‘Operation Any Booking’ just business as usual

A recent investigation by the Los Angles Times uncovered an organized contest among deputies in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to see who could arrest the most people in a series of 24-hour periods. In response to negative media coverage, the Sheriff’s Department has said it will end the game. But although they may end this particular competition, deputies will still face institutional pressure to boost arrest numbers. This is especially the case when it comes to drug law enforcement.

For more than 30 years, policymakers have used two very simple criteria for judging the effectiveness of law enforcement agencies in fighting the war on drugs: how many people have they arrested and how much drugs have they seized? Yet arrests and seizures have little if any effect on drug availability or the problems associated with substance abuse. Furthermore, measuring success by these statistics can breed corruption and impropriety.

Because the amount of funding many narcotics task forces receive is often based in part on how many people they arrest and the amount of drugs they seize, individual officers can advance their careers significantly by making a large number of arrests, even if they are just drug users. This incentive structure often leads to fabricating informants, raiding homes on false evidence, lying to judges and planting evidence. Remember L.A.’s notorious Rampart scandal? Among other corrupt acts, officers planted evidence and lied in court to boost conviction rates.

Even when police officers play by the book, grading them by arrests and seizures is a recipe for failure. The easiest way to boost their numbers is to arrest low-level offenders - from people smoking marijuana on the street corner to drug mules and the homeless. These arrests pad the official reports, but do nothing to stop major traffickers or reduce the problems associated with substance abuse.

It is time for a new bottom line. Law enforcement agencies should be graded on their ability to break up crime networks and apprehend violent offenders. Arrests and seizures should be strategies for achieving these goals, not measurement criteria to judge success or failure. As a recent book by the American Enterprise Institute called “An Analytic Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy” explains:

This pragmatic approach is taking root in Texas, where a series of scandals has spurred massive change. State narcotics officers are now judged less by arrests and more on how well they disrupt and dismantle dangerous crime organizations. Gathering intelligence and building connections take precedent over arresting low-level offenders. Drug arrests have fallen by more than 40% in the last year, but drug seizures have more than doubled.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department needs to do more than just ban childish arrest competitions by its deputies. It needs to ensure that officers are under no pressure - officially or unofficially - to meet arrest quotas. The Sheriff’s Department should also reorder its narcotics units to focus on violent crime, not nonviolent drug law offenses. Most important, L.A. policymakers should stop depending on police to solve their city’s drug problems, and focus on increasing funding for treatment, prevention and harm-reduction approaches instead.

Bill Piper is director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance (www.drugpolicy.org), the leading organization advocating for alternatives to the war on drugs. Click here to read more about The Times’ Blowback feature.