Fish Scales

For most urban public defender offices, drug cases are a large part of the caseload. There are a million reasons why the war on drugs is probably one of the biggest wastes of time, but that's for a whole different post. This will just be a rant about Philadelphia narcotics investigations.

For the most part there are a bunch of different ways police conduct street level arrests of drug dealers. They can (1) use undercover officers buying drugs, (2) simply watch corners in the city, see if they find someone who appears to be selling drugs and arrest them, (3) use confidential informants to buy drugs from dealers, and on and on.

The problem with most of these types of investigations is that they almost always end up relying entirely on the word of the one police officer doing the surveillance; there is nothing to corroborate their testimony. And as history has shown us (Operation Sunrise in Philly, Street Crimes Unit in New York, Ramparts in LA and the guy in Tulia Texas) narcotics units are often where crooked cops end up (or are made crooked). As Chief Burrell (of "The Wire") noted, "In narcotics there are no virgins."

In Philly anyway, the police pretty much show up at trial, make some notes from their police report, and ramble on the stand about whatever they say happened. You ask police, DA's, etc. about maybe somebody, anybody in the investigation wearing a wire, videotaping the alleged sales or hell, even taking a picture of the alleged transaction and you are met with the response: "we don't have the money, we don't have the resources, we can't afford it, blah, blah, blah."

So you can imagine my shock when I get to New Orleans and have my first drug case. There, sitting in the file is a clear black and white videotape with the officer, a clear shot of the face of the person selling drugs and the sound accompanying the whole damn thing.

Let me get this straight. The city devastated by a hurricane that has lost half of its police force and is struggling with solvency at times finds a way to videotape their drug investigations. Meanwhile, the city that is booming with 8 million new condos can't afford even a camera phone for police to take pictures of their "observations."

To be honest, I am not that happy with the use of videotapes, because, well if they have your client on video selling you are pretty much screwed.

But that being said, if you really wanted to make sure the "bad guys" are off of the street, speed up the criminal justice system and make sure cops were out doing police work and not sitting on a witness stand, why not video all of these transactions? You would have a hell of a lot fewer trials (because it would be a lot harder to suggest the officers were lying or made a mistake) and you could save a lot of overtime pay for officers coming in to testify and waiting around all day for their turn on the stand. What does it say about the credibility of these officers that Philadelphia doesn't trust them to video what they say happened?

Of course, if we stopped the war on drugs we could save a whole lot more money, but that's a whole different mess.