from the just-out-there-doing-the-CIA’s-work dept

As much as I write about cops, you’d think I’d rarely be surprised by them or their thought processes. But, every so often, they surprise even me. Let’s take a ride back to early 1989, when the Broward County (FL) Sheriff’s Office was actually bragging about this sort of thing:

A chemist with the Broward County sheriff’s office has manufactured $20,000 worth of crack cocaine for sale by undercover deputies in sting operations, officials confirmed.

Randy Hilliard legally makes crack on the seventh floor of the Broward County Courthouse. Undercover officers then sell the cocaine and arrest the buyers.

‘They were doing so many stings, it got to the point where we couldn’t keep up. It made it easier to do it ourselves,’ Hilliard said Monday. Usually, police use drugs seized in investigations for sting operations.

Well… I guess… congratulations for being Florida, but more CIA? Unpacking is what needs to be done here, but first let’s just acknowledge the fact the Broward County Sheriff’s Office was perhaps the closest any law enforcement agency has been to winning the Drug War and then — instead of resting on its laurels — decided to start the war all over again.

What the actual fuck. They busted so many people, deputies couldn’t seize enough drugs to use in future sting operations. Rather than realize they’d made a dent in the drug problem, they put a chemist to work to generate a drug problem that pretty much no longer existed.

“Unprecedented” would be one way to describe this. So would “unconscionable.” Here’s the response from a DEA rep — an agency not exactly known from shying away from actions that are unprecedented and/or unconscionable.

‘I never heard of that in my life before,’ agreed Con Dougherty, spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington.

Most of us are in Con Dougherty’s boat, whether we like it or not. Manufacturing illicit drugs for the sole purpose of distribution isn’t an act that inhabits the grayest areas of under-developed law. A cop shop wouldn’t hire a hacker to illegally access the DOT (Dept. of Transportation) database to instantly invalidate thousands of license plates just because officers are having trouble finding expired license plates to ticket. But, because it’s drugs, it’s apparently OK to manufacture drugs to sell to people for the sole purpose of busting them for buying drugs.

It wasn’t OK for long, though. A Florida appeals court shut down this illicit drug manufacturing operation four years after it was first exposed.

A sheriff who said he made crack to guarantee a supply for undercover operations has been told to stop by a state appeals court.

“The sheriff of Broward County acted illegally in manufacturing crack,” Judge Mark Polen wrote in Friday’s decision. “The police agencies themselves cannot do an illegal act, albeit their intended goal is legal and desirable.”

The needless addendum? This statement, from the then-Sheriff, sour-grapesing his way into some sort of win by pretending he was always going to do the thing now being forced onto his department by a state court order.

Broward County Sheriff Nick Navarro said he would comply because his anti-crime strategy, started in 1989, has eliminated much of the area’s drug activity.

Except that the drug activity had been “eliminated” before the sheriff’s department artificially created a new drug market for the sole purpose of generating more drug activity, which was for the sole purpose of putting people in jail, seizing their property, and otherwise making their lives miserable because an unexpected new source of crack cocaine had magically materialized in the area.

It seems like it’s too little and it certainly seems late, but at least this injustice is no longer being ignored. Victims of this Broward County-centric form of entrapment may belatedly see justice, thanks to a county prosecutor who’s apparently less unwilling than his predecessors to pretend this fuckery never happened.

A Florida prosecutor says he will seek to vacate as many as 2,600 convictions of people who bought crack cocaine manufactured by the Broward County Sheriff’s Office for sting operations between 1988 and 1990.

[…]

Broward County State Attorney Harold F. Pryor said Friday that while his office was reviewing old records, prosecutors realized that many people may still have criminal charges or convictions on their records because of the sting operation.

“It is never too late to do the right thing,” Pryor said in a statement.

Which is true, of course. For years, though, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office did the wrong thing. Not only did they manufacture supply to meet demand it could no longer prosecute due to the lack of possessed drugs, it sent out officers to peddle drugs as close to schools as possible for the sole purpose of securing harsher sentences for residents who had the misfortune of running into these law enforcement officers who felt they could only do their jobs by violating more serious laws (drug distribution, selling drugs in “drug free” zones) than the people they arrested.

It will take some time to handle more than 2,500 cases. Those with current convictions will apparently have those vacated. That’s the immediate effect. The long term justice might be too late, even if it’s better than nothing: the prosecutor is hoping to have past convictions sealed or expunged or both. But this will likely come years after the damage has already been done. Most of the victims of the sheriff’s drug production lab are already suffering the combined weight of two decades of vindictive drug policy. While this may finally clear their records, it can’t possibly erase the damage done by years of being viewed as felon in the eyes of the law.

I’m glad this is happening, but the question that needs to be asked of everyone in the Broward County government is why it took more than 20 years for anyone to attempt to right these 2,600 wrongs.

Filed Under: broward county, broward county sheriff, florida, police misconduct