Drug cop corruption

By Joel Miller

Most of us get a laugh from hypocrisy. We’ve got a dozen images
stored in our mental caricature file: the animal-rights activist wearing
leather shoes, a serial womanizer in the church worship band, the
fitness coach who can’t fit into his pants, and an Amish farmer surfing
the Web (the Lehman’s nonelectric catalogue is actually


online
).

Then there’s this gem: “Two Indonesian anti-drug activists,” reports the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “were caught at a drug party. …” Even better, “one of the two middle-aged men, members of Solidarity against Drugs and Crimes, had tried to pass himself off as a journalist when they were caught using crystal methamphetamine.”

Of course, the two had good reason to lie. The same article notes that “In the past year, three Indonesians and several foreigners caught at airports have been condemned to death for trafficking, and,” hitting on the hypocrisy once again, “the crackdown has netted the relatives of top figures including army generals and TV personalities.”

If you haven’t noticed, however, Indonesia is a long way away. Things are funnier at a distance. Where hypocrisy ceases to be funny is when it comes to your local police.

“A second Chicago police officer was arrested … on drug charges of joining forces with violent street gangs in a Chicago-to-Miami drug-running conspiracy, providing them with protection and guns,” reported the Sept. 22 Chicago Sun-Times.

The boom in this case was first lowered on his former partner, “a decorated gangs crimes investigator who police say joined forces with drug-selling gangs and furnished them with guns, ammunition and the names of undercover police investigators and informants.”

The indictment of the two officers includes charges of blind-eyeing a fugitive drug runner, allowing him to evade arrest, lying to obtain search warrants, seizing guns and drugs from suspects for personal use, possession of narcotics, extortion and conspiracy.

“It is unfortunate that a Chicago police officer has chosen to tarnish the badge that so many carry with dignity and honor,” said the police department in a statement about the arrest and indictment of the second officer in the case.

Widespread corruption
Worse than unfortunate, it’s not uncommon, as some stories from just this year make abundantly clear:

  • As the Oct. 3 Associated Press reported, when agents from the FBI and Georgia Bureau of Investigations tried to arrest Coffee County Sheriff Carlton Evans earlier this month, he bolted for a nearby wood. About five hours later, the sheriff’s body was found in the wood after he had apparently shot himself. The reason for his evasion of arrest and subsequent suicide? He was wanted on federal charges of conspiracy to grow more than a 1,000 pounds of marijuana. According to the Oct. 3 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, charges were also directed at a former captain in Evans’ department and Evans’ former chief deputy.
  • Scott County Sheriff’s Deputy Andrew J. Brutsman woke up on the wrong side of the law in early February, according to the Feb. 13 Lexington Herald-Leader. The three-year veteran of the force was busted by Kentucky State Police at his house after the sheriff got word he was growing marijuana.
  • The sheriff’s office of Prince George’s County, Md., kept some $45,000 under wraps, hidden from auditors, according to the Jan. 23 Washington Post. Seized from a drug dealer, the money was secreted for almost seven years, while the office lobbied for new laws that would allow the department to keep the cash. “We wouldn’t have known it existed if somebody hadn’t told us about it,” said the acting county auditor. “If their intent was to hide it and sit on it, we would never have found out about it.”
  • Former California anti-narcotics agent Richard Wayne Parker, convicted of operating a multi-state drug-running network, was sentenced in January to life in prison and fined $16 million. A Jan. 19 AP report in the New York Times said that two others charged in the same case were Parker’s former partner and his half brother, a former California Highway Patrol officer.
  • About the same time Parker was getting parked in prison for life, federal prosecutors came down on Gregory Colon, a Cleveland, Ohio, police officer who allegedly ran a cocaine ring that, as the Jan. 19 Cleveland Plain Dealer reported, “used exotic dancers to recruit customers in show bars.”
  • As the Feb. 17 Lafayette Advocate reported, a Louisiana jury lowered the boom on former Duson Police Chief Thomas Deville after only three hours of deliberation, convicting him of conspiracy, weapons and drug charges. “Deville was accused of being part of Lanier ‘Pops’ Cherry’s drug ring, which investigators said distributed more than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana.”

As a 15-year veteran and many-time “officer of the month,” former Jackson, Miss., police Detective Alvaline Baggett isn’t one you’d finger for corruption, but in September, she was convicted “on charges of extorting money from drug dealers to ‘fix’ their cases,” according to the Oct. 3 Jackson Clarion-Ledger. Working the city’s anti-drug unit, Baggett prided herself as being the “No. 1 narcotics officer in Jackson.”

In 1999, a consulting group gave Jackson officials cause to fear when it reported what Clarion-Ledger editorialized as “a serious perception of police corruption by the department’s rank-and-file.” Turns out that more than 75 percent of survey participants believed up to 25 percent of their fellow officers were on the take.

A problem you can count on
Worse than being both unfortunate and common, however, this corruption of our law enforcement is also predictable.

“As to corruption,” explained the National Commission of Law Observance and Enforcement in the Wickersham Report, “it is sufficient to refer … to the revelations (of) police corruption in every type of municipality, large and small throughout the decade … to the evidence of connection between corrupt local politics and gangs and the organized unlawful narcotics traffic, and of systematic collection of tribute from that traffic, for corrupt political purposes.”

“There have been other eras of corruption,” the report goes on to say, “But the present regime of corruption in connection with the narcotics traffic is operating in a new and larger field and is more extensive.”

Sounds bad, right? No doubt.

It also sounds a bit inaccurate. The National Commission of Law Observance and Enforcement — also known as the Wickersham Commission because of its headman, George W. Wickersham — was organized by President Herbert Hoover. The Wickersham Report was published in 1931. I played a little revisionism with the previous quotes; to restore them to the original state, simply switch “narcotics” with “liquor.”

Charged with reviewing the first decade of Alcohol Prohibition, the Wickersham Commission came back with stunning news about law enforcement corruption, basically that prohibition itself made corruption unavoidable.

As any economists can tell you, prohibition creates inherent incentives for corruption. Couple the illegality of a product with its demand and you’ve got a good recipe for a bad thing. The economics are simple. Because a product is illegal, the risks of getting the product to market are greater, leading directly to higher prices — nobody is going to charge spare change in a business where selling can land you in the clink for more years than committing murder. Thus, the illegality of drugs drives the prices sky-high, and it doesn’t take Milton Friedman to figure out that with that much money involved, somebody — poor hoodlum, high-school dropout, white-collar exec or police officer — is going to figure out a way to get in on it.

This is especially obvious when you consider the low pay scale in which many in law enforcement find themselves. When you’re only making $28 to $30 Gs a year, what’s a little side venture? Let’s say all you do is turn your head while a deal goes on — a cut for silence isn’t that bad, is it? Many officers start down precisely this path. If you seize $500 from a suspect, who does it hurt if you only report $400? From there, getting deeper is just a matter of going with the flow. In his groundbreaking study, “The Economics of Prohibition,” economist Mark Thornton explains in typical economist-speak that “When an official commits one act of corruption, the costs of additional acts decline, in a fashion similar to the marginal cost of production in a firm.” In other words, pocketing that $100 gets easier and easier the more you do it.

Consequently, the drug war “has created a business whose profits make the rum-running of the Prohibition Era appear bush league by comparison,” explained Richard Ashley in his 1972 volume, “Heroin: The Myths and Facts,” adding that “these profits have corrupted our police.” And corrupted them badly.

“Profits are so great,” reported Richard Kunnes in his 1972 book, “The American Heroin Empire,” “that corruption of law enforcement officials has become pandemic. In fact, the more officials hired for heroin suppression work, the more are bribed, or worse, become distributors themselves.”

Taking it into the present day, in a Sept. 21, 1999, Los Angeles Times op-ed, Hoover Institution scholar and former Kansas City, Mo., Police Chief Joseph McNamara blames “The lure of fortunes to be made in illegal drugs” for “thousands of police felonies: armed robbery, kidnapping, stealing drugs, selling drugs, perjury, framing people and even some murders. These police crimes were committed on duty, often while the cop gangsters were wearing their uniforms, the symbol of safety to the people they were supposed to be protecting.”

Blue cancer goes beyond the badge
When the public perceives police as corrupt, even if the actual number of lawbreaking law enforcers is minute, the entire community suffers immensely. For the criminal justice system to have any trust at all, it must be just, and when officers fudge the law — in ways either big or little — they chip away at their own system, eroding community trust and endangering the very people they are sworn to protect by allowing violent drug dealers to continue operating or by wearing the drug-dealer hat themselves.

Knowing this, it’s more than ludicrous for the legal system to insist on waging a prohibitionist war on drugs that fosters corruption within its own ranks. Society cannot counter economic forces. The free market is nothing more than the reflection of people’s wants. When you criminalize those wants, you drive them underground along with anybody involved in fulfilling them, even — perhaps especially — cops.

This is as true now of drug prohibition as it was of Alcohol Prohibition.

Harry Anderson, cited 70 years ago in the Wickersham Report and quoted by Mark Thornton sums it nicely: “These principles of economic law are fundamental. They cannot be resisted or ignored. Against their ultimate cooperation the mandates of laws and constitutions and the powers of government appear to be no more effective that the broom of King Canute against the tides of the sea.”

Even more ominous, Anderson warned that with total enforcement of prohibition the government would still fail. Complete enforcement “would inevitably lead to social and political consequences more disastrous than the evils sought to be remedied. Even then, the force of social and economic laws would ultimately prevail. These laws cannot be destroyed by governments, but often in the course of human history governments have been destroyed by them.”

As we see our Constitution eroded, our liberties erased and the very officers sworn to uphold them subverted by obscene economic incentives made real by the drug war itself, Anderson’s warning seems all too prescient.


Recent drug war columns:


“Are druggies worse than killers?”


“Marijuana monkey off your back”



Joel Miller’s entire drug war archive