Operation Pipeline
...by Mark Drake
Issues of this newsletter for the past three years have carried reports on a series of evolving Highway Patrol drug-interdiction operations; some of them acknowledged by the CHP for what they were, and others masked as highway safety programs. We've had to do a lot of reading between the lines to figure out what was going on, partly because the funding and executing agencies don't want to blow their cover by describing what they're actually up to in enough detail to alert their targets to the tricks of the trade, and partly because the program - involving traffic stops and searches based on driver and vehicle profiles - is Constitutionally suspect (and was even more so when these operations began, before the last few eviscerations of the 4th Amendment by the Rehnquist court).
Now at last, the overall picture has emerged. When reporter Gary Webb was pressured out of his position with the San Jose Mercury News*, he took a job with the California legislature in an investigative capacity. Assigned to look into reports of CHP teams allegedly specializing in stopping and searching Latinos, he uncovered the framework for these programs across the nation and the origins of it all in the federal DEA's "Operation Pipeline".
He took the same training course that CHP candidates for this line of work take, and interviewed a number of instructors and acknowledged "experts" around the country, prepared his report for the legislature, and wrote an article which was published in the April '99 issue of Esquire magazine, under the title, "DWB" (for "Driving While Black").
(In the course of his investigation, he came across references to CLMP in CHP documents, so he took a drive up here to interview a couple of CLMP board members and take back a bundle of information from our files, including back newsletters.)
The Esquire article is very well worth reading for anyone to whom this subject is important. We won't attempt to recap it here; get hold of a copy. It seems very likely that the enormous increase in interest in DWB shown by the news media in the last month - and even (at last) by Attorney General Janet Reno's "Department of Justice" - owes as much to the publication of Webb's clear exposition as it does to the tedious groundwork which the ACLU in various states has been painstakingly grinding out for several years.
(The CLMP lst Wednesday program on KMUD for April was devoted to a discussion of the article and how it relates to our local experience; cassette copies are available from CLMP for $5.)
*Webb's unforgivable trespass at the paper was his "Dark Alliance" series, which described Nicaraguan Contra CIA "assets" who were raising money for their cause by distributing cocaine in the U.S.
But that was not the first time he had stepped on governmental toes: In 1993, a few weeks before California's draconian asset forfeiture law was due to "sunset" if not renewed, Webb published a series in the Mercury News disclosing real-life stories of the actual, abusive application of that law. Although the politics involved was complex, Webb"s expose (and its timing) was certainly a critical factor in causing that miserable law to die.
|
|
