New Haven Independent

That cop gets caught. So do a bunch of people working in the narc unit, including Billy White. The feds accuse them of stealing drug suspects’ money and of taking bribes. It turns into a continuing scandal that focuses attention on the way New Haven goes about fighting drugs — and what should be changed. Including the question: Does having a narcotics unit at all even make sense?

The feds brought more charges last week against members of the department’s disgraced narcotics unit. Additional arrests are expected soon.

Meanwhile, the city temporarily disbanded the narcotics unit but is now reconstituting it. Under recommendations from a panel of experts, the department plans to limit members to four-year tours of duty in the unit, perform spot checks on their performance, scrutinize their financial backgrounds, keep tabs on confidential informants.

In between the scandals of 1970s and 2007, the “War on Drugs” failed to shut down New Haven’s narcotics trade. But the cops racking up the arrests continued racking up controversy. At times they racked up the most overtime in the department, to the tune of six figures. Prisons filled with young, mostly black and Latino males. A separate FBI report concluded that a city cop who busted dealers was actually working in cahoots with their boss and framing them for crimes. (Click here to read that sordid tale.)

You could blame the individual cops. You could, as the experts and city leaders are also doing, blame a system with inadequate safeguards. Or you could think of a new way to combat drugs rather than spending millions on chasing down street dealers and locking them up.

A Call To Disband

One member of PERF (Police Executive Research Forum), the panel of experts the city hired to recommend changes in the wake of the most recent corruption scandal, did just that. He came up with a minority opinion — that the narcotics unit should remain dead, never to rise again.

This expert is no cop-hater or citizen crusader. He is a former New York City narcotics cop and second-tier police chief in Hartford and Providence, named Andrew Rosenzweig. He published his minority opinion as an op-ed in the New Haven Register.

In it, he argued that the very existence of a narcotics squad inevitably leads to corruption, because a drug “war” that treats addiction primarily as a criminal problem, not a health care problem, cannot be won.

Instead, Rosenzweig argued, narcotics squads rack up arrests, clog the courts and jails, while the streets remain just as dangerous — or even more so, as cops collude with their informants, sow paranoia, or merely drain public resources that could be better spent investigating and arresting violent criminals. (Or, perhaps, assigning more neighborhood cops to walking or biking beats?)

“To be effective, narcotics investigators often shave the corners of the Constitution, state laws, and their own departmental procedures,” Rosenzweig wrote. Click here to read his full piece.

Political Reality

The Independent put Rosenzweig’s argument, and the larger question of how to address drug crime, to New Haven police-watchers who have participated in cases or debates growing out of the ongoing scandals. Rosenzweig’s argument struck a chord in some cases. Defense attorney Michael Jefferson, for instance, embraced the call to disband the unit (or at least refocus it on suburban drug-suppliers). Green Party mayoral candidate Ralph Ferrucci embraced the idea at a recent debate, too.

But even drug-war opponents like defense attorneys Diane Polan and Norm Pattis hesitated to endorse Rosenzweig’s call. As long as society is criminalizing drugs, they argued, a narcotics unit — albeit one with stronger oversight — might make sense, they argued.

And political reality may preclude Rosenzweig’s ideas — or examinations of how the city polices the narcotics trade in the long term — from going too far at this stage in New Haven’s wrestling match with drugs and cop corruption. Democratic Mayor John DeStefano and his Republican opponent, Rick Elser, both called the narcotics unit’s work necessary at their debate with Ferrucci. One of the most influential voices expressing the black community’s impatience with the police, Minister Donald Morris, called for more, not less, street-level enforcement of drug laws.

Following are excerpts of conversations with some of those police-watchers.

Norman Pattis
The civil-rights lawyer has represented people arrested on drug charges or accusing the cops of mistreatment for decades.

There is a lot of easy money around. I suspect it is inevitable that some cops will put their hands out to take some. It is a common complaint by people charged with these crimes that they had x thousand dollars on them: When they got to the station, x thousand disappeared. The cop’s going to deny it. The kid’s going to say it happened. Who’s the judge going to believe?

Federal oversight is probably necessary. If you’re going to enforce narcotics laws, I think it makes sense to have a narcotics unit. But I think you need to rotate the leadership or have federal oversight so things don’t get too clubby. It was like Animal House under Billy White

Minister Donald Morris
Morris runs the Christian Community Commission, through which he runs Brotherhood Leadership Summits and leads anti-crime rallies in city neighborhoods.
Certainly narcotics is one of the biggest problems we have in the city. If you eliminate the narcotics unit, it’d be open season with drugs coming into the city. The drug dealers need to know there’s a narc squad.
Billy White no doubt did an injustice to that whole department. However, the narcotics unit plays a very important role. I don’t agree with that recommendation [to disband it permanently].

Ed Mattison
As an East Rock alderman, Mattison (at left in photo) deals with neighborhood complaints about drug crime. He also runs the Regional Association of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Programs.

I have been very interested in the New Haven police department’s approach to drugs from the beginning. I used to meet with Billy White to talk about this occasionally. My point was that you needed to have some notion of where you were going and how to get there. You needed a strategy.
He gave me his cell phone. He said, “Call me and I’ll be right out.” And he was right out.
But that wasn’t a strategy. What can we accomplish with the resources we have? And what do we get with it?
For a while they wanted to eliminate open-air drug marts. And they did that. They concentrated their resources. They didn’t try to win the war on drugs. They just tried to make neighborhoods not as awful as they were.
I don’t entirely agree with the notion that you should stay away from trying to deal with drugs [through arrests]. It just seems to me you should figure out what are the things you could do.
In the neighborhood I represent, there are several drug houses where people buy drugs and smoke cocaine on the premises. My strategy is, I’m going to get rid of those places. I’m going to try to make it painful enough for those folks so they don’t try to open another one. I constantly talk to the police about those particular places. Most of those places are gone. They haven’t been replaced.
It isn’t that there aren’t drug deals. What we have now are people using cell phones and agreeing to meet cars. I have seen t hose transactions take place. Those things, though I don’t like them either, do the neighborhoods much less harm than locations where known drug deals take place, which make a statement that we have no control over our neighborhoods.
So I don’t want them to do random drug raids anymore. That’s pointless. But they should develop with the citizens of the neighborhoods a strategy, and it should be carried out.
One of the things that lead to corruption, they were secretive. I would complain about something, like a drug house. Billy White would say, “Of course we have that in our radar screen. We’re getting some place.” But he’d never tell you anything. I don’t think that works. You don’t necessarily believe him. Even worse, it does give rise to the perception that they have their own agenda. Which they do.
In some respects what we’re talking about is harm reduction. When you have needle exchanges, with respect to public health, you say: What are the bad things that drugs do to a neighborhood? And you try to deal with those things. But you don’t have wildly unrealistic expectations that you can eliminate drug use.

Diane Polan
The New Haven civil-rights attorney has for years represented people who charge the police with misconduct, including a current case involving Justen Kaspzerzyk, a target of the FBI’s corruption probe.

I don’t think [the existence of a narcotics unit] is what this corruption is about. Whether these narcotics units inevitably breed corruption, I just don’t know.
The war on drugs is only going to be won when we decriminalize them. Who is going to get shot when there is no money to be made?
I just don’t know if we should disband the narcotics unit. I do think the answer to the war on drugs lies elsewhere… We’re not dealing with addiction. We’re just feeding these violent drug gangs.

Michael Jefferson
The civil-rights attorney helped organize a Dixwell neighborhood community meeting this spring about the corruption scandal. He also represented one of the man arrested for murder by the former cop targeted by an earlier FBI investigation into drug-related corruption on the force.

I do think from a criminal defense perspective that the narcotics unit should be disbanded. It certainly breeds corruption. The whole point of it is to make arrests. Those who make arrests tend to do so I think … to place more feathers in their cap, which leads to promotions. That could very easily encourage corruption.
But I think it extends beyond this War on Drugs. The thing I ‘d like to see is a greater emphasis on the high-level drug pushers, the ones who bring the stuff into the country, into the state, into the region. I’m trying to figure out why, given the vast network of informants, this hasn’t been a target of the narcotics unit.
If one wants to argue to keep the narcotics unit, then that narcotics unit should not be targeting low-level drug dealers, who often tend to be black, Latino, poor, and from inner-city neighborhoods. They should go after those who seemingly are protected, unseen, and quite possibly those who live in the suburbs.
I can’t possibly believe that they don’t know about the existence of these individuals. Very rarely do we hear about these operations targeting high-level drug dealers. The “drug dealer” in the mind of the American public is the young black male.
If you’re going to have a narcotics unit, send them to deal with the big boys. Let’s face it: It’s easy to target young, poor black males in these poor communities. It’s just an easy target.

Jeffrey Meyer
“The Quinnipiac law professor and former prosecutor co-chairs a citizen review panel overseeing PERF’s work in New Haven.

I think on the substance I have some concerns about [Ronsezweig’s] view. I guess I’m not quite as defeatist about the prospects of a successful anti-drug unit. I certainly believe that treatment and alternative forms of intervention are very important, especially at the user level. When it comes to the dealers, however, many of whom are not users, it cuts both ways.

At the structural level, I don’t know that his op-ed adequately accounts for PERF’s specific recommendations for safeguards. The PERF report doesn’t simply suggest that now we’ve gotten rid of Billy White, let’s bring in a bunch of new cowboys. The PERF report goes into some detail [about quality controls, rotating narcotics unit members, financial disclosures, credit checks, systemic supervisory reviews, spot audits].
Obviously one of the issues in drug cases is the extreme reliance on confidential informants. With my background as a prosecutor, I have a healthy distrust of informants because of general reliability issues, because of the self-interest involved — people dealing on one hand, and using the police essentially as tools for expanding their own operation. That’s why it’s important to have safeguards in terms of informant registration and supervisory review, so that you avoid the situation of a single detective in the unit developing this kind of secret relationship with one informant who’s not known by anybody else, and the detective and the informant go crooked.

Clifford Thornton
Thornton ran for governor as a Green in 2006, largely on an anti-drug war platform.

Every day somewhere in this country there is a story about a corrupt cop or politician that involves illegal drugs. Now the entire police department of New Haven is at risk of illegal drug
transactions.
Until these drugs are brought within the law, New Haven as well as the rest of the country will keep reciting Forest Gump’s saying: “Stupid is as Stupid does.”