The New York Police Department has been sending undercover officers to find addicts, ask them for help buying drugs, then, when they hand the contraband over, arrest them on felony drug-dealing charges. It’s easier to set a user up to be charged with drug dealing than to charge a dealer.
The New York Times reports the cases of a 55-year-old crack addict and a 21-year-old heroin addict, neither of whom had the money to purchase drugs for themselves:
Each was approached by someone who asked the addict for help buying drugs. Using the stranger’s money, each addict went to see a nearby dealer, returned with drugs, handed them over and was promptly arrested on felony drug-dealing charges. The people who had asked for drugs were undercover narcotics officers with the New York Police Department.
A review of the trials in those cases and two others illuminates what appears to be a tactic for small-scale drug prosecutions: An undercover officer, supplying the cash for the deal, asks an addict to go and buy $20 or $40 worth of crack or heroin. When the addict — perhaps hoping for a chance to smoke or inject a pinch — does so, he is arrested.
In the cases above, one undercover officer pretended to be on the verge of withdrawal; the other let the target, who didn’t have a phone, use his cell phone to contact the (actual) dealer. At no point did any of the officers involved try to pursue the source of the drugs.
The 55-year-old man, identified as Reginald J., went on the record about his experience.
“For him to put the money in my hands, as an addict, let me tell you what happens,” he said. “I like to think I could resist it, but I’m way beyond that. My experience has shown me that 1,000 times out of 1,000 times, I will be defeated.”
The 21-year-old, Bryan L., also spoke with the Times and relayed a truly shady scenario. There were nine officers involved in his arrest; he was charged with dealing drugs near a school because one was nearby the location to which he walked to secure drugs for the undercover officer.
[When arrested] [h]e had less than a dollar in change with him and no drugs, a police officer later testified. After the arrest, officers logged the dozens of possessions, including toothpaste, winter hats and stuffed animals, that Bryan L. carried in his two canvas bags.
His lawyer, Sam Roberts of the Legal Aid Society, asked Detective David Guevara, an investigator working on the case, whether any officers of the nine-member field team on the case followed Bryan L. to see where he bought the drugs. The answer was no.
Fortunately, at least in the four cases reviewed by the Times, jurors found these tactics problematic.
Jurors and a judge expressed skepticism in the four cases. One juror, Seth Silverman, wrote a letter to prosecutors after the trial of Mr. Coward in December, saying he felt it was “approaching absurd that you would use the awesome power of your office to represent the people of New York County, along with it and the court’s limited resources, on such a marginal case.”
Since December, juries and judges in Manhattan have acquitted men of the main charge in three of the cases and deadlocked in the trial of a fourth. In each episode, an undercover investigator had approached men, largely at random, at locations where the police believed drug dealing was occurring.
Acquittal in the most egregious of cases is far from a solution. Especially for the defendants. Although Bryan L. was acquitted in less than an hour, the six days it took to conclude the trial cost him his job. Then consider the resources squandered, the rights trampled, and the trust destroyed.
Yet the NYPD is standing by its tactics, and the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted three of the four cases, said only that some addicts who pleaded guilty to dealing are “steered toward treatment instead of prison.” That’s beside the point. Why are prosecutors going along with these tactics and charging the victims of these buy-and-bust schemes with dealing to begin with?