Des Moines Drug Bust worth the Price?

On July 13 Des Moines police seized 11 pounds of heroin and 3 pounds of methamphetamine after searching two vehicles at a convenience store on N.E. 14th Street just off of I-80. This one bust resulted in two arrests and accounted for more than 440 times as much heroin as was seized in Des Moines in all of 2012, more than 23 times as much as the state Division of Criminal Investigation took in during fiscal year 2013. To put this in perspective, the seized pure heroin bricks could have produced 16,000 doses or more, depending on how it was cut, and the street value of the drugs is estimated to be in excess of $1.3 million.

Des Moines police seized 11 pounds of heroin 

and 3 pounds of methamphetamine in the city’s 

largest heroin bust. / Rodney White/The Register

All police have said thus far is that the bust was the result of a tip. Chalk one up for the good guys. Two drug smugglers are headed to jail and a significant amount of drugs are off the street.

Nothing but good news here, right? Maybe, but new evidence today about how some police departments receive tips from a massive federal government data mining program might change your answer.

Can you hear me now?
According to a Reuters investigation published today, a growing number of drug arrests are the result of a secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration initiative that funnels information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records of Americans.

Here’s how this program works.

The Special Operations Division (SOD) of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) receives and analyses data collected by two dozen partner agencies including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. From time to time, while collecting information in an effort to thwart terrorism and bolster other national security initiatives, these agencies stumble across something outside of their purview, say a local drug matter. SOD passes the information on to local law enforcement with a strict directive the source of the information cannot be revealed.

By using something that has become known as parallel construction, local law enforcement make it look like good old fashioned police work produced the intelligence. In order to use the information, local law enforcement must keep the U.S. government’s role secret. They don’t lie, they just obscure the source of the data and how it was collected. An unnamed snitch on the street stands in for a multi-billion dollar, multi-government agency data mining effort.

The use of information surreptitiously collected by the federal government about and belonging to private citizens by local police to make routine drug busts and the subsequent cover-up by law enforcement to make these investigations appear home grown raises a myriad of constitutional questions.

There has been a rush by the federal government to collect data and information at home and abroad since 9/11. The government is using national security and our collective interest as Americans to slowly diminish what was once thought to be the hallmark of our nation, the rights of the individual. Personal information like phone records, emails and other correspondence, travel records and spending habits once thought to be private, at least until a crime was suspected, are now parsed by a massive information gathering network that is collecting data on all of us. No suspicion required – or is it something worse – now, we are all suspects.

We live in a world where countries like Germany scold the United States for trampling the rights of individuals. What bothers me is not the irony that Germany now drives on the high road we often traveled alone, but that we appear so willing to yield this road to others in the name of short sighted self protection.

It is time we Americans stop allowing fear to drive our national agenda. We are better than this. Yes, the 9/11 attacks scared us. And, it is reasonable to attempt to prevent future attacks and the loss of life they could bring. However, if we do so at the expense of basic individual rights, America will become something far less than it was intended to be. Our children will inherent a country devoid of the very qualities that made her great. We have a task even greater than protecting and defending our borders and the lives of Americans. Our greatest responsibility is to preserve and protect the American ideal.

The Des Moines police have not and are unlikely to release the details about the tip they received that led them to suspect the two individuals arrested in July were drug smugglers. Let me be clear, we don’t know if the July 13 Des Moines arrests came from SOD information, but the circumstances certainly fit the profile.

One thing is for certain, DMPD didn’t just happen on these bad guys. An officer at the convenience store there to pick up a hot dog didn’t spot 14 pounds of drugs sticking out a truck’s gas tank. Vital information led DMPD to the conduct this search. If DMPD obtained this information from SOD, we should be concerned. Are we Americans willing to pay the full price of repurposed information collected in the name of national security? Are a few drugs worth the loss of individual freedom? Let’s hope for all of us and our children, the answer is no.

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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com 

This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register online essay.