Pubdate: Thu, 03 Nov 2005
Source: Dallas Observer (TX)
Copyright: 2005 New Times, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.dallasobserver.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/884
Author: Jim Schutze

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.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman