This weekend, HBO’s The Wire kicks off its final season. After living in relative obscurity throughout much of its run, the show is finally getting a lot of attention for telling amazing true-to-life stories from the inner-city that have long gone untold. The show’s material is based on the experiences of its two creators, former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon and former Baltimore PD Detective and public school teacher Ed Burns. As one of those who found out about this show too long after it began, I’m still catching up on the last few seasons. While the show deals with various aspects of inner-city life, the drug war and its downstream effects are everywhere, demonstrating in full detail the damage being done by a policy that far too many Americans have been fully content to ignore. The final season will focus on the role of the media, and how it fails to tell this story.
Last weekend, I posted a response to a column from the Longview Daily News, written by editor Cal Fitzsimmons. The column was describing a case from rural Cowlitz County where a confidential informant, 40-year-old Tina Rivard, tricked federal drug agents into arresting a man, 21-year-old Bo Jeremy Storedahl of Kelso, on felony drug trafficking charges. The original article on the Longview Daily News site is no longer there, but the Seattle Times article on the case is still up (and another article from The Daily News Online is here).
According to Mike Carter’s account in the Times, Rivard was first arrested in May for forging prescriptions. In return for leniency, she agreed to become a confidential informant (or “snitch”) in order to help build cases against others involved in dealing prescription drugs. After successfully helping to convict one person, she helped the police nab Storedahl, a 21-year-old with no criminal record. She did this in part by tricking the drug agents who were listening in to her calls by quickly re-dialing a different person (her husband) and convincing the agents that they were listening to Storedahl when in fact they weren’t. After Rivard managed to carry the charade further and stage a drug buy at Storedahl’s house, the young man was arrested and charged with a five-count felony indictment. Now that Rivard has admitted to what she did and plead guilty, she faces up to 20 years in jail, while Storedahl was only charged with misdemeanor drug possession for the four pills he had in his pocket when he was arrested.
I initially took issue with Fitzsimmons’ column because despite the tremendous example he had right in front of him that the use of confidential informants can be fraught with problems, he brushed all of that off in order to reassure his readers that snitches are good. There was no desire to explore the world of confidential informants, to look into the role they’ve played in our prison overcrowding problems, or to look at the larger issue of why these drug war tactics are failing – both in large cities and small towns – to actually prevent people from using drugs, while also undermining the level of trust in law enforcement. A few days after my post went up, an interesting comment appeared:
Hey, sometimes it pays to Google your name. I suppose I could complain about your reprinting my column here, though in chunks, but I won’t.
I won’t even engage in an argument about snitches. (Love ’em). But I would suggest you lighten up. Cheers.
Cal | 01.02.08 – 4:45 pm
I wasn’t sure what was more amusing, the fact that the editor of a newspaper had such a poor understanding of Fair Use in the internet age, or that I was being told to lighten up by someone who still fervently believes that we’re achieving something by sending as many people to jail as we can for drug offenses. A second comment, however, was even more interesting:
FYI – Your assumptions about this case are largely wrong. Bo plead because he confessed to the crime and there were other witnesses willing to testify they bought dope from him (without any compensation by LE). Tina wasn’t simply forging prescritions, she was entrenched in the sale/distribution network. You can spin this however you want but you can’t change the facts – Bo was dealing – Tina was dealing – both faced a judge for their behavior. That’s the way its supposed to work.
KT | 01.02.08 – 6:40 pm
KT’s comment was directed at me, but his/her opinion was that I was getting some facts wrong both by accepting what Fitzsimmons had written about this case and through a couple of assumptions I made myself. At this point, I have no way of knowing who’s telling the truth (KT declined to leave any contact info), but some of what he/she says actually makes a bit of sense: if Rivard was just some lone addict forging prescriptions to get her pills, it wouldn’t make much sense to make her an informant. She was likely involved in some larger network of people forging prescriptions and selling oxycodone tablets.
As for Fitzsimmons, his belief that this case represents some grand departure from the normal use of confidential informants has no basis in reality. This outcome is often what happens when people snitch in order to get more lenient treatment. In theory, it’s supposed to yield some kingpin, but that’s rarely what actually happens. What often happens is that the informant rolls over on some easy target like Storedahl. The story here is not that this case is an aberration, it’s that messes like these have become commonplace.
As for Storedahl, commenter KT is not the only person who believes that he wasn’t just some random innocent target, but was just as involved in dealing prescription drugs as Rivard (see the comments at the end of the Daily News Online article). None of this is proof of anything, but it is interesting that Storedahl is a son of a local businessman. There are still a lot of questions in this case that have still gone unanswered. How did the Rivards know Storedahl and had access to his house? Was he a customer? A friend? Who was the first person sent to jail by Rivard and what were the circumstances of his arrest? Why was law enforcement using Rivard as a snitch even though with prescription drug fraud there’s not likely a “kingpin” to take down anyway? Is Rivard getting the book thrown at her because she really tricked the police or because she targeted the wrong person? It seems like the only thing I really know about this case is that the editor of the Longview Daily News wants to me to “lighten up” when it comes to my concerns over what can go wrong when confidential informants are used by law enforcement.
I can only guess at the plotlines in the upcoming season of The Wire, but I’ve gained a very clear picture of how the media has failed to tell us the bigger story behind the drug war. Whether we’re talking about inner-cities or small towns, heroin or OxyContin, young black men dealing on a street corner or wealthy white kids dealing out of their parents’ suburban house, newspapers across the country seem uninterested in doing anything more than parroting the view from law enforcement that the war is necessary, the victims deserve what they get, and the tactics should not be questioned. It’s time for someone to tell this story with the kind of honesty and insight that will finally break down the illusions that have been mistaken for reality for so many years.
The Wire is gritty and witty. I think some of their police portrayals are over the top though. It is similar to what happened in Philly growing up. Those of us who were city dwellers can attest to this. Burb boys have no relationship to that life.
I prefer Big Love, thank you.
Will Roman Grant get the UEB back? Will Barb come to fully accept Webber Gaming? Will Nickie ever sever her ties to her weird family? Will Marjeanne grow up? Will Lois be able to get a potload of dough when she divorces Frank (How? They havn’t been legally married long enough for Utah’s community property statute to give her an undivided 1/2 interest in much of anything).
My sons got me hooked on Entourage, too, but it’s too hip for the HA Happy Hooligans.
As for drug dealers, users, and the whole coterie? Whatever grief comes their way is deserved. I used to live in Longview, and my oldest daughter was born there. It was a great town with all the charm of small town living while the Portland metro area was just over an hour away.
My youngest daughter has a relationship with a guy who lives there, and by all accounts drugs and the drug culture, particularly meth, have done serious damage to the town such that the people who don’t use want the people who do locked up with the keys tossed into the Columbia River. Most crime is drug-related, and it’s increasing.
Longview/Kelso is still pretty much a forrest products community even though logging and the mills long ago passed their prime. The people there – not just cops and the media – are pretty self-reliant, and, while they certainly have their vices – alcoholism isn’t at all unknown – the modern ones, and those who engage in them, are loathed; there’s close to zero compassion for the plight of druggies of any stripe.
Whether it’s lock ’em up, run ’em out of town, or dump ’em in the digester, most folks in Cowliz county want users, abusers, and selling losers out of their town and lives.
The Piper
Fair Use has several definitions, one of which is:
“amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole”
When it comes to columns and their comments, citing short snippets is permissible, but reprinting the whole thing or the comments thereto can be seen as an infringement.
Whether that’s what happened here or not, I can’t say. But that’s generally the understanding of “Fair Use” in such a situation.
The Piper
Piper, I’ve made a New Years resolution to stay out of the comment threads, so this will be my only comment here. I’m not surprised that people are angry at meth heads, but for any addictive drug, it’s just impossible to prohibit the behavior. What you need to do with amphetamines, and with other drugs that people choose to take recreationally, is to regulate their production and sale to make sure they’re not as dangerous as they are right now (meth’s dangers are mostly the result of prohibition, as meth is just a variation of what John F. Kennedy took while President and what we’ve given to Air Force pilots). During alcohol prohibition, people drank some really dangerous forms of alcohol, and small towns certainly got annoyed at both the bootleggers and the fall-down drunks. When prohibition ended, people stopped drinking stuff made by criminals and started drinking Budweiser and all the other beers that are barely more than water. The same thing would happen with meth. They’d stop doing the shit that destroys their teeth and they’ll go back to using the stuff that Winston Churchill used.
I think some of their police portrayals are over the top though.
In what way? The techie stuff is definitely over the top.
Don’t get me wrong – I think The Wire is just about the greatest TV, Movie, Novel – anything – that’s ever been done!
#5: You really think the police talk that way in the precinct, in their cars or in the bars after work?
Lee, I am very sure the relatives of the dead in this bus crash will agree with your meth position.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/.....4620.story
“The driver of a Texas-bound charter bus from Chicago that was involved in a fatal crash in eastern Arkansas in November had amphetamines in his system, impairing his ability to safely operate the bus, prosecutors said Thursday.”
I wonder if Winston Churchill had an amphetamine abuse problem because of the attitude of the British people before WWII. Remember it was Chamberlain who allowed Czechoslovakia to be annexed to Hitler which improved Germany’s military production systems. Being a history buff Churchill said: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.”
Maybe that’s why he popped amphets because he saw the real enemy (Hitler) and not too many other Brits did at the time. But as we know now Churchill was right.
Here’s the link to the original story about Rivard/Storedahl: http://www.tdn.com/articles/20.....026726.txt