Pubdate: Mon, 26 Aug 2013
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2013 The Washington Post Company
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/mUgeOPdZ
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Authors: Scott Higham, Sari Horwitz and Steven Rich

1,000 POINTS OF CONTENTION ON CARTELS' PRESENCE IN U.S.

Experts: Oft-Cited Report Exaggerates Mexican Drug Traffickers' Reach

When Sen. John McCain spoke during an Armed Services Committee 
hearing last year on security issues in the Western Hemisphere, he 
relayed a stark warning about the spread of Mexican drug cartels in 
the United States.

"The cartels," the Arizona Republican said, "now maintain a presence 
in over 1,000 cities."

McCain based his remarks on a report by a now-defunct division of the 
Justice Department, the National Drug Intelligence Center

(NDIC), which had concluded in 2011 that Mexican criminal 
organizations, including seven major drug cartels, were operating in 
more than 1,000 U.S. cities.

But the number, widely reported by news organizations across the 
country, is misleading at best, according to U.S. law enforcement 
officials and drug policy analysts interviewed by The Washington 
Post. They said the number is inflated because it relied heavily on 
self-reporting by law enforcement agencies, not on documented 
criminal cases involving drug trafficking organizations and cartels.

The Post interviewed local police officials in more than a dozen 
cities who said they were surprised to learn that the federal 
government had documented cartel-related activity in their communities.

"That's news to me," said Randy Sobel, chief of police in Middleton, N.H.

"I have no knowledge of that," said David Lancaster, chief of police 
in Corinth, Miss.

The NDIC's headquarters in Pennsylvania was closed last year and its 
personnel folded into the Drug Enforcement Administration. DEA 
officials declined to release a list of the cities, calling it "law 
enforcement sensitive."

Privately, DEA and Justice Department officials said they have no 
confidence in the accuracy of the list.

"It's not a DEA number," said a DEA official who requested anonymity 
to speak candidly about the report. "We don't want to be attached to 
this number at all."

The Post was able to identify more than a third of the cities using 
computer mapping techniques and government documents. The analysis 
located government claims of Mexican drug activity in numerous cities 
in unexpected places: 20 in Montana, 25 in Oregon, 25 in Idaho, 30 in Arkansas.

There is no disputing that Mexican cartels are operating in the 
United States. Drug policy analysts estimate that about 90 percent of 
the cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine on U.S. streets 
came here courtesy of the cartels and their distribution networks in 
Mexico and along the Southwestern border. DEA officials say they have 
documented numerous cases of cartel activity in Houston, Los Angeles, 
Chicago and Atlanta.

But analysts who study drug trafficking scoffed at the idea that the 
violent cartels and other Mexico-based drug organizations are 
operating in more than 1,000 U.S. cities.

"They say there are Mexicans operating here and they must be part of 
a Mexican drug organization," said Peter Reuter, who co-directed drug 
research for the nonprofit Rand think tank and now works as a 
professor at the University of Maryland. "These numbers are mythical, 
and they keep getting reinforced by the echo chamber."

The NDIC's former chief defended the work of his former agency.

"It doesn't surprise me that the DEA doesn't support those numbers," 
said Michael F. Walther, who ran the agency from 2005 to 2012. "They 
like to paint a more positive portrait of the world. I stand by the 
work that our analysts did at NDIC."

The war on drugs

Drug policy analysts said the wide dissemination of the number is 
part of a pattern in the decades-long "war on drugs" of promoting 
questionable statistics in an attempt to quantify the drug problem in 
the United States and justify budgets.

"Washington loves mythical numbers," said John Carnevale, a former 
drug policy and budget official who served three presidents and four 
"drug czars" at the White House Office of National Drug Control 
Policy. "Once the number is out there and it comes from a source 
perceived to be credible, it becomes hard to disprove, almost 
impossible, even when it's wrong."

The NDIC closed in June 2012 after 19 years of operation and more 
than $690 million in taxpayers' money spent. But the NDIC number 
lives on, cited in congressional reports on security along the 
Southwest border and in testimony by high-ranking members of the 
military and key lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

"The cartels now have a presence in more than 1,000 U. S. cities," 
said a 2012 report by the House Homeland Security oversight 
subcommittee on violence and terrorism on the border.

"A terrorist insurgency is being waged along our southern border," 
then-House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Connie Mack (RFla.) 
said during a 2011 hearing on combating international criminal 
organizations. He cited "the operations across Mexico and Central 
America, as well as in over 1,000 U.S. cities."

Drug policy analysts called NDIC definitions of what constitutes a 
Mexican drug organization murky and not particularly useful, paving 
the way for confusion and misinterpretation. In its 2010 report, the 
center used the phrase "Mexican drug trafficking organizations," 
defining them as being based in Mexico or the United States, with 
Mexican nationals serving as their leaders. The report's definition 
of "presence" in a U.S. city was met if at least one member of the 
organization was engaged in "some type of trafficking activity."

In its 2011 report, the center used the phrase "transnational 
criminal organizations" and said they included seven cartels based in 
Mexico, the well-known Sinaloa and Zetas syndicates among them. The 
report broadened the definition in a footnote to include traffickers 
who purchased drugs from cartel associates.

Under such definitions, the analysts said, anyone from Mexico caught 
selling a small amount of marijuana in a U.S. city could be counted 
as a Mexican drug organization or cartel presence.

"These definitions are interchangeable and indistinguishable," said 
Peter Andreas, a drug policy analyst at Brown University who has 
written a book about the politics of drug policy called "Border 
Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide." "This is a particularly 
egregious example of a pattern that unfortunately has not gotten a 
lot of scrutiny."

Walther, the former NDIC chief, said it is difficult to determine 
what constitutes a Mexican cartel presence because there are varying 
degrees of separation between street dealers, distribution networks 
and operations south of the border. But he said that his agency did 
the best it could under the circumstances and that the NDIC was 
frequently attacked because it became the bearer of bad news.

"It's in the nature of government that agencies don't like to be told 
they are not entirely successful," said Walther, who now works as a 
criminal defense lawyer in Pennsylvania and recently authored a study 
for the Army War College titled "Insanity: Four Decades of U.S. 
Counterdrug Strategy."

"There's no uniformly accepted glossary of terms," he said. "Some of 
the distinctions are too fine to be appreciated by people who are not 
engaged full time in the counterdrug world."

The story behind the NDIC number dates to the days of the first drug 
czar, during the George H.W. Bush administration in 1989. With 19 
federal agencies generating drug intelligence reports at the time, 
administration officials wanted to create a clearinghouse to 
coordinate the flood of information.

In theory, the National Drug Intelligence Center seemed to be a 
solution. Then-Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) got involved. Murtha 
chaired the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, and in 1992 he 
obtained a $40 million Defense Department earmark. The center was 
established in an abandoned department store in his home town of 
Johnstown, Pa., 180 miles from Washington.

At its dedication ceremony in Johnstown in 1993, then-Attorney 
General Janet Reno called the NDIC "a crucial turning point" in the 
Clinton administration's efforts to combat drugs.

But some White House officials, such as Carnevale, saw the NDIC as a 
Washington boondoggle.

"They were getting so much money," he said. "They hired a lot of 
staff. But they were so far away, and a lot of us didn't read their reports."

In a recent interview, Murtha's former chief of staff defended the NDIC.

"They did a hell of a job. It wasn't a porkbarrel type of thing," 
said John Hugya, who worked for Murtha for 23 years. "They had a lot 
of professionals working there. I respected the whole damn group."

On Feb. 8, 2010, Murtha died at age 77, and the NDIC lost its protector.

Method criticized

Two months after Murtha's death, the NDIC issued a "Situation Report" 
titled "Cities Where Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations Operate 
Within the United States." With "high confidence," the report said 
they were operating "in at least 1,286 cities."

To arrive at that figure, the center used a methodology that federal 
law enforcement officials now say was questionable. NDIC field 
intelligence officers surveyed 1,200 law enforcement agencies across 
the nation and asked them if they had Mexican drug-trafficking 
organizations in their communities. Of those agencies, 1,039 said 
they did, according to the report. The center then added that total 
to a total based on case information kept by the Justice Department's 
Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, which reported that 
Mexican drug organizations were operating in 247 U.S. cities.

The NDIC added the two numbers to come up with 1,286 cities.

"The methodology was flawed from the start," said one Justice 
Department official who was familiar with the report and also spoke 
on the condition of anonymity. "I heard that they just cold-called 
people in different towns, as many as they could, and said, 'Do you 
have any Mexicans involved in drugs?' And they would say, 'Yeah, sure.' "

Drug policy analysts say self-reported surveys are subject to 
exaggeration, particularly when local and state law enforcement 
agencies are looking for federal grant money to bolster their budgets.

"At a time when agency budgets are being cut, you want to demonstrate 
that you are protecting the public from a menace," said Eric E. 
Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a 
group that seeks reforms in drug and policing policy. "If you say 
there are Mexican henchmen in 1,000 cities, you don't want to cut 
their budget."

More than a year after Murtha's death, the NDIC issued its second 
report in August 2011, titled "National Drug Threat Assessment." In 
it, the center modified the 1,286 number by saying Mexican 
"transnational criminal organizations" were "operating in more than a 
thousand U.S. cities during 2009 and 2010."

Drug policy analysts said the NDIC number and other questionable 
claims have important consequences.

"We have no idea how many Mexican drug cartel operatives are out 
there and where they are, and these kinds of claims are a really big 
problem for public policy," said David A. Shirk, a professor of 
political science at the University of San Diego who examines 
Southwest border issues. "Citizens have a right to know if federal 
agencies are doing their jobs, and without verifiable information it 
calls a lot of this work into question."

Although the DEA declined to release the list of cities, The Post was 
able to pinpoint the locations of hundreds of them by analyzing a map 
included with an early version of an NDIC report.

The Post contacted police officials in 24 cities. While a few said 
they found possible connections to the cartels, officials in 18 
cities said they were unaware of cartel-related activity in their communities.

The NDIC reported a Juarez Cartel connection in the former mining 
town of Ladd, Ill., in the north-central part of the state. Ladd 
Police Chief William Gaefcke said he can think of only one reason why 
his city of 1,300 residents was listed in the report. A few years 
back, his department, along with two federal agents, investigated a 
claim that the cartel was smuggling assault weapons in the region. 
The investigation went nowhere. "The case was dismissed as 
unfounded," Gaefcke said.

The NDIC reported that the Juarez Cartel was tied to a drug operation 
in Garden City, Kan., made famous as the site of the murder trial 
depicted in Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood."

"We have drugs in our community," said Capt. Michael Utz of the 
Garden City Police Department. "But as far as the Juarez Cartel 
operating in this city, I don't have any information on that."

The NDIC reported Tijuana Cartel activity in South Lake Tahoe, Calif.

"I haven't seen a link to the Tijuana Cartel," Police Chief Brian T. 
Uhler said. "That's surprising to me. There are gangs here that have 
a statewide connection, and there may be linkages to the cartels. I 
guess an affiliation can mean a lot of different things in law enforcement."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom