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Government Corruption

The Drug War is a Training Camp for Corrupt Cops

In order to fight the drug war, police are trained in all the skills they need to become effective criminal masterminds. And many of them end up doing exactly that.

The Los Angeles Times tells the story of a group of narcotics officers who formed a gang that robbed dealers and sold drugs. It's a disturbing, though perfectly typical and illustrative, example of how the drug war functions as a training seminar in police corruption.

In the beginning, corruption is just a tactic for catching the bad guy:
Palomares admitted on the stand that he and fellow officers periodically planted drugs -- "cop dope," he called it -- on suspects against whom they didn't have sufficient evidence and then wrote false police reports, but he said he felt doing so was justified.

"We felt we were at war," he said. The officers who did such things, he said, "were the officers who really did their jobs and didn't let the gang members win."
Then it escalates. Widespread corruption inspires "clean" officers to turn dirty and get a taste of the action:
Palomares said he turned to crime after getting hurt on the job and becoming disillusioned by the suspension and subsequent firing of officers implicated in the Rampart police corruption scandal.
Good cops, once corrupted, make the best bad cops:
Palomares said William Ferguson, whom he met while the two worked together briefly in the Rampart Division, was a thorough searcher whom he could count on to find drugs or money hidden in locations where they conducted their bogus raids.

"I used to joke that he was like a bloodhound," Palomares testified, a slight smile crossing his face. "If there were drugs, I knew he would find them."
Police training and resources are converted into instruments of criminality:
Under questioning by prosecutor Jeffrey S. Blumberg of the Justice Department's civil rights division, Palomares at times sounded like an active duty police officer as he talked about "formulating a plan" prior to doing "takedowns" on the locations.

Blumberg asked about the significance of arriving at the locations in a police car.

"That way we wouldn't have any resistance or any problems," Palomares said.
It's important to note that the reason police are constantly arrested for drug war corruption isn’t because they're sloppy. These are highly skilled criminals with unique knowledge of how to keep their criminal enterprises under the radar. The reason we hear stories like this so often is because police corruption in the drug war is incredibly commonplace and endemic. Thus, for every such story one reads, countless similar operations continue undetected.

As this story illustrates, it does not matter if narcotics officers are subjected to rigorous psychological evaluations, background checks, or financial disclosures. This is all irrelevant because they aren't dirty when they arrive. They are rendered that way by the inherent filthiness of the job itself. The grinding, fruitless, repetitive process of whacking moles with a mallet leaves one defeated and desperate. As frustration ensues, one eventually casts the mallet aside and commences kicking the arcade machine until the coins come pouring out.

So if anybody needs a concrete demonstration of the drug war's inevitable continued failure, look no further than the daily revelations in our nation's newspapers about the role of police themselves in redistributing confiscated narcotics for personal profit.

Police Who Steal From Drug Suspects Are Charged With Theft of "Government" Property

The drug war has a rather tragic tendency to turn police into perps. Our ability to run a weekly feature with the latest news on domestic drug war corruption is just one example of the ubiquity with which law-enforcement becomes complicit in the very activity they are responsible for preventing.

Inevitably, when one hears about a police officer being sentenced to jail time, you simply know that their crimes were drug war-related:
On one occasion, prosecutors said Silva acquiesced while Kasperzyk improperly relocated confiscated narcotics during a drug raid to solidify a case against a suspect. Another time, prosecutors said Kasperzyk stole $1,000 confiscated during a drug raid and later gave $500 to Silva. Silva kept the money and did not report the theft, prosecutors said.

Kasperzyk has pleaded guilty to theft of government property and a civil rights conspiracy. He is scheduled to be sentenced in March. [Hartford Courant]
So if police steal during a drug raid, they're charged with robbing the government, not the suspect. It is often literally impossible for a drug suspect to be robbed by police, because their property ceases to belong to them once police start grabbing at it. Whether it ends up in an evidence bag or an officer's pocket, it's all the same to the innocent-until-proven-guilty drug suspect.

Isn't it interesting that the government maintained its ownership of the property here even though the arresting officers turned out to be liars and thieves? Even when police are found guilty of planting and stealing evidence, the government still keeps the fruits of their felonious labor. Anyone presiding over a policy such as this has no business enforcing laws against theft in the first place.

How can government possibly expect moral accountability from agents who are trained to steal on its behalf?

Is It Bad Cop vs. Bad Cop, or Bad Cop vs. Good Cop?

Jeralyn Merritt linked in TalkLeft today to a Chicago Tribune article covering what sounds like a fairly spectacular police corruption trial. A police ring allegedly engaged in armed robbery of drug dealers, and as part of that engaging in home invasions, falsifying police reports and lying to judges and juries. The prosecutors, not surprisingly, have gotten one cop -- Corey Flagg, who has pleaded guilty -- to testify against another -- Eural Black, who took it to trial -- in order to get a "deal," e.g., a lighter sentence. And Merritt aptly points out that in such a circumstance -- a known criminal providing testimony, in exchange for the compensation of spending less time in prison -- it's really hard to know whom to believe. There is incredibly strong incentive for the guy making the deal to say anything that will get him off more easily, and by definition the guy making the deal is someone we believe to be a criminal in the true sense of the word. Should such a person's testimony really be the basis for handing out hard-time in prison? Defense are pointing this out, and Merritt asks what the jury is likely to make of it:
What does a jury glean from all this? That all the cops were dirty, or that one cop who got caught is trying to save himself by selling out a clean cop who worked with him?... Does a dirty cop really sell out a clean cop? Or does he, caught in the headlights, just spread the blame to others as dirty as him, in hopes of a shorter sentence?
This sort of deal is made all the time, of course, on countless routine cases. I consider it to be a fundamental corruption of the administration of justice -- it is just too obviously true that one cannot trust testimony given under such a circumstance. The older type of practice is that deals would be offered to informants who provide useful information that investigators can use to then find actual evidence. Instead, drug war prosecutors, with the complicity of judges, have shed their morality and instead use the informants' mere testimony. Hmm, maybe that's one of the reasons some people don't like snitching.

Mexican Federal Police Take Tijuana By Storm -- Too Bad It Won't Work

A Reuters article this afternoon reported that Mexico's new president, Felipe Calderon, is sending over 3,000 troops to Tijuana in a crackdown aimed at stemming the ongoing violence that has wracked the border city in recent years. The first 500 arrived today and are investigating charges of corruption in the local police force:
As two helicopters circled overhead, dozens of troops with assault rifles and riot shields converged on a police headquarters to inspect weapons, a first step in probing alleged drug gang links and corruption inside the local force.
The move comes only three weeks since Calderon sent 7,000 troops to his own home state of Michoacan. 2,000 people were killed in drug trade violence in Mexico last year. One of the guests at DRCNet's 2003 conference in Mexico, "Out from the Shadows, Ending Drug Prohibition in the 21st Century" ("Saliendo de las Sombras: Terminando de le Prohibición de las Drogas en el Siglo XXI" en Español) was Gregorio Urias German, a Mexican congressman from Sinaloa, another part of the country that has suffered in the drug wars. Urias blames drug prohibition for this violence, but he fears that "If we can't even discuss the alternatives, if we can't even admit the drug war is a failure, then we will never solve the problem." He said that existing forums, such as the UN and the Organization of American States, are not fruitful places for discussion, "because only the repressive policies of the United States are discussed at these forums." While it is not the job of media outlets like Reuters to take a position favoring legalization in their news reporting, they will be doing a better job when they start to include leaders like Urias in their articles who hold that point of view. This Google News link will pull up a list of hundreds of appearances of this news story that are currently active in the mainstream media (many though not all the Reuters story or another by the AP). We encourage you to follow the links and submit some letters to the editor. Post them back here along with the letter-writing info for others.

The Drug Czar Has Another Brilliant Idea

Afghanistan is in flames. The Taliban are resurgent. The opium economy provides livelihoods for millions of Afghans. And now, US drug czar John Walters announces over the weekend, that Afghanistan will begin spraying the poppy fields with glyphosate, the same stuff we've been using with such great success in Colombia against the coca crops. (After six years of Plan Colombia spraying, the coca crop in Colombia is about the same size it was when we started.)

DEA Found Guilty of Retaliating Against Whistleblower

The DEA has been found guilty of retaliating against an agent who exposed misconduct. Basically they committed a crime in order to send a message to their employees about not exposing their other crimes.

From MiamiHerald.com:

A federal jury in Miami found the Drug Enforcement Administration discriminated against Sandalio Gonzalez, the former second-in-command of the DEA's South Florida field office, by retaliating against him with a transfer to another job in Texas in 2001.

…

For Gonzalez -- who stirred controversy in 2000 when he blew the whistle on a Miami drug bust in which 10 kilos of cocaine went missing -- the court triumph was sweet vindication. He had stood up for not only himself, but also other Hispanic and black DEA agents in the Miami field office over issues of discrimination, his lawyers said.

But wait…that name sounds familiar. Isn't Sandalio Gonzalez the same DEA agent who was forced into early retirement after exposing DOJ culpability in the "House of Death" murders in Mexico? Apparently yes.

So as I understand it, Gonzalez first blew the whistle in Miami when his colleagues stole 10 kilos of cocaine and tried to cover it up. He was then involuntarily transferred to Texas, where he blew the whistle when his colleagues allowed a government informant to commit multiple gruesome murders in Mexico. Having had about enough of him, the DEA again retaliated, forcing Gonzalez into early retirement.

The Chronicle plans a trip to the Andes

Snowflakes are falling in the Dakotas today. With winter coming to the High Plains, it's a good time to be thinking about heading south, and that's just what I intend to do in a few weeks, probably in early January. Thanks to a targeted gift from an individual donor (the same guy who financed my Afghanistan trip last year), I will be heading to Bolivia and Peru to report on the status of the Andean drug war.

Barnett Rubin Lectures the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Afghan Opium

On Thursday, I crossed back into the US from British Columbia and spent the day listening to all the back and forth over Chavez's "devil" comments as I drove across Washington, Idaho, and Montana. About 4am, I checked into a motel in Broadus, Montana—which is about 150 miles from nowhere in any direction—flipped on the tube, and lo and behold, there was Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin giving the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a tutorial on the complications of US Afghan policy.
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