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A Drug Enforcement Program For Santa Cruz County

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A DRUG ENFORCEMENT PROGRAM

FOR SANTA CRUZ COUNTY Mark A. R. Kleiman Mary Ellen Lawrence Aaron Saiger

August 5, 1987

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Santa Cruz County has at least five distinct major drug problems. Three of these cocaine wholesaling, methamphetamine production, and marijuana cultivation -involv.e large-scale production and distribution for sale large-Iy outside the county. The other two major problems are retail heroin sales and drug dealing to schoolchildren. These two problems involve drug abuse within the county rather than "exports." The heroin problem contributes to the county's property crime problem and spreads the virus of AIDS. Santa Cruz County has severely limited resources available for drug enforcement. It also has a low ratio of law enforcement officers to population and a high rate of serious personal and property crimes. The County must therefore carefully select its drug law enforcement targets and concentrate its efforts in order to achieve maximum effect. The cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana problems are too large to be significantly ameliorated by any enforcement effort within the current capacity of County agencies. However, these drug markets provide opportunities for asset forfeitures which can help build enforcement capacity for the future. Existing investigative and litigative manpower should be invested in cases with enough forfeiture potential to support the creation of a virtually self-financing major drug trafficking enforcement program. The problem of drug sales to schoolchildren, particularly on school grounds, needs to be addressed by the schools and law enforcement agencies working together; this will put a small additional demand on law enforcement capabilities. The most attractive current opportunity for the use of existing and new resources is an attack on heroin sales and use. Operationally, this attack would take two forms: o

Enhanced street-level enforcement, including aggressive use of Section 11550 of the Public Health and Safety Code ("addict under the influence ").

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Intensively supervised probation, including the use of urine monitoring, for about 250 probationers and parolees for whom drug (primarily heroin) abuse is a major contributor to criminality.

1. THE DRUG PROBLEM IN SANTA CRUZ COUNTY A. Drug Abuse The two most widely consumed illicit drugs in the county, as in the nation, are marijuana and cocaine. So far, snorting remains the predominant fonn of cocaine consumption; crack, the smokable fonn of cocaine, is not widely available. There is some use of amphetamines and of hallucinogens such as LSD; PCP (phenylcyclidine, "angel dust") is fortunately rare. These patterns of illicit drug consumption are consistent with national trends. When it comes to heroin abuse, however, the county, and particularly the Watsonville area, has an extraordinarily bad problem. State health authorities estimate that there are 1,780 opiate abusers in Santa Cruz County; Watsonville police estimate that among the city ' s 30,000 residents there are several hundred chronic heroin users. If that is correct, Watsonville has about as many heroin users per 1,000 population as New York City, an unheard-of phenomenon in a small city far from any major urban center. The problem is asserted to be equally grave in the labor camps outside of Watsonville city limits; heroin trafficking and abuse are also problems in the Beach Flats area of the City of Santa Cruz. Wherever heroin use is widespread, property crime is likely to follow, since heroin users tend to be unusually persistent property criminals whose criminal activity moves up and down with their drug use. County probation officials estimate that some 250 of the county's 1,600 probationers and parolees are hard-core drug users. Heroin users in the county appear to be quite young, primarily in their early twenties. This contrasts sharply with the national pattern of an aging heroin-using population, and suggests that the county's heroin problem involves continuing recruitment of new users rather than merely continued use by established users. This continued recruitment increases the damage done by heroin dealing and the importance of breaking up the market soon, since heroin use is far easier to prevent than to reverse. The frequent sharing of needles among heroin users makes the heroin problem especially dangerous. The virus associated with AIDS (Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV) has spread far less rapidly among intravenous drug users in California than it has among their counterparts in New York largely because of California's lower incidence of needle sharing. In Santa Cruz County, however, needle sharing is very common; one County health official reports that "there isn't anyone who doesn't share." A large number of female IV drug users are prostitutes; if they are infected with HIV they pose a definite (though not yet measured) risk to their customers, and thus to their customers' other sexual partners. The spread of the virus among needle users thus poses a marked threat to the health of the whole county. Current Health Department figures show that between 10% and 20% of the needle users tested by Santa Cruz County are infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). In other areas with frequent needle-sharing, the infection rate has been seen to double every year. Thus, unless sharing patterns change, a majority of the county's needle users could be infected within two years.

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Drug use by school-age children starts in about 5th grade, primarily with marijuana. Studies of high school students estimate that as many as 80% have at least experimented with marijuana. As many as 25% have tried cocaine, though its expense makes it less available than marijuana and the social pressure to use cocaine seems to be easing. In the Pajaro Valley Unified School District (Watsonville), somewhere between 10% and 25% of the student population have been caught using or possessing drugs on school property. In North County, school officials estimate that 5% of high school students show marked difficulty in school as a result of drug-taking. Since the adoption of the state law which prohibits smoking on school campuses, students who formerly congregated in highly visible smoking areas are now congregating with their drug-using schoolmates in secluded locations on or near campus. This may lead to more experimentation with illicit drugs.

B. Drug Production, Trafficking, and Markets According to several law enforcement officials, there are 1,000 or more cocaine dealers in the county who are able to "move" at least one kilogram per month. If correct, this suggests a total "throughput capacity" for the county's wholesale cocaine market of almost a quarter of a billion dollars per year, equivalent to nearly 25% of the total national market. Clearly, not all of this capacity is used, but the estimated magnitude is still impressive. Methamphetamine is produced in Santa Cruz by substantial "laboratories" in the hills behind the city. The labs, well-hidden in mountainous terrain, are difficult to locate; furthermore, the drug is largely marketed outside the county, probably mostly by Hell's Angels. Marijuana cultivation flourishes in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Ideal climate combines with inaccessible terrain and absentee landownership to create excellent growing conditions. The marijuana grown in the county tends to be extremely potent; the most recent test batch averaged 15% THC by weight, at least 50% more than typical domestic sinsemillia. No formal estimate has been made of the size of the market. While it appears to be much smaller than, for example, Mendocino County's, it is still substantial enough that 1985 crop seizures with wholesale values of more than $50 million appear to have had little impact on the market. Retail-level dealing includes wide-open cocaine and marijuana markets. Additionally, cocaine can reportedly be bought with ease in many locations throughout Santa Cruz, including such "inside" locations as restaurant bars. Heroin, mostly imported from Mexico in small amounts, is sold openly in Watsonville. There is a secondary distribution site in the Beach Flats area of Santa Cruz; the dealers in Beach Flats go to Watsonville for their supplies. One long-term heroin user, who had purchased heroin in major urban areas across the country, told a Watsonville police officer that Watsonville was "the easiest place to buy heroin in the United States." The ease of purchase means that new and juvenile users have fairly easy access to heroin. Diversion of licitly manufactured drugs into illicit channels through prescription forgery used to be a substantial problem, but the triple-prescription program seems to

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have brought it under control. Although careless prescription practices still lead to substantial abuse of pharmaceuticals, only small quantities of diverted drugs are available for sale.

C. Current Enforcement Resources Santa Cruz County is under-policed. There are 255 sworn officers (local police and deputy sheriffs) for a total population of approximately 230,000, or about 1.1 officers per 1,000 citizens, as compared with the national figure of 2.0 officers per 1,000. Reported personal and property crimes, on the other hand, are 20% above national norms, at 60 Part I crimes per 1,000 population. Low numbers of police and high crime put enormous pressure on law enforcement in general; specifically, they make it difficult to allocate substantial resources to drug enforcement. The County's drug enforcement effort currently consists of seven officers assigned to the Santa Cruz County Narcotics Enforcement Team (SC-CNET); one full time assistant District Attorney, working on criminal and forfeiture prosecutions; one inspector in the D.A.'s office working about half-time on forfeiture cases; one deputy sheriff working about half-time on marijuana cultivation cases; and some limited activity by local police. SC-CNET, originally intended to pursue cases against major violators, now makes predominantly retail cases. Rather than choosing one or a few local markets for intensive enforcement, it moves its operations in response to citizen complaints. This year, fewer than 150 arrests were made by drug enforcement personnel in the county, and fewer than 50 persons are currently in lockups, jails, or penitentiaries awaiting trial due to County drug enforcement activity.

II. OPTIONS The test of a drug enforcement strategy is its ability to reduce drug abuse and its ill effects both on drug users and on others: neighbors, crime victims, and taxpayers. There are only two major ways for drug enforcement to reduce drug consumption: by making drugs more expensive or by making them less available to the [mal consumer. Increased price and increased convenience will both discourage some drug users. Price depends largely on the market for bulk drugs. The difficulty of retail purchase depends almost entirely on the number, distribution, and behavior of retail drug dealers.

A. High-level Enforcement "High-level" enforcement activity -- investigations and prosecutions of wholesale dealers and manufacturers/cultivators -- has little effect on retail dealers. Unless a temporary physical shortage can be created, high-level enforcement has virtually all of its effect on drug prices. When wholesale markets are as large, and the enforcement resources as scarce, as they are in Santa Cruz County, it may be virtually impossible to improve matters with Modest increases of any achievable program of high-level drug enforcement. enforcement pressure might prove, on balance, counter-productive, making dealers and growers more willing to use violence without significantly reducing the volume of transactions, thus creating a more rather than less dangerous situation.

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Large multiples of the current enforcement effort would be required to get either large- scale cocaine trafficking or marijuana cultivation under control. We have attempted some rough calculations of what would be accomplished using existing County drug enforcement resources, plus funds likely to be available under grants from OCJP. We cannot identify any strategy of high-level enforcement likely to increase the wholesale price of cocaine, marijuana, or methamphetamine produced in or moved through the county by as much as 5%. A price increase of that magnitude is unlikely to have any substantial effect on drug consumption. If these illicit industries, all largely devoted to serving final customers outside the county, are to be effectively fought in the near future, state and Federal forces will have to do most of the fighting. The laws allowing the use of forfeited drug dealing assets for drug enforcement purposes were designed to give drug fighters resources proportionate to those of drug traffickers. The forfeiture laws give drug enforcement an opportunity to lift itself by its own bootstraps, or rather, by its opponents '. Viewed as problems to be solved with current enforcement capacity, the cocaine wholesaling, marijuana growing, and methamphetamine producing industries in Santa Cruz County are daunting. Viewed as potential sources of forfeiture funds with which to expand that capacity, they are inviting. We recommend that achieving forfeitures to build enforcement capacity for the future be the primary goal of the County's high- level enforcement activity until such time as expanded capacity allows a more direct attack on large-scale drug dealing in the community. Most of these cases will involve cocaine dealing and marijuana growing; the valuable assets of the operators of the methamphetamine "laboratories" will be hard to find, while many cocaine dealers have cash and some marijuana growers own land. B. Street-level Enforcement

While high-level enforcement is unlikely to be able to significantly affect drug abuse, street-level enforcement, by contrast, has great potential for cleaning up the heroin markets and reducing heroin use, property crime, and the spread of AIDS. Street-level enforcement makes it more difficult, rather than more expensive, to buy drugs. It can therefore suppress drug consumption without leaving remaining users with more expensive drug habits, a side-effect of high-level enforcement which may actually increase property crime. Furthermore, once it becomes concentrated enough to force a local market to contract, street-level enforcement will tend to feed on its own success. As the number of users and dealers shrinks, the risk of arrest for each remaining participant grows. In the extreme, the market may collapse and disappear almost entirely. An example of the success of such a strategy is the experience of Lynn, Massachusetts. In a setting similar to Watsonville -- open heroin dealing in a small city -- a street-level enforcement program reduced robberies and burglaries by 35% and murders, rapes, and aggravated assaults by 65 %. These reductions were evident in the first year of the program and have persisted for the subsequent three years. The volume, di spersion, and covertness of the markets for cocaine, marijuana, and "dangerous drugs " makes it unlikely that these markets can be successfully attacked

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Table 1. Options

DRl,X;

HIGH-LEVEL

ASSET SEIZURE

ENFORCEMENl'

ClJLTIVATlOO

INl'ENSIVE

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SUPERVISlOO P!lOBATIOO

WI

UA

Heroin

Little high-level dealing. Prerequisite to hitting tirst-line wholesalers is making more street-level cases.

Largely irrelevant (tew assets to seize) .

nl a

Big opportunity to reduce tratticking. crime. consUlllption . AIDS. and to restore cannJIlity order.

Big opportunity to control crime while suppressing heroin demand .

Cocaine

Scale ot ettort required tor substantial results is well beyond current capabilities of County entorcement and prosecution agencies . Focus on cases with forfeiture potential to build enforcement capacity for the future.

Cases can be made whose dollar yield would exceed COtIts; scale is still too SIIIIlll. to damage market to a substantial extent . AIIsetseeking makes sense to tund expanded enforcement.

n/ a

Eftective entorcement would require an unworkable nunber ot arrests. Worth suppres.ing open dealing in order to maintain order.

Ettective only tor a minority of users.

Dangerous drugs (other pi lls and powders)

Very hard to make much impact with County resources. ENE and DFA should be encouraged to participate .

Hard to go fran lab cases to valuable assets .

All with cocaine .

Ettective only tor a minority of users .

Marij uana

As with cocaine .

As with cocaine .

All with cocaine .

Largely irrelevant.

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n/a

Scale ot eftort required daunting . Much marijuana production for sale outside of county .

by retail-level enforcement. Where such drugs are dealt openly, enforcement efforts should emphasize the maintenance of order and the minimization of neighborhood disruption as central goals, rather than attempting to eliminate consumption and dealing altogether.

C. Intensively Supervised Probation and Urine Testing A program of intensively supervised probation (ISP) for heroin-using offenders could contribute both to the control of the heroin market (by reducing demand) and to the control of personal and property crime. Persons on probation or parole should be required to abstain from heroin and to demonstrate that abstinence by submitting to regular urinalysis, with a graduated schedule of penalties, up to and including reincarceration, for missed or "dirty" tests. The goal of such a program would be to maintain as many participants as possible at liberty in the status of ex-heroin-using exoffenders, while protecting the community from those who cannot or will not comply with probation or parole conditions. The link between crime and the abuse of other illicit drugs is less clear than the link between crime and heroin. ISP with urinalysis will make sense for a minority of cocaine, barbiturate, and stimulant abusers. D. Schools The problem of drug dealing on or near school grounds is more serious than the dealing of the same drugs elsewhere, because drug abuse by children is a special social concern and because intoxication by drugs interferes with learning. Although some dealing to children is incorporated into the adult market, much involves dealing by other children or dealers who work near school grounds. This part of the market deserves special enforcement attention. The primary agency concerned with school-level drug dealing is the school. Teachers and principals are responsible for maintaining a healthy learning environment. Enforcement should serve as a backup to the schools' disciplinary program. When cases involving schoolchildren are referred to law enforcement agencies, it is important that they handle the problem in cooperation with the school authorities and that case dispositions reflect both the gravity of the problem and the hope that youthful drug offenders can be helped to reform. What is needed is less new enforcement activity than improved communication among police, courts, and schools to ease the process of responsive enforcement and the search for appropriate dispositions. Table 1 summarizes the drug enforcement options (except for the schools program) and their probable effects.

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III. PROJECT PLAN The project plan below outlines a program of street-level enforcement and intensively supervised probation which takes advantage of the strong potential of these activities to disrupt drug markets and control drug abuse and crime. Also included is a modest program of enforcement support for the schools' efforts to control drug dealing and use on and near their grounds. This plan will allow the County to maximize the drug abuse benefits it gets for its drug enforcement dollars, rather than spending money on programs which cannot be effective unless the County greatly expands its drug enforcement capacity. At the same time, the proposal includes an asset seizure and forfeiture program designed to build those capacities for the future. A. Street-Level Enforcement We recommend a program of street-level enforcement for Santa Cruz County similar to the program in Lynn, Massachusetts. We suggest the establishment of a task force aimed at clearing out the heroin markets in Watsonville and Beach Flats. Based on the Lynn experience, we estimate that the Task Force will initially require at least nine full-time officers or the equivalent in part-time assignments. If the program succeeds in shrinking the drug markets, its manpower requirements will shrink as well. The task force should be prepared to change the site of its operations if required. Heavy street-level enforcement may displace the market as well as shrinking it; if the market moves, the task force should be prepared to move with it. The heroin problem in Watsonville is concentrated among Latino residents: and the Latino community will thus reap most of the benefits of a crackdown on drugdealing: less drug abuse, less crime, and less disease. On the other hand, most of the arrestees will also be Latino; this may create problems in police-community relations. Active community support, in the form of a steady flow of information about drugrelated activity, has been essential to the success of street-level enforcement efforts elsewhere. That support is more likely to be forthcoming if efforts are made to persuade the Latino community of the benefits of a crackdown and to take advice from Latino leaders about the design and operation of the program. For both operational and community-relations reasons, at least some of the task force's officers should be fluent in Spanish. Free voluntary AIDS testing and counseling should be offered to all IV drug users arrested by the task force. We estimate that 300 misdemeanor and 50 felony arrests will be generated by the street level law enforcement effort in its first year. This will require two full-time prosecutors. It will also lead to a more crowded court calendar. Additional workloads created by large numbers of arrests from the street level task force, the probation violators who fail their drug tests , and the forfeiture cases will create a burden on already busy court clerks. Two full-time intake clerks should be able to deal with the expected 'increase in workload.

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The idea behind the program should be discussed with judges in advance; it is important that they understand that 11550 and possession cases are not "garbage counts" to be disposed of casually.

B. Probation The Probation Department estimates that approximately 250 chronic users of illicit drugs, primarily heroin, can be identified among its client population. The demonstrated link between heroin use and high offense rates makes this population a logical target for intensively supervised probation (ISP). These probationers and parolees should be required to abstain from drug use as a condition of release. We propose that urinalysis (UA) be used to monitor their drug use on a weekly or biweekly basis. UA would screen for opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, barbiturates, and PCP. In addition, ISP with UA will be used to monitor arrestees from the street-level task force program; they are particularly good candidates for ISP. We estimate that about 75 of them will be part of the caseload at any given time. Since some task force arrestees are likely to come from the current probation population, the total urinalysis caseload in any period should be around 300 persons. We propose a graduated series of sanctions for missed appointments or positive test results: First bad test Second bad test Third bad test

Retest more frequently A weekend in jaiVcommunity service hours A week's incarceration/community service hours To be handled by the probation officer on a case-by-case basis

Fourth bad test

Conversely, clients who repeatedly test clean can be tested less frequently. Terms of probation should include search clauses, and "known associates" or "known drug dealers" clauses, as well as the UA provision. A standard set of terms should be drawn up which can be modified at the discretion of the P.O. 'so For juveniles, provisions should include parental involvement/assistance/cooperation, and aim at promoting the completion of high school or the OED, and perhaps some sort of job training. The cooperation of the courts is vital for the success of the ISP program. In particular, judges must be prepared to impose reincarceration and other penalties for persons who repeatedly miss or fail tests. Judges should be approached with information about the urinalysis program and the importance of progressive sanctions before the actual program begins. The program requires the participation of five experienced probation officers, including one supervisor; this will create an ISP/UA workload of about 60 offenders per officer. A secretary will also be needed in order to coordinate the activities of the P.O. 's participating in the ISP program. ISP programs in other jurisdictions have found it beneficial to keep their offices open for longer than the normal business day.

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Technological requirements are an EMIT machine and reagents. It may also be necessary to hire a technician to run the machine. Another option for testing is to train the probation officers to administer the tests themselves. This would result in both increased efficiency and increased effectiveness, since test results would be available immediatel y. Community service could be administered through the Sheriff's Work Release Program (Municipal and Superior Court cases), the Court Referral Program (Municipal Court cases), or a separately established non-profit organization. Court Referral representatives voiced concerns about the population which would be appropriate for their service (they would much rather supervise marijuana cultivators than heroin users) and the way in which it is used (they prefer clients who choose community service over clients who are sentenced to community service hours). This suggests that these agencies would not be adequate to handle all the candidates for community service. At present Work Referral is set up for job-training and might not be appropriate for short sentences of community service. One advantage of having a separate non-profit organization is that it could seek paying customers for community service labor as a way to cover the costs of supervision. One idea for community service is a program offering a combination of job training and short-term service. A possible scenario: a master carpenter, who is supplied with tools and a van, hires out to do low-cost community improvements, such as repairs to low-income housing. He has three or four long-term crew members who are actually learning job skills, and three or four short-term crew members (working off a weekend or a week of community service hours) who perform unskilled labor. This project should generate enough revenue to pay the salary of the master carpenter who runs it. Giving police officers and deputy sheriffs limited status as Probation Officers might also assist in implementing the UA program. C. Schools Drug violations in the schools require the combined attention of school officials and law enforcement agencies, following guidelines to be drawn up jointly. These guidelines should address both investigative procedures and appropriate case dispositions. Making the punishment fit both the crime and the criminal is difficult when the offense is as serious as distributing drugs to children but the offenders are largely juveniles themselves. We recommend the assignment of a coordinator to act as liaison between schools and police and to help the courts find appropriate dispositions. Truancy and juvenile drug use often go together. Police and the District Attorney's Office should be available to back up school authorities when necessary to enforce school attendance. In addition, police should be available as requested for surveillance of drug consumption sites on or near school grounds.

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D. Forfeitures/Prosecution

All County drug enforcement officers not assigned to the street-level task force should devote their efforts to developing major cases with forfeiture potential. The major drug case prosecutor in the D.A.'s office should spend full time prosecuting such cases and litigating for forfeitures. This effort should generate the funds to support its own growth from year to year. E. Coordination, Guidance, and Control

In a program as complex as the one outlined above, involving many agencies and the unpredictable behavior of drug dealers and users, surprises are to be expected. We recommend that a project manager be recruited and be given the authority to make adjustments to the program as needed. The manager will also need outside expert help in monitoring the operations of the program, making mid-course corrections, and evaluating the results. An outsider can often speak more frankly than can someone who must maintain working relationships with the people and agencies involved. We recommend that a contractor for monitoring and evaluation be retained before the program starts. That contractor should begin by making measurements of the drug problem as a baseline against which to measure progress and a basis for recommending adjustments during the life of the project.

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