Rise of the Warrior Cop (28 page)

Describing the 1984 operation, the journalist Dan Baum writes, “For a solid month, the clatter of helicopters was never absent from Humboldt County. CAMP roadblocks started hauling whole families out of cars and holding them at gunpoint while searching their vehicles without warrants. CAMP troops . . . went house to house kicking in doors and ransacking homes, again without warrants.”

In his book
The Great Drug War
, Arnold Trebach writes that in 1983 and 1984 Ruzzamenti claimed that the entire town of Denny, California, was so hostile to the drug warriors that he’d need “to virtually occupy the area with a small army.” Denny residents Eric Massett and his wife Rebecca Sue told Trebach that when they pulled out of their driveway during a CAMP raid in 1983, there were six men in camouflage pointing rifles at them. They fled into town, where CAMP officials then put up roadblocks to keep everyone in town while they conducted their eradication campaign. When CAMP left, a military convoy drove out of the small village, guns trained on the townspeople. The couple told Trebach that one of them was waving a .45 as the others chanted, “War on drugs! War on drugs!”
⁸

But CAMP was just the marijuana eradication program in California. The Reagan administration had begun similar federal-state programs all over the country. In 1984 the federal-state marijuana eradication efforts conducted twenty thousand raids nationally, resulting in the destruction of 13 million plants (many of them wild) and around five thousand arrests. The following year, newly appointed attorney general Ed Meese put his own stamp on the program by ordering the largest armed law enforcement operation in American history. On the morning of August 5, 1985, Meese flew to Harrison, Arkansas, to kick off Operation Delta-9, code for the scientific name (delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol) of the psychoactive chemical in marijuana, more commonly known as THC. The plan was for Meese to take part in the raid of a pot grower in the Ozark National Forrest. Unfortunately, the fifty-four-year-old politician’s plan to cast himself as a heroic drug cop fell short when bad weather got in the way. Heavy rain, fog, and flash flooding reduced Meese’s
role to photo-ops of him observing hillside pot growth from a helicopter and, during a press conference, inspecting the catch that other agents had brought back. Operation Delta-9 sent 2,200 drug cops on simultaneous eradication raids in all fifty states over two days. It was mostly for show, of course. Even the most feverish of drug warriors had to know that at best the massive effort would register as little more than a blip in the market for pot.
⁹

T
HE
S
UPREME
C
OURT ALSO DID ITS PART IN THE
1980
S TO
dismantle civil liberties for the cause of saving the country from drugs. In 1983 the Court heard oral arguments in
Illinois v. Gates
.
¹⁰
At issue was whether information gleaned from an anonymous letter sent to police was enough to establish probable cause for a search. Under the existing law and the Exclusionary Rule, the case should have been open and shut. Since a 1969 Court decision, police had had to meet a two-pronged test to determine if information provided by an informant was reliable enough to establish probable cause for a search warrant. They first had to demonstrate to a judge that the informant was credible. Second, they also had to show that there was a factual basis for the informant’s allegations. In
Gates
, the police had no way of knowing whether the informant was credible. They only had the letter that the informant had sent to the police department.

The Court’s conservative wing initially saw the case as an opportunity to carve out a “good-faith exception” to the Exclusionary Rule. The facts of
Gates
didn’t allow for that, but the Court did dismiss the two-pronged test for an easier-to-meet “totality of the circumstances” test. The next year, in
US v. Leon
, the conservatives got their good-faith exception.
¹¹
After
Leon
, if a police officer inadvertently violated a suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights during a search, but was acting in good faith, the Exclusionary Rule no longer applied. Moreover, the Court wouldn’t second-guess the officer’s intentions. A defendant would have to prove bad faith, generally an impossible task. The ruling was essentially an instruction manual for police to use to get around the Fourth Amendment.

Subsequent rulings further narrowed the Fourth Amendment. In
Massachusetts v. Sheppard
, the majority again declined to apply the Exclusionary Rule, this time after police
knowingly
provided a defective warrant to a magistrate.
¹²
When the magistrate returned the warrant, the police didn’t bother to read it before conducting the search to see if the mistake making the warrant defective had been removed. The Court said that was fine. In
Segura v. United States
, the Court ruled that police who broke into a residence without a warrant, then hung out inside for nineteen hours until they were able to get one, didn’t violate the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights because they didn’t actually begin searching the place until they had obtained the warrant.
¹³
The Court also declined to sanction the officers, because the majority didn’t believe the ruling would make illegal breaking and entering by police a regular problem. In
Nix v. William
, the Court introduced the doctrine of “inevitable discovery,” which states that if the police find evidence during an illegal search that they would likely have found if they had conducted the search legally, the Exclusionary Rule doesn’t apply.
¹⁴

Prior to these rulings, as previously noted, there were still plenty of forced-entry raids into private residences in the name of the drug war. There had already been a number of wrong-door raids and a handful of resulting fatalities. But there were still some checks in place to prevent violent raids from becoming an everyday occurrence and to induce drug cops to work carefully and avoid shortcuts. The Exclusionary Rule was the biggest and most important of these checks. If police didn’t follow the proper procedures before breaking into a house, they risked losing any evidence they might find and wasting the time and effort they’d spent conducting the investigation. It was a significant disincentive—and the Court’s 1983 and 1984 decisions cleaved much of it away.

B
ECAUSE
1984
WAS AN ELECTION YEAR, IT WOULD NEED TO
have an omnibus crime bill of its own. Polls showed that crime was the most pressing domestic issue with the public, so everyone
running for reelection needed something to tout on the campaign trail. At this point, there wasn’t any real debate about crime policy. It was really only about which party could come up with the most creative ways to empower cops and prosecutors, strip suspects of their rights, and show they were more committed to the battle than their opponents were. The most significant provision in the newest crime bill again dealt with asset forfeiture. The new proposal was to let law enforcement agencies involved with federal drug investigations share in any asset forfeiture proceeds that the case might produce. Previously, forfeiture revenues went toward general operations. Under the new law, the Justice Department would set up a fund with the cash and auction proceeds from its investigations. After the lead federal agency took its cut, any state or local police agencies that had helped out would also get a share.

The measure was considered uncontroversial at the time, but it is difficult to overstate the effect it would have on drug policing over the next thirty years. With drug investigations now a potential source of revenue for police departments, everything would change.

The law’s impact was immediate. After it passed, for example, the CAMP raids and those like them in other parts of the country were no longer just about putting on a good show and terrorizing the counterculture. Now the raids could generate revenue for all of the police agencies involved. The DEA’s Ruzzamenti was rather frank about it in an interview with Ray Raphael for his 1985 book on the CAMP program,
Cash Crop
. “The biggest focus of what we’re doing is going to be on land seizures,” Ruzzamenti said. “Anybody who is growing marijuana on their land, we’re going to take their land. It’s as simple as that. It’s done civilly through the federal system. Basically, people have to prove that they weren’t involved and didn’t know about it. Just the act of having marijuana grown on your land is enough to tie it up; then you have to turn around and prove you’re innocent. It reverses the burden of proof.”
¹⁵

Some people in northern California owned thousands of acres of land, much of it densely forested. Growers were also known to set up operations on someone else’s land, without the owner’s permission.
If the feds started a forfeiture process, the owner was then in the difficult position of having to prove his innocence. Even then, federal prosecutors could argue that he should have been more vigilant about policing his property for pot plants. Some landowners faced the loss of hundreds of acres of property over a few dozen marijuana plants grown in an area the size of a backyard garden. Because it was much easier to win land through civil forfeiture than to win a conviction in criminal court, federal prosecutors often offered to drop the criminal charges if the landowners agreed to hand their property over to the federal government.

Those sorts of offers exposed just how fraudulent the government’s justification for its terror tactics really were. Allegedly, these pot growers were the dregs of humanity, greedily poisoning America’s children with their sinister harvest. They were dangerous enough that the government had to send virtual armies to occupy entire towns, buzz homes and chase children with helicopters, set up roadblocks to search cars at gunpoint, and strip suspects and innocents alike of their Fourth Amendment rights. These growers were
that
dangerous. However, if they were willing to hand over their land, the government was more than happy to let them go free.

Because of the new forfeiture law, police agencies now had a strong incentive to “find” a connection between valuable property and drug activity, even if there was none. They now had an incentive to conduct drug busts inside homes when the suspects could just as easily—and more safely—have been apprehended outside the house. They now had a strong financial incentive to make drug policing a higher priority and to devote more personnel to drug investigations than to investigating other crimes. Closing a rape or murder case didn’t come with a potential kickback to the police department. Knocking off a mid- or low-level drug dealer did. Most perversely of all, the promise of a financial reward actually provided drug cops with an incentive to wait until drugs had already been sold to move in with searches and arrests. A suspect flush with pot or cocaine didn’t offer much forfeiture potential. If they waited to bust him until he’d sold most or all of his supply, the police department got to
keep the cash. Subsequent media and academic investigations would bear this out, finding examples of police waiting to bust stash houses until most of their supply had been sold, or of being far more likely to pull over suspected drug-running vehicles in the lanes leading
out
from large metropolitan areas (when they were likely to be full of cash) than the lanes leading in (when they were more likely to be filled with drugs).

Over the next twenty years, many states would attempt to correct these incentive problems by requiring that any money earned from drug forfeitures be given to a general fund or to a schools fund instead of going back to the police. But under a provision in the federal law called
equitable sharing
(also known as
adoption
), all that a state or local police agency looking at a potentially lucrative forfeiture case needed to do was call up the DEA to assist in their investigation. Even cursory involvement from a federal agency made the investigation federal, and subject to federal law. Whatever laws the state legislature tried to pass to curb abuses no longer applied. The federal government then took its cut and gave the rest of the proceeds (sometimes as much as 80 percent) back to the local police agency.