Drug Sweeps, Continued...
...by Mark Drake
Just as the Fall newsletter was coming off the press early last November, news arrived describing the Highway Patrol's first Highway 101 drug interdiction program for the '97 - '98 season. It took place for a few days in late October at the north end of Sonoma County, and according to reporter Mary Callahan of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, was conducted by a "special enforcement unit sent from the Bay Area for the job."
The spokespeople for the sweep still exhibited the CHP's characteristic skittishness about acknowledging outright the purpose of the operation; the team supervisor said that the primary mission of the operation was vehicle code enforcement, but that the timing of the visit reflected their "secondary reason" -- drug interdiction. The CHP's Santa Rosa office spokesman called it "a successful traffic operation," and said the drug interdiction was an important byproduct of an operation aimed mainly at slowing traffic and making the highway safer, adding, "That has been kind of a high accident picture up in the north."
Well, no figures were forthcoming concerning the highway carnage rate along this freeway section between Healdsburg and Cloverdale, but for the record here are the best numbers we do have for this operation -- along with the unnamed 1993 experiment in the Laytonville-southern Humboldt area, and 1996's Operation North Coast for comparison (the CHP still maintains -- with a straight face -- that they didn't keep any records on 1995's "Operation Harvest Sweep"):
'93 '96 '97
Duration 5 days 5 weeks 5 days
Personnel 10 12 14
Dogs 4 1 6
Stops 534 "est. 1000"* about 950
Searches ? ? 95
Warnings 300 ? 300+
Citations 206 246 90
Drug-related Arrests 19 125 "about 70"
DUI's 9 12 ?
Marijuana Seized ? 224# 28#
*CHP "estimate": CLMP suspects from the other figures associated with that operation that the true number of stops was about 2000.
Notes:
1. The ratio of dogs to people was about the same for this year's "road safety" program as for '93's, and far higher than for last year's drug sweep. But then again, perhaps these dogs have been specially trained to "alert" to bad driving.
2. This year's team made nearly twice as many stops but issued fewer than half as many tickets as the '93 crew. This may reflect a P.R. backlash from the previous practice of writing bogus tickets to cover pretext stops.
3. When they started in '93, they took care to report the numbers of citations, warnings, and arrests so as to tote up to the exact number of stops. Now they're not embarrassed to report making a large fraction of stops -- ostensibly for safety, remember -- which didn't even warrant a "warning." For all that, it's striking that in marked contrast to previous years, CLMP has had only two complaints from people stopped, and the Sonoma ACLU chapter had not received any. So however many people are being stopped, they nearly all seem to have gotten used to the idea.
4. Though it certainly makes intuitive sense that using northern Sonoma County as a choke point -- south of all the feeder roads -- should do a better job of intercepting northcoast produce, the seizure yield of the recent operation per vehicle stopped was remarkably low -- even accepting CLMP's estimate of the actual number of stops in the unimpressive '95 operation, rather than the CHP's. Maybe the profiles these Bay Area people use for pretext stops are less apropos than the ones our local officers have developed.
For perspective on the cost-effectiveness of this operation, factor in this "Routine Stops" brief from the January issue of the "California Highway Patrolman" magazine: "As Officer Todd Overzett...was watching, a Nissan Sentra crashed into the rear of a pickup while both vehicles were traveling east on SR-91 in Cerritos...As the officer inspected the damage to both vehicles, he noticed a large blue, partially opened cooler sitting in the rear seat of the Nissan. A closer look into the opening revealed a number of unwrapped 'bricks' of marijuana." They recovered 46 such bricks, one of which is shown with a ruler across it, measuring 10 inches long.
So though they don't give a total weight, we know that this officer had to have confiscated more weed by investigating a single, random accident than his 14 colleagues with their 6 dogs could uncover in stopping about a thousand people they had the advantage of having selected for this attention.
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