cannabisnews.com: Have Drugs, Will Travel





Have Drugs, Will Travel
Posted by FoM on March 19, 2002 at 17:22:28 PT
By Michael Stoll of The Examiner Staff
Source: San Francisco Examiner
Office workers are not the only businesspeople to make the daily trek into San Francisco. Drug dealers can hop on a bus or BART the same as anyone else, and are doing it every day.  An Examiner analysis of months of police records bears out what police and neighborhood activists long have suspected: Street-level pushers in downtown San Francisco are largely from out of town, many hailing from Oakland and Richmond.
In buy-and-bust operations that roped in hundreds of suspected dealers in mid-Market, the Tenderloin and the Mission, about 40 percent of arrestees gave addresses in the East Bay and elsewhere. Some examples:   Police in the Mission arrested 414 suspected drug dealers in the first five weeks of what Capt. Greg Corrales dubbed Operation Reclamation. Of those, 185 suspects, or 45 percent, were listed as "out-of-towners."   At least 16 percent of the 193 suspects arrested for drug crimes by the Rotating Narcotics Enforcement Team in the three highest-density drug corridors, all close to BART stations, were nonresidents, tallies from the last four months show. Another 25 percent were initially booked in as homeless, transient or other, meaning they could come from anywhere.   Of the 16 crack-sale suspects arrested in January through undercover buys in SoMa, at least 11 lived outside of San Francisco.  The City's criminal database is so antiquated that a comprehensive search of records is not possible. One deputy public defender, Sandy Feinland, said he was skeptical of the purported trend without more evidence.  "We see, hands on, dozens of police reports a day and almost all of our clients have local addresses," he said.  The police response: Nonresident suspects often give phony San Francisco addresses to keep local police ignorant of their profession -- and to maintain fraudulent San Francisco welfare benefits.  Anecdotally, narcotics officers have known about commuter criminals for years. One plainclothes officer in the Tenderloin, Darren Nocetti, said that nearly every warrant he has served on a mid-level dealer has taken him to the East Bay -- Oakland, Richmond, Vallejo, Antioch, San Leandro, Berkeley, Rodeo, San Pablo, Pittsburg, Fairfield, Pinole, Concord and elsewhere.  "I ask them why they come over to San Francisco, and they say, 'I can make more money in a few hours here than I can in a full day or two days back home,'" Nocetti said.   Impunity and payoff   Big cities have always been magnets for vice. But deserved or not, The City is especially plagued by its reputation for lenient prosecutors.  "That criticism is a little stale," said Liz Aguilar-Tarchi, the assistant district attorney in charge of narcotics cases. She said her office has responded to such attacks with more uniform prosecution. But it takes a while for word of that change to reach the street.  The real problem is the judges, Aguilar-Tarchi said. Despite recent reform efforts, San Francisco bails are still the lowest in the Bay Area, and the criminals know it.  One drug dealer, who spoke with The Examiner on the condition that she not be named, said her colleagues pay attention to such details, calculating where to do business based on where the punishment is lightest.  But just as important as a lenient legal system is The City's large number of addicts and vast demand for illegal narcotics. One measure of the problem: In 1997 the Department of Public Health reported that San Francisco led the nation in drug-related emergency-room visits.  The demand draws a long line of suppliers -- marginally employable young men and women eager to strike it rich in San Francisco's black market.  "The money can be as addicting as the drugs," said the dealer, who sells crack in the Tenderloin.  "You have to give them a better way of looking at things, a better aspect to their lives, you have to broaden their horizons," she said. "A lot of them don't have educations. What are they going to do, get a job paying $7 an hour? You can't tell them to just stop selling. That's like telling a dope fiend to stop using crack."   A drain on The City  The constant deluge of drug dealers costs The City not just in prosecutors' time, but also in parole supervision and increasingly costly diversion programs such as drug treatment. In lieu of sentences, dealers sometimes get services and court-ordered volunteer work intended for drug addicts, not sellers.  Because of the commuter crime problem, San Francisco courts are chronically underfunded. The state pays for courts on a per-capita formula based on an official population of 776,000. But add to that commuting workers -- legal and illegal -- and the population swells, by some estimates, to twice that number during the day.  City planners still have great hopes that San Francisco will attract more residents and commerce to its high-density "transit corridors." That may be a hard sell for suburbanites considering relocation -- precisely because the drug dealers have been going there for years.  Evidence that the drug dealers commute into the mid-Market Street area boosts poor and immigrant residents' claims that they are victims of lawbreaking outsiders.  Assistant District Attorney Michael Menesini set up The City's first street-level prosecutor's office on Sixth Street in January after active members of the community complained that hordes of drug dealers set up shop on their streets and intimidated residents.  "The decent people living in these areas shouldn't have to put up with this," said Ross Laflin, a 31-year police veteran at Southern Station who has been working undercover for 14 years and places the onus for commuter crime squarely on the District Attorney's Office. "To trivialize drug dealing is ludicrous."  The dealers are smart, said Judith Berkowitz, longtime neighborhood activist with the East Mission Improvement Association. Drugs moved back into Garfield Park near Cesar Chavez Street after a hiatus when the Bernal Dwellings housing project opened next door. With the increased activity on the street, the interlopers, mostly Latino gang members, are able to blend into the Mexican barrio.  "These guys are in my neighborhood, but they're not my neighbors," Berkowitz said. "I don't know where they're from."    Heat in the Mission  After five weeks of nonstop daily busts starting last month, centering on the 16th and Mission BART station, nonresidents got the message of Operation Reclamation, Capt. Corrales said. Last week almost all of the suspects arrested were local, suggesting that the police presence repelled the out-of-town dealers.  "The word is pretty much out there that the heat is on and some of those out-of-towners elected to stay home," Corrales said. But he is less concerned with the message he is sending than his ability to inconvenience the dealers.  "I don't want to deter them," Corrales said. "I want them to go to jail."  When the increased presence subsides, police say, out-of-towners will come back.  Stepped-up enforcement downtown also makes it safer for dealers, Sgt. Ed Santos of Southern Station said. No gangs have managed to monopolize the mid-Market or Tenderloin because it is hard to start fights with so many eyes on the street. The area has become a sort of no-man's land, with as many as 25 dealers on a corner -- all jockeying for buyers' attention.  Even though the Oakland dealers and Richmond dealers do not coexist well, Santos said, "They'll take the chance of getting caught, but won't take the chance of shooting someone."  Lee, a marijuana dealer who lives in the Fillmore and now sells on Market Street, said the out-of-towners recently invaded the Tenderloin, and were hogging the street corners with the best business opportunities.  "It used to be an easy sale," Lee said. "Now all these people from Oakland came in and brought the heat with them."  A 29-year-old homeless man by the last name of Moore, who alternately gave his name as Roger and Carlos but said the police know him as Michael, has been addicted to drugs most of his life and understands the dope dealers on Sixth Street. Some of them come from as far away as San Jose and Sacramento, he said, preferring to take the bus or train.  "This is like a melting pot," Moore said in between halfhearted requests for a beer. "They come here to sell their drugs and when they leave, the town can go to hell."   Keeping police guessing  Nocetti from the Tenderloin noted that two young women returned to the same spot in mid-Market Street for years to sell drugs, and were arrested as many as 20 times. Each time they gave a San Francisco address to throw the police off track. Last year they both were arrested on warrants at their real homes in Oakland and Concord.  Sometimes dealers will give old San Francisco addresses where they resided before the dot-commers made The City unaffordable, or addresses of parents, lovers or friends. A few tell the police they live in Geneva Towers, a housing project in Visitacion Valley that was torn down years ago. All that is done to avoid raising suspicion on their home turf.  Nocetti recalled one trip he made to Oakland to pick up a San Francisco dealer he knew was living at the Rio Hotel, which he described as one of about five cheap dives popular among drug dealers near the MacArthur BART station. Walking to the suspect's room, he spied through an open window another man with an outstanding drug-arrest warrant in San Francisco, whom he also promptly arrested.  Driving back across the Bay Bridge with the two suspects in custody, he got a call from an informant saying a third suspect staying in yet another room saw the officers and waited until the coast was clear to return to the Rio. Nocetti turned around and arrested the third man.  Not bad -- three separate San Francisco arrests in one Oakland hotel of no more than two-dozen rooms. Such a concentration of commuting drug dealers makes serving warrants a cinch, police say.    Obstacles to enforcement  Dealers know that public transportation is safer than driving. If they drive, they are likely to get flummoxed when they see a police car and make a moving violation, allowing the police to stop and search them. In California they can lose their cars if convicted of transporting drugs for sale. "By coming in on BART, you're just like everyone else, you get lost in the crowd," Santos said.  Attempts to clamp down on drug dealers using the trains so far have been met with skepticism from the public.  Proponents of medical marijuana savaged BART police in November when they brought a small, friendly drug-sniffing dog, Mattie, on the trains. The force withdrew the K9 officers less than a week after starting. They netted 10 people on possession and one on possession for sale.  The dealers knew the stepped-up enforcement was temporary, said Gary Gee, chief of BART Police.  "It lasted all of 11 hours -- three shifts," he said. "The first place was at 16th and Mission. We cleared out the area. The place was tolerable. Then when we left they all came back."  Overall, BART Police handled 53,000 cases last year, but only 200 involved narcotics.  Without a legitimate cause to stop dealers on the train, there is little that BART police can do to curtail the flow of drugs into San Francisco, Gee said. What are they supposed to do? Random drug searches are as repugnant to most and probably as unconstitutional as racial profiling. Unless dealers actually sell dope on the train, BART police are powerless.   Intercity rivalry  Police in other jurisdictions, however, can make a big impact.   In Oakland, community policing is not as widespread as it is in San Francisco. But occasionally officers meet in small groups with the community.  Amy Petersen, a community organizer with the Safety Network Program in San Francisco, said that at one meeting in her Temescal-Oakwood neighborhood of Oakland, an officer was asked what she did when she found drug dealers on Telegraph Avenue.  "She said, 'I take them by the collar and I say to them, you can't do this here -- if you want to do that you should take a bus over to San Francisco,'" Petersen recalled.  Fear of commuting criminals was one reason politicians in Marin County were reluctant to invite BART in when the system was being built in the 1960s. Gee added: "At city council meetings in San Rafael, people said they didn't 'want the troublemakers coming up here.'"  Such antagonism isn't universal, however. Nocetti talks daily with Eric Riccholt from the Oakland police. They say they joke about forming an intercity task force to combat commuting drug dealers, but have never had the opportunity.   No one's asking  San Francisco has been slow to react to the problem of out-of-town crime in part because its information-technology capabilities are so limited. Ancient computer databases at the police and Sheriff's Department at best print out only lists of who was arrested on a particular day. If you want to compile statistics about drug suspects' county of origin, good luck.  The police planning and research office tracks numbers of crimes by location, but never has been asked to examine where the suspects live. Even if they were charged with the task, it is unclear whether they could do it without browsing through hundreds of thousands of paper booking cards.  Aguilar-Tarchi said that a new computer system, which could link most of The City's justice system as early as next year, would be useful in calculating totals for out-of-town arrests. It also would help generate demographic profiles of people taking advantage of Proposition 36, the 2000 state initiative that allows first- and second-time nonviolent offenders convicted of simple drug possession to get treatment instead of jail.  Still, so many defendants lie about their addresses that trends may be impossible to calculate. If their true counties of residence were exposed, out-of-town probationers could lose fraudulent welfare benefits from The City, as well as treatment and other services, said Art Faro, division director of community specialized services of The City's adult probation department.  San Francisco has a better treatment system than most surrounding counties, and it is easier to get into public-service programs, such as CalWorks.  "When we find out someone has a residency somewhere else, we try to contact the General Assistance program and say, 'Hey, they don't live here,'" Faro said.  But the drug money is so abundant, and the risks so low, they keep coming. The widespread image of San Francisco as the place to peddle vice is understandable, Faro said.  "San Francisco has been known as a mecca of free love, peace and drugs -- always has," he said. "That's the way it is. Some of that lifestyle is a blight on our city."First in a two-part series on commuter crime.Source: San Francisco Examiner (CA)Author: Michael Stoll of The Examiner StaffPublished: March 19, 2002Copyright: 2002 San Francisco Examiner Contact: letters examiner.com Website: http://www.examiner.com/ Related Articles:Drug Dog Gets Booted from BART http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread11739.shtmlBART Must Constrain Drug-Sniffing Dogs http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread11614.shtml
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Comment #3 posted by Jose Melendez on March 20, 2002 at 05:50:08 PT
oops
comment # 2 from: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n508/a11.html?397
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Comment #2 posted by Jose Melendez on March 20, 2002 at 05:49:22 PT:
Arresting Prohibition
From:Police act on hunches all the time; it's part of the job. But they know in every other instance they need proof to make a charge stick. Seizing property should be no different. When police find $244,000 in the trunk of a car, it is natural to be suspicious. But if we allow police to deprive anyone of property or liberty merely on suspicion, it's not just drug dealers who will be at risk. We all will be.Legislators did the right thing a year ago when they stopped police from playing fast and loose with the rules. They helped law enforcement to regain credibility it otherwise was losing. 
Narcosoft.com - technology with substance
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Comment #1 posted by Dan B on March 20, 2002 at 00:23:06 PT:
It's The Money, Stupid!
"The money can be as addicting as the drugs," said the dealer, who sells crack in the Tenderloin."A lot of them don't have educations. What are they going to do, get a job paying $7 an hour? You can't tell them to just stop selling. That's like telling a dope fiend to stop using crack."These are, perhaps, the most remarkable statements in the entire article. Here, we have a drug dealer (we know not what drugs sheis dealing, by the way) telling us exactly why there is a problem with people selling drugs in San Francisco's Tenderloin district: Dealers can make more money selling an illegal substance on the black market than they can doing working a legal but underpaid job. $7 an hour in the Bay Area is not enough to pay rent. Anywhere in the Bay Area. Even if all of the paycheck goes toward paying rent.There are really two interrelated reasons why people sell drugs in America. First, they sell drugs because they can make more money doing that than they can in most legal jobs. This is highlighted above. The second reason is implied by the first: employers do not pay their employees a living wage. That is why Republicans are so adamant about continuing the war on some drugs: they know that if the black market is suddenly removed, many poor people will be unable to make aliving wage, which means that more will raise a cry about the injustice of American-style capitalism. In the 33 years that I have been alive, I have seen the American family go from being sustainable with one person's income to being nearly insustainable with two incomes. Prices have increased far faster than wages, and the result is catastrophic for many families. What does a man do when he has been told his whole life that he holds the primary financial responsibility for the family, yet nobody will pay him a fair wage to uphold that responsibility? What does a woman do when she has to raise her children without child support on a wage that cannot sustain the family? Some turn to the black market. Many more turn to the drugs themselves for comfort in lieu of answers. More than a few decide suicide is the answer, and some, crazed by the world's indifference to their plight, even turn their destructive wrath on their children.Am I making excuses for this behavior? That is not my intention. What I am saying is that for this country to end its problem with drugs, it must do more than end the black market--must do more than end the war on some drugs. Drugs are a symptom of a larger crisis. A crisis of hope.Ending the war on drugs will do much to end suffering for millions of people. That's a good start, but we must be willing to do more. As we speak out for justice, we must also impress on the American public the need for state-funded treatment--voluntary, not compulsory--and real employment programs that will give people a chance at a living wage. We must close loopholes and end trade agreements that send American jobs outside the country, forcing millions of Americans into the unemployment lines. And we must, above all, do more than pay lip service to the Constitution--must strive instead to support all efforts to defend the rights guaranteed therein.Once we get our house in order here, then (and only then) we can begin working toward the same conditions for the rest of the world.Dan B
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