Wiretap Worries

The Los Angeles Police Department’s dogged wiretapping of a small cellular telephone company in Downey deserves scrutiny. Questions rightly have been raised about how investigators request wiretaps. Equally important are the issues of piling additional requests onto an original tap and how well and how often cases are monitored to determine whether they are bearing fruit.

Just what is the basis for seemingly endless extensions of wiretaps, especially when the police work in the Downey case, as an example, continued for months without producing enough evidence to arrest the original target?

The answers must come from police detectives, the county district attorney and the judges who grant the wiretap requests and sometimes extend the taps for months and even years.

Atel Cellular and Paging in Downey is the company involved. Its manager was believed by police to have been in cahoots with drug dealers through the sale of secure cellular phones that could not be monitored by authorities. Eventually, this wiretap investigation extended to three years, becoming Los Angeles County’s largest ever and covering almost 400 telephone numbers and thousands of intercepted conversations.

Wiretaps always were intended to be an investigative tool of last resort, not a carpet-beating operation to see what turns up in the dust. Atel’s management members were never arrested, though several dozen customers were charged.

The surveillance approach was shaky, such as the assumption that men dressed in floral shirts, pressed denims and cowboy boots were likely to be involved in the drug trade.

Judges granted 19 extensions of the original May 1996 wiretap order, raising the question of whether the threshold for such investigations has become entirely too low, inviting the monitoring of thousands of innocent telephone calls in the future.

It’s not reassuring to note that the D.A.’s office routinely handed off wiretap evidence to other investigations without notifying trial defendants in at least 58 cases that they had been tapped. This bears some explaining. County residents can be expected to worry about whether strong cases are being pursued here or just electronic fishing expeditions.