Levi Pulkkinen reports:
Thirteen teens associated with Redmond High School are facing drug charges after a long-running undercover operation involving a police officer posing as a student.
In charging documents filed earlier this week in King County Juvenile Court, investigators describe the months-long operation that saw a Redmond police detective enroll in the high school and buy drugs from students there.
Enrolled as a senior in August 2009, the detective described herself as a transfer student who’d recently moved to Redmond from California. She attended classes, ate lunch at the school and lived as a high school student until 11 students were arrested in February.
According to charging documents, the undercover officer was able to buy a wide variety of illicit drugs at the suburban high school, including ecstasy, heroin and cocaine.
Investigations like these are upsetting to me on a number of levels. For starters, if there are 13 different students dealing drugs at your suburban high school, arresting those students will – at best – provide a short window of time where those drugs are hard to obtain. In other words, if there’s enough commerce going on that it requires 13 different drug dealers to satisfy the demand, other sellers will quickly fill that void.
That said, I don’t really believe that there were 13 separate drug dealers supplying the students of Redmond High with drugs. What often happens in investigations like this one is the following scenario:
The female undercover officer enrolls in the school with the intent to seek out the “dealers”. With a little effort, she’s able to locate students who are occasional drug users. She then approaches a 16-year-old boy who perhaps some other students have told her smokes pot. This kid isn’t a drug dealer, but he knows the people who are. The undercover officer approaches him about acquiring drugs, asking “hey, do you know where I can buy drugs?” The 16-year-old, who thinks this new girl from California is kind of cute and now thinks she also likes to smoke pot, wants to impress her and decides to be the middleman himself. He visits someone he knows he can get some drugs from, buys them and brings it to her. He’s now a potential felon.
Without knowing any of the details of the cases against these 13 young people, no one other than the accused themselves has any idea how many would fit the profile I gave, but I have trouble believing that this one undercover cop managed to bring down over a dozen truly dangerous drug dealers in a single high school. Yes, drugs are widespread in our high schools, whether they’re in the city or out in the wealthy suburbs. But for the student in the scenario I gave, while his parents should rightfully be upset that he’s able to find drugs in high school, getting arrested will be far more detrimental to his prospects in life than the drugs were.
As a parent myself, this weighs heavily on my mind. I’m not happy about the fact that it’s so easy to get drugs in our schools (and it’s the main reason why I fight for regulated sales of softer drugs like marijuana and ecstasy – so that they can be as hard to obtain as alcohol), but sending in undercover officers to entrap at-risk teenage boys is not the right solution. In fact, it generally ends up being more of a threat to young people than a benefit.
It was easy to get drugs in my middle class high school back in the 70’s as well.
The local police spent how much on this barely credible sting operation? Were any actual drug sources arrested? Of course not, that would be too much like work. Others will soon take the place of these kids.
The War On Drugs should be renamed the Full Employment Act For Lazy Police instead.
uptown and Goldy,
I’m with you. In my middle class high school in the late 70s you got the pot/drugs through people you knew who got it through people they knew. You’d have to go up a couple of levels at least before you got to anyone serious. Hell, at least half the people I knew who used would be a conduit at one time or another when they had a connection. This is so silly. As far as I can tell, the only thing that has changed is it was easier to get drugs in my son’s middle school than it was when I was a kid. In fact, I never heard of anyone selling even pot when I was in middle school. Still hard to get alcohol in middle school though.
I’m with you uptown: “The War On Drugs should be renamed the Full Employment Act For Lazy Police instead.”
legalize drugs. and education. also.
I appreciate your concern, Lee, but stuff like this is common in the black community where we have the ongoing “war on black people who happen to be around drugs”.
I betcha’ the Redmond community will be outraged by this and make it quite clear that sending undercover cops into the high school shall not be permitted in the future.
The public also unwillingly subsidized the undercover sting with hard to find education funds. That space in the classroom wasn’t free, those books cost money too and have a limited use life, and those teachers spent a good deal of time correcting that cop’s work and assessing that cops progress believing that was a real student.
BTW, the other lazy police employment act is the school drug dog searches. Each search cost is around $1000 and the ACLU says there is up to a 70% error rate (yes that is seventy). This is also where you find a job lifeline tossed to cops who are too toxic or in too much controversial trouble to work a real beat.
My experience with this sort of thing back in the early 80’s was the cop became obvious what he was doing by the middle of the second week he was there. He put a LOT of pressure out on people to find stuff from the first day he was at the school. Everyone knows the code words that are current, and the cop always seemed to be looking for “grass” and we called it “herb”. He was this nice clean cut pretty boy and we were all a bunch of metal geeks in leather and denim. He made sure he was hanging out with us, even though he didn’t know any of the current music or have a fucking clue about what was current for us in the world.
He was lured into the little hole in the hedge where everyone went to smoke and we publically outed him in front of everyone. He was gone in about 10 minuites.
Now, within about a month after that, we were repeatedly brought in for questioning, all us longhair types, one at a time, about a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood surrounding the school. They kept us from contacting out parents, and made sure that it was our little group that were the primary suspects in this string of burglaries that went on for about four months. Making sure that everyone in the school “knew” it was us. The teachers and the administrators etc. WE were under a hell of a lot of scrutiny and real pressure to “come clean”. I was visited at my work, and my friends were harassed just walking down the street.
When the cops finally caught the dudes that were doing it, it turned out to be a few of the basketball and football players who were everyones heroes, and they never were even suspected at all. Rich silicon valley kids. Supporting their coke habits, and that $100 a week allowance wasn’t enough to support it for them.
The two that were caught in the act, sang like little birdies, and they were questioned about OUR involvement, even though we had nothing to do with it whatsoever. For 2 years after we graduated, it was a regular thing for Sgt. Banks or one of his psycho buddies to pull up on us and ask us what crimes we’d been up to lately. Accusing us directly of all kinds of crap.
I will never trust cops, ever. They will flat out lie to make that bust. Every single time. Banks eventually got popped with a throwdown piece after he and one of his cop buddies beat hell out of some kid they caught with beer and got a little smart with them. It took the FBI watching him and his pals two years to finally catch that crooked fuck.
@6
At our high school, there were always discussions about whether some new kid was really a narc. Apparently, it had been common practice to do that in years past (in the “just say no” era). I started high school in 1989.
Sadly, there was one kid who moved into our district who had the misfortune of looking way older than he really was. He had a lot of trouble making friends because everyone assumed he was a narc. Eventually, people figured out he wasn’t (and I just saw his Facebook profile pop up a few weeks ago in my recommended list). He still looks older than he really is.
It was easy to get pot in my suburban high school in the mid-80’s. Booze was a lot harder to come by.
We had an alternative high school where all the druggies went. At least that was the stereo type, you had to take a drug test to go there. The reality was that the the alt school was the drug free one.
Stings of any sort are problematic because they use deception. The level of deception can be adjusted up or down to get the desired result, as illustrated by the hypothetical example outlined by Lee.
There was an actual case remarkably similar to Lee’s scenario, except that it wasn’t at a high school. It happend a few years ago in Okanagan County. PI story here . A twist in this case was that the cutie narc (paid informant, not a cop) turned out to be HIV positive. Oops.
If used at all, stings should be tightly controlled and only targeted at people already under suspicion. Randomly targeted stings (such as what SPD used to do at Rick’s) are essentially an investigation of a non-suspected person, and should be unconstitional under the 4th Amendment, IMO.
That’s a shitload of public money invested … for what? A dozen juvenile charges? At least $50,000 just for half a year of one cop’s salary and benefits. (How cute is she?) It would have been better spent going after the burglaries and other crimes that people commit to buy drugs with.
This is a great, insightful set of comments.
I saw something similar, although funnier, in Sweden about twenty years ago. At that time the Social Democrats were in perpetual power. The government had infiltrated most local activities, including the University, with undercover Party members, called “polikuts.”
Being Sweden, these polikuts were not dangerous; after all “Swedes are nice.” Everyone else, esp. the “radicals” knew who the Polikuts were. I think the Polikuts knew this too but they played the game too.
Are US polikuts, undercover narcs, equally humorous or are they the real danger Lee sees? Does their presence undermine education?
I have a question for you young uns. Is this just a game here too? Leaving aside Lee’s usual concern for potheads, are there enough dangerous drugs in our schools to justify this sort of thing?
Hmmm …
how many polikuts and narcs lurk at HA?
Don’t buy any shit from Lee here!
I saw the same sort of entrapment happen when I was a civilian working for the military overseas. CID popped one guy, then entrapped a bunch of his peers in the following way: the first soldier arrested would approach one of his peers and ask him to take some dope down to another guy; among the instructions was the information that the errand runner could keep some of the money. The person receiving the dope was a CID agent.
One day, the CID agent showed up and walked through the ranks picking out the soldiers who were ‘pushers’. It decimated one Pershing missile battery. To the best of my knowledge, it didn’t happen again in Schwabish Gmund because commanders pressured CID to stop.
@13
Exactly, they use the word “pusher” to describe what should more accurately be called “person willing to be a middleman in an illegal transaction”.
How is this any different than the Fauxies sending their pimp to an ACORN site?
Do you object to the method or just to its use in re drugs?
As I understand it, plagiarism is also wide spread in today’s schools. How would you fee about a similar form of entrapment intended to discourage that?
This is a very worthwhile discussion!
@15,
it’s different because this time the authorities were targeting affluent suburban Caucasians for persecution. That’s always wrong.
I wonder if any of these 16 arrests led to other arrests higher up the “food chain”? Is there any reporting on this?
Also,
I see where you are going here, but I disagree in this regard. Will the void be filled? Probably. Will the illegal activity move off campus? I think there is a higher probability of this after 16 peers are cuffed and walked off the school, and put in detention. At least there is less illicit activity happening on campus…
@17
I wonder if any of these 16 arrests led to other arrests higher up the “food chain”? Is there any reporting on this?
Not that I’ve seen. If you see anything, please feel free to send it to me.
I see where you are going here, but I disagree in this regard. Will the void be filled? Probably. Will the illegal activity move off campus? I think there is a higher probability of this after 16 peers are cuffed and walked off the school, and put in detention. At least there is less illicit activity happening on campus…
That’s a good point. It’s very likely that it would move off-campus and perhaps not be done so blatantly in front of the other students. It’s also likely that the students themselves will just become far more conscious of the possibility that a student they don’t know very well is a narc (a lot of comments above discussed this phenomenon).
I’ve often used the term “shooting fish in a barrel” when describing these types of operations. And I don’t believe that this undercover officer managed to remove every student in this school willing to sell a bag of weed to another student. It’s possible that those students will just be far more cautious about doing so in the future.
Pot Eventually Will Win
Post-election analysis shows marijuana legalization lost in California because 66% of senior citizens voted against it. After these voters die off, it’ll pass.
Mike Love of The Beach Boys was asked if he started playing music to attract girls. His response: “Why else does any 17-year-old boy do anything?”
I think that your “cute California girl” explanation is the best one.
Like any other drug operation, you need a score card to tell the cops from the criminals.
I just finished 4 recent books on the Narco-controlled government of Mexico. I now see that narcotics are nothing more than an endless sea of money and that nothing is going to stop it.