police) find out you've got instruments in the van, they'll poke and
prod and shine their flashlights all over the interior. 'Have you been
drinking? Have you done any drugs? Do those instruments belong to you?' It
gets old."

It may be getting old, but a nationwide crackdown on "drugged driving" has
the support of the Bush administration and the Office of National Drug
Control Policy. Science, however, is on the side of drivers.

There is no reliable field test for marijuana, nor any determination of how
much marijuana causes dangerous driving. Profiling is forbidden, so how is
the Boulder Police Department supposed to implement the federal
government-recommended crackdown on drugged driving?

There are conflicting scientific studies on the issue, but the assumption
that marijuana causes driving impairment is subject to investigational
question.

The New England Journal of Medicine, according to the Office of National
Drug Control Policy, published results from a roadside study of reckless
drivers (who were not impaired by alcohol) in which 45 percent tested
positive for marijuana. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
estimates that illegal drugs are involved in 10 to 22 percent of all motor
vehicle crashes.

But unlike alcohol, many drugs are detectable in the bloodstream or in
urine long after their impairing effects subside. The cannabinoids from one
marijuana cigarette will remain detectable for up to three weeks. Cocaine
can be detected over a period of three days after use. Will courts accept
such wide-parameter tests as proof of impairment?

In Britain, cops are relying on old-fashioned roadside maneuvers, including
standing on one leg and touching one's nose, to determine if a driver is
stoned. They plan on testing 20,000 drivers per year.

In America, a 1992 study commissioned by the federal government and
conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reached a
conclusion that the feds didn't want to hear: "THC's adverse effects on
driving performance appear relatively small." THC, or delta-9
tetrahydrocannabinol, is the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.

Science aside, though, it's just plain un-American and possibly
unconstitutional to stop people just because they wear long, matted
hairstyles mandated by their religion.