Month: May 2022

On Highway Drug Interdiction, Part Two: The Sequeling

So. Part One introduced you to highway drug interdiction and what it typically looks like. On the face of it- if you’re a straight white male who’s lived in a straight white

Jean Baptiste Emmanual Zorg
This guy gets it.

male world your entire life-

Well, then, it’s pretty cut and dried. Yup, drugs are a scourge that should be eliminated by any means necessary to protect our society, so you can safely raise your kids and those kids can grow up to have more kids and so on and so forth. Sure, there’s lots of clever defense attorneys who’ll throw every technicality in the book at your case in order to let this evil scumbag go; but you’ve been trained by the best. You’ve seen a thing or two, and you know EXACTLY how to articulate this case to thread it around the traps those godless attorneys will throw at you. You sleep well at night knowing (and I mean this honestly) that you’re protecting society from these evils.

If you’re seething while reading this, just remember you haven’t been in this world. There are thousands and thousands of cops who chose LE as a career because they honestly wanted to protect their fellow man. There are plenty that saw it as an opportunity to further their grade school career as a bully, yes; but that’s not what I saw amongst the officers I worked with. Most of us got into it with the noblest of intentions; and while I may have been lucky in the agencies I worked for, the sort of scandals you see at agencies like Minneapolis, Portland, NYPD, LA- even Atlanta PD- were unknown in the ones I worked. I don’t know how I lucked out in that.

But the longer you’re in- especially if your agency doesn’t have a strong ethical and moral center- the idea that you’re “losing the war” grows ever larger and more influential. Every case that you busted your ass on, that you crossed every T and dotted every I on, that you lose on a “technicality” or through the foibles of the judge, is another strike in favor of juggling the odds in your favor. As a very minor example, I once had a municipal court judge dismiss my Obedience to a Traffic Control Device (running a red light) ticket because “it’s Valentine’s Day, and everyone should go free on Valentine’s Day.”

Now, that’s very minor, yes; but it pissed the ever-living fuck out of me. Where’s the case law on Valentine’s Day being an automatic get out of jail free card for traffic misdemeanors? Judges are Gods in their courtrooms; what can you do? What about that evidence you found on a search warrant that’s thrown out because you didn’t describe the instruments, articles, or things which have been used in the commission of a crime exactly right in your affidavit and your evidence is determined to be outside the scope of the search? Never mind that the whole system, through countless cases and appeals, is pretty firmly tilted in your favor. Pretty soon, you get tired of following every rule to the letter; every policy to it’s exact wording; and you… cut corners.

And these “acts of omission” pretty soon become “acts of commission”, and before you know it, you’re deep into unethical behavior that you’re convinced is the only way to do your job.

And, almost every time, you get away with it. And you get bolder, and lazier, confident that the prosecutor and judges and city or county officials will give you, the cop, the benefit of the doubt; and let you get away with it in the name of “public safety”.

And the body of “case law” gets deeper and deeper in your favor; and you get even more fat and lazy and complacent.

DRRRAGGING this conversation back to the point; what does that have to do with the interdiction stop of the DSU Lacross team bus recently?

Well, the stop itself was a TEXTBOOK presentation of how to conduct a highway drug interdiction stop. Each and every one of the deputies involved comported themselves in a professional and polite manner. It was all recorded, even if the Sheriff did spout off his mouth before he had the facts and, politely speaking, stepped on his dick. The investigation revealed no drugs and all parties were free to go on their way in a reasonable amount of time.

So, what’s all the hubbub, Bub? Why are all these bleeding-heart LIBRULS making such a stink?

Because they came from a very different background than these deputies; and they’ve seen this sort of “this is for your own good”, “I’m on your side, honest; if you ain’t done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to worry about” invasions of privacy based off of eggshell-thin probable cause before. Far, far too many times.

So, armed with the first essay on interdiction as our baseline, let’s look at this stop in particular. The video I watched came from https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2022/05/11/body-camera-footage-contradicts-sheriffs-account-georgia-bus-stop/9729651002/

Burnt out megabus
Well; maybe not Megabus; they tend to catch on fire a lot.

The video starts as the bus is stopped. Busses on the interstate are are particularly prized target amongst interdiction officers, because of the people who travel on them. Long-haul busses like those annoying Megabusses or, even better, busses that run from Mexico to various parts of the US, are juicy targets. They got a lot of “those” people on them- you know, poor, shiftless vagrants who just flit between cities; with no doubt nefarious ambitions once they alight in a new location. If you were an honest citizen; wouldn’t you be able to fly or drive your own car from place to place? Poor folks are always committing crimes; and drug mules can use this transportation vector efficiently. A Mexican bus? Anything from south of the border is suspect; and even if they’re not transporting drugs for some hazy Mexican cartel, they’re bringing people to take our (white male) jobs.

Am I saying every cop has this thought foremost in their mind? No, of course not.

But… The job DOES tend to promote these sorts of ideas into the back of your head; where they slowly work on you.

So you see this unmarked charter bus pass you and you get behind it, looking for any reason to pull it over. Lo and behold, the driver travels in the far left lane; a technical violation that you’ve probably never written on a normal basis (unless you’re a truck trooper), but gives you the opening you need to pull it over. A pretextual stop; remember those? Light ‘er up.

You’ve already got a posse of backup units with you; including that important K9 unit. That’s your ace in the hole. So, while you talk to the driver, the K9 sniffs the luggage compartment. Take your time; bring the driver back to your car and make small talk with him to give the K9 time to provide your PC to go further. Normally, you’d need a warrant to make such a detailed search of a vehicle; but being a vehicle, and “inherently mobile”, gives you some warrantless exceptions. Be sure to use all the good-sounding boilerplate phrases, like “they did a study a long time ago that showed how dangerous this driving behavior is” and refer to the “number of crashes and fatalities on this highway”. Hey, I’m the good guy here; just keeping the highways safe.

My favorite bit of verbiage along these lines had a modicum of truth- “Ga 316 is THE MOST dangerous highway in the state of Georgia based on fatalities”- was, actually, true. When it opened, because of it’s shitty, cost-saving design that had uncontrolled intersections every couple of miles, we racked up a truly obscene number of fatality accidents; the images from which will be imprinted on my brain forever. But save that for the guy that’s doing 110mph in heavy traffic.

Well, dang, it’s not a busload of mexicans running dope for a cartel. BUT, it IS a bunch of black college students; and you know how they love their weed. I listened to Busta Rhymes once, you know. Maybe you’ll get something after all. And hey! The K9 hit on the luggage area, so you’re good to go. Maybe you’ll dig up something. Be sure when you talk to the students on the bus that they know you’re looking for SERIOUS things… why, these busses are sometimes used to TRAFFICK CHILDREN as sex slaves.

Yes, that was said on this video.

Now, where have I heard that logic before?

They could have shortened their time on the side of the road by having the dog sniff the luggage after it was out of the bus; but I saw no evidence of that. We’re on a fishing expedition here, one with a limited timeframe of reasonability, so let’s fish quickly.

Whoa, what have we here? A plain package wrapped in brown paper? That got some pulses elevated. Alas, it turned out to be a still shrink-wrapped book safe that was a gift from an aunt to one of the students.

DSU students reacting to more bullshit
The expressions on their faces say more than I ever could.

(A BOOK SAFE?!? Why, those are used to hide CONTRABAND! Believe me, I got to know every variation of this theme- fake 2-liter cola bottles, cans of baked beans, you name it. This deputy didn’t pursue it much further, to his credit, when he saw it was still shrinkwrapped and unused; but you KNOW he was thinking “she’s gonna store her weed in here when she gets back”)

The one thing that I saw that made me think about the bigger picture in this little slice of interdiction reality was the expressions of the faces of the students on the bus. All black females, all with a resigned “this is bullshit, but what can I do about it” look on their faces. They’ve seen this from LE their entire lives; on every traffic stop or encounter with the police- or well-off white society- their entire lives. It’s an inescapable reality for them that those of us who have never lived it don’t understand. The idea that the cops are always there, always looking for some reason to snag you and make you pay for your “crimes”.

That they don’t seem to snag too many middle or upper class white folks at the same time is just another knife in the back. Does make you wonder how many busses full of retired white folks headed to a Senior’s Casino Vacation get stopped and searched, though… and of those that are, how many were done just to get some “clean stops” on their record in case some smartass defense attorney asks.

“Whoa there, skippy”, you heatedly interject. “Are you saying these deputies are racist?”

Now, how can I possibly know that? I’ve never met them, that I know of. I have no idea.

But I spent 20 years in LE in Georgia, and I’m pretty sure the undercurrents there are the same as they were for me. No one comes out and SAYS the n-word; but euphemisms are OK. If someone said they just broke up a house party full of “democrats”, they meant black people. “Wetback” was still an acceptable slur, but “chink” was a bridge too far. Poor whites busted for meth related crimes were “dirtlegs”. A photo recognition book of various homeless people frequently encountered was named the “Skinnies Final Solution Book”. Being poor was far more likely to make you a target than skin color; but being poor AND a minority generally led to harsher treatment.

By “harsher treatment” I don’t mean having someone kneel on your neck until you’re dead; although that has obviously happened, and happens more often these days. “Harsher” is the difference between going to jail or being given a warning; when going to jail will utterly crash your world to the ground. Most of the officers I worked with would not label themselves as racist, and would loudly proclaim that they treated everyone equally… because they didn’t even see how their disparate treatment was a problem. Most of them likely didn’t recognize it in themselves.

But it’s a pervasive, low-level rot; that slowly seeps into the consciousness and very fabric of an agency, and gradually changes you over a long period of time. And the “us vs. them” mentality that is hammered into you day after day, seemingly reinforced by your daily experiences, doesn’t help. If you looked back on those reinforcing experiences and critically dissected them, from start to finish, you’ll see that it’s your own conviction that the public is out to get you and therefore your enemy that made that interaction turn out the way it did. Is some of the public out to get you? Of course. There are very real dangers. There are countless stories of officers killed because they let their guard down for a mere second.

But there’s also millions of interactions on a daily basis that don’t result in bloodshed… and others that wouldn’t, had the police not treated everyone as a threat.

And in this corner of LE- the one tasked with eradicating drugs and drug use- has done more to reinforce all of the things I’ve mentioned and coalesce them into one messy package than almost anything else. Even the popular name for it- the war on drugs- implies that this is combat on a daily basis and only warriors can fight it.

So, yes, this was a textbook interdiction stop on a bus. Calm, courteous, and professional.

It’s also an assault on individual freedoms for a vague, unending war that could be better fought by addressing root issues than with guns and “investigative detentions” or jump-outs. A war that was declared for very shaky reasons and has resulted in punishing disparate numbers of minorities, forcing them into becoming a permanent underclass. A war that has even further tarnished police officers who fought it and antagonized the divide on either side of the “thin blue line between order and chaos”. A war, and the ensuing mentality, that has “us vs. them”’d us to the point that reforming law enforcement is going to take decades and drastic measures.

The interdiction stop itself was perfect on the face of it… but rotten to the core, nonetheless.

On Highway Drug Interdiction: Part One, An Explanation

(NOTE: This is Part One of a two part series. In this one, I will explain what interdiction is and my experiences with it; I will talk about the recent stop of the DSU Lacrosse Team bus in part two. But for the folks who don’t know what interdiction is, this is required reading. It’s a little rambling; I’m sorry about that.

And yes, mimicking Dave Grossman’s attempt to pass his stuff off as a scholarly treatise with his title choices is intentional; just in case any of you thought I was that far up my own ass. I never really expect anyone to read this stuff.)

Highway drug interdiction stop on I85 south, sometime around 2004.
Highway drug interdiction stop on I85 south, sometime around 2004. We found no drugs on this stop, but money and something we never expected…

Let’s talk about highway drug interdiction for a moment. (Or just “interdiction”; because that’s less of a mouthful. Honestly, I’m surprised Law Enforcement hasn’t come up with a catchy acronym for it, like so many other things.)

Drug interdiction isn’t a new thing. It’s been around in one form or another long before the 1980s, usually involving federal agencies and various military organization such as the Coast Guard and other regular military units; generally aimed at stopping the flow of drugs from the border and at the source. It became a major focus in the late 70s and early 80s, especially after the rise of the Medellin cartels and the Mariel boatlift.

Drug interdiction on interstate and local highways really got its start in New Mexico and New Jersey in the 1980s, especially along I95 from Florida. Their successes attracted the attention of the DEA, who quickly seized on this and began providing training and intelligence to local law enforcement. The DEA had already established the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) in 1974, ostensibly to focus on “threats to the Nation, with an emphasis on the Southwest border”, and began adding law enforcement into their operations in the 80s. My second agency, the Barrow County (Ga) Sheriff’s Office, for instance, sent two narcotics investigators to work at EPIC for 6 month stints in the 2000s. EPIC’s mission might have had a wide brief of intelligence for LE, but much of the information we ever received or acted on was related to the smuggling of narcotics. Every five to six months, we might get a notice from EPIC of a smuggler who would be traveling on I85, and we would wait for them on the highway. Most of the time, they would get nabbed by another agency before they got to us.

So, how does local interdiction work?

It’s really amazingly, stupidly, simple.

You simply sit on the shoulder or median of a major highway, interstate or local; and just look as glaringly obvious as you can possibly can. At night you’ll have your headlights, or “takedown” lights- the white lights on the lightbar that are meant to illuminate the car in front of you- on so you can better see into the cars that pass, and wait for someone suspicious to drive by. You WANT to be seen, to be noticed from a long way down the road. What side of the highway is up to you- do you want to find drugs, or money? For I85, drugs flowed INTO Atlanta; and money flowed OUT of it. On state highway Ga 316, it was Athens.

Why is that; and what makes someone suspicious?

The idea- borne out by countless successful stops and even more unsuccessful, narcotics-wise, ones- is that someone who’s smuggling drugs or drug money will be extremely nervous and alert for the cops. When they pass you, you note their behavior- are they driving at precisely the speed limit? Arms locked out rigidly on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, not glancing at you even for a second?

In other words, someone who just said “Cheezit! The cops!” and is now trying to do absolutely nothing to attract your attention. A lot of times you’ll find they’re in rental cars, rented by a third person, and have no idea who that person is. Rental moving trucks from U-Haul or Ryder are another good bet.

Of course, this means that you’ll pull over a lot of people who have a warrant or suspended license, or just a ¼ ounce of weed in the car, and are paranoid. All grist for the mill.

elderly couple driving an rv
“Yessir, we’re headed to to the Devil’s Anus monument! Mary and I took the kids to see it once… Hey, I’ve got some pictures of them in my wallet…”

(As a side note, I always said that if I wanted to smuggle anything on the interstate, I’d use a kindly old couple who are gregarious and friendly, driving an RV. They’ll wave at the cops on the side of the road and drive merrily by.)

So, you’ve spotted a likely target and pull out behind them. Now you need a court-defensible reason to stop them, as “they didn’t wave at me when they passed” is hardly probable cause; or even reasonable articulable suspicion.

But that’s easy enough. You can find a moving or equipment violation on almost ANY vehicle on the road. Didn’t signal a lane change? Headlight out? Something hanging from the rear-view mirror, “obstructing the driver’s view?” Weaving within a lane? No county decal on the tag? If they’re not weaving, they will be when you zoom up behind them at high speed and park yourself an inch from their bumper. If it’s a commercial vehicle- a truck or bus- there’s a whole code section of violations you can find. Truck Troopers- excuse me, “Motor Carrier Compliance Division officers” (yes, there’s a lot of teasing in LE)– are usually the only ones to get that nit-picky; but you’ll use whatever reason you can find to pull them over.

This is what’s called a “pretextual stop”, and the only times I’ve ever used it was when I was working narcotics, SWAT, or interdiction.

Now; you’ve found a violation, and you pull them over.  One of your backup units will be a K9 officer, who will walk the dog around the car while you talk to the driver. Rental car? Out of state license? Two passengers who, when you separate them and talk to them, give differing stories of where they’re coming from and where they’re going? That might be all you need. But you’ve got the dog there as your ace in the hole.

“But wait!” you say. “If the dog alerts to drugs in the car, why, that’s ironclad! They must be smugglers!”

Yeah. Except that the K9, no matter HOW assiduous the handler is in their training, really really wants to please their master. They get treats when they “hit”; so they WANT to hit. And even the most ethical, moral, 100% by-the-book handler gives off signals- signals that they don’t even realize they’re sending, and that the dog picks up on; signals that say “oh boy, I hope we get a hit!” Handlers are supposed to keep records on true hits and false ones, but no one ever looks at those in small town courts- and drug mules keep their mouths shut.

Not to mention what an unethical K9 handler can get away with.

So, now you’ve got PC for a more invasive search, one way or another. You could always articulate an “officer safety” reason to “frisk” the interior of the car; or get a search warrant… but cars are a special exemption to 4th amendment search and seizure rules; because they are “inherently mobile” and the time to get a warrant will be unreasonable. A K9 hit solves that right away- and although there is a whole body of case law on K9 hits and vehicular searches, you can bet that the LE doing interdiction know what all of them are and how to stay within court-acceptable limits but still get the job done.

Bingo, there’s drugs in the vehicle- possibly hidden in any number of very clever and intricate hidden compartments… OR, there’s more than $10,000 in cash.

Should it be illegal to have that much money on you? Are there legitimate reasons you might?

No, of course not; and yes, absolutely… but it’s very easy to articulate that you believe this money was the result of illicit activity and seize it; and very difficult to prove otherwise and get it back.

That’s the world we live in.

Barrow County wanted badly to get in on the interdiction game, as the small town of Braselton- that sat on the intersection of 4 different counties and had a 5 mile stretch of I85 in their

Man holding a fancy FN-FAL varient
I’m sorry about that link if you weren’t expecting gun porn. My patrol rifle was an FN-FAL .308, 4 MOA semi-auto rifle. Some of the magazines I bought had house-paint Rhodesian camo from the late ’70s.

jurisdiction- had made absolute mad BANK on drug interdiction and asset forfeiture. This tiny northeast Georgia town had the best patrol cars, packed full of the best equipment, everyone with their own M4 rifle (at a time when patrol rifles weren’t that widespread) and paid amazing salaries to their officers… all thanks to the insane amounts of cash they were seizing on the interstate. That’s one thing about narcotics investigations and asset forfeiture; after a while, you’re more concerned with what you can seize and make your own than anything else. We once seized a bright yellow Hummer H1 that was stuck in limbo for a year while the case wound its way through the courts… I know every one in the narcotics office was hoping to make that their personal undercover car.

But to start off, the Traffic Unit was tasked with learning about interdiction and starting a program. We invited Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office, a deep south Georgia county on the Florida line along I75 and who had a flourishing interdiction unit, to Barrow on several occasions to teach those of us on the traffic unit how to do it. We only had 1.5 miles along I85- a very rich source of traffic- to work with; and about 20 miles of Ga 316 from Atlanta to Athens in our jurisdiction. Development along 316 was only beginning its meteoric rise in these days. Over several week-long sessions, we learned what to look for and all the tips and tricks necessary. And, we did seize a lot of drugs- and, more importantly, money- during that period.

Scene from Beastie Boy's video for Sabotage
Y’all don’t understand how formative this stuff was on a young me

(Although, we did freak the ever-living fuck out of the Lowndes County deputies. You see, their stretch of I75 had cable-stay barriers in the median- a steel cable “fence” designed to keep out of control vehicles who enter the median from making it to the opposite lanes; so they only had limited spots they could cross over the median and change direction. We had no such barriers on I85 or 316; and were used to diving into the median at 70mph, cutting the wheel and stomping the gas to do a bootlegger turn, squealing tires as we fish-tailed into the opposite lanes and heading the other way to catch a car going the opposite direction. What can I say; we were all raised on Dukes of Hazzard, Smokey and the Bandit, and the video to Beastie Boys “Sabotage”. They had never seen this and were convinced we were suicidal lunatics bent on carnage.

Well. Maybe a little.)

At one point, the Captain over Investigations,- whose real love was the narcotics unit, and was also the commander of the SWAT team of which I was the Entry Team Leader- asked me if I wanted to join Narcotics full time as the lead of an interdiction and “Heightened Enforcement Action Team”, or HEAT (gotta love those acronyms) unit, primarily focusing on interdiction, SWAT narcotics raids, and “pro-active patrols”.

That latter one consisted of the SWAT team, most of which were narcotics agents, cruising through a “high crime area” so we could jump out of our vehicles and question anyone hanging around “the usual drug trafficking locations”- which were majority black,- and earned us the name “jump-out boys”

Did I mention that, more than once, we did it in full SWAT gear?

Geebus. Sitting on the side of the road, waiting for some poor schmuck who probably only has a blunt or a suspended license, day after motherfuckin’ day, so I could seize everything he owned, had no appeal to me. That’s not why I became a cop. I tactfully told him that interdiction bored the shit out of me, and he’s be better off with someone else.

Thankfully, shortly after this, I was promoted to Sergeant and took over the training unit; which was what I really wanted to do.

There’s one more type of vehicle that gets stopped on interdiction missions that I hinted at; and that’s busses… specifically, charter busses. And that, dear readers, leads us to the point of this exercise; and On Interdiction: Part Two, the Sequel-ing.