Cops make crack in California - Orange County, California's reverse-sting operation - Cover Story

Progressive, The, April, 1995 by Bobbie Stein

When Orange County went bankrupt, it made national news, but what you haven't heard about may disturb you more. For nearly two years the Orange County sheriff's department has been quietly manufacturing crack cocaine at the behest of the Santa Ana Police Department. The sheriff's department hands the publicly produced rocks over to the police, who use them in undercover operations targeting certain neighborhoods. One heavily targeted area is the largely Hispanic neighborhood surrounding an intermediate school in Santa Ana.

To date this "reverse-sting" program has yielded more than 400 arrests for possession of crack cocaine. Most of the people arrested had no prior record for drug possession.

Orange County is not the first purveyor of government-issue crack. Police departments in Florida were busy making rocks, until the Florida Supreme Court outlawed the practice. The court found that law enforcement's manufacture of crack cocaine for use in reverse sting operations "shocked the conscience," and violated the due process clause of the state constitution. "It is incredible that law enforcement's manufacture of an inherently dangerous controlled substance, like crack cocaine, can ever be for the public safety," the court ruled, as it reversed hundreds of drug convictions. But the Florida ruling didn't slow things down in Santa Ana.

Lieutenant Robert Helton says the department has carefully examined the liability issues, and deems its operation safe. One of the reasons the police decided to "rock up" cocaine themselves was "to make it as safe as they could," Helton says. Never mind that crack is perhaps the most dangerous and addictive form of cocaine: the police are ensuring that impurities have been removed from their product before it hits the street. Helton also says that although the undercover cops are selling crack one block from the Willard Intermediate School, they conduct their sales mostly in the evening or when the kids are in classes.

The district attorney has established written guidelines for the police that include selling drugs for cash only and not exchanging the drugs for property that might be stolen. Other rules prohibit selling drugs to people in cars and chasing suspects in cars. Police are also discouraged from selling drugs to minors.

Back in October of 1994, an electronic bulletin board for members of the California Association of Criminalists was all abuzz with news of Santa Ana's conversion program. Most forensic scientists on the Net were dramatically opposed to the process. "People were in an uproar," says Roger Ely, who works in the Drug Enforcement Agency lab in San Francisco.

"It's outrageous," says Pete Barnett, a forensic scientist in Oakland, California. "The idea of law enforcement is to minimize the unsavory activity in neighborhoods, not to engender it." Even if the police retrieve most of the crack, says Barnett, if any gets back into the community, that's bad. He compares this program to firing a gun into a crowded room.

Although so-called reverse-sting operations have been popular for quite some time, the common police practice has been to snare leaders of major drug cartels by setting up elaborate schemes where large quantities of narcotics are flashed. In Orange County itself for the past ten years, the district attorney's office had a policy of requiring a five-kilogram minimum for use in reverse-sting investigations.

What makes this operation particularly controversial, says Wayne Schmidt, director of the Chicago-based Americans for Effective Law Enforcement, is that law-enforcement officers are actually cooking up the drugs and selling small amounts to small-time users on the streets, not major drug dealers.

Here's how Orange County's crack operation works. The police obtain powder cocaine seized in other drug busts. Then they take it to the Orange County Sheriff's crime lab, where chemists convert it from cocaine salt to cocaine base, or crack. Equipped with their newly minted crack, video cameras, and the usual arsenal of police weaponry, undercover officers posing as drug dealers stand on street corners and sell $10 and $20 rocks to unsuspecting buyers. Most buyers are immediately arrested.

According to Frank Fitzpatrick, the sheriff's department's director of forensic-science services, the manufacturing of crack is a fairly straightforward chemical process. The powder is heated to remove hydrochloride and other impurities. The resulting rocks are then coated with quinine, which rubs off on anyone handling the drug. When sprayed with lemon juice and illuminated under an ultraviolet light, any body part that touches the drug will glow. This coating makes it easy for police to identify suspects who attempt to dispose of the drug, for instance, by dropping or swallowing it.

The conversion process, minus the quinine, is "what they're doing on the street," says Paul Sedgwick, the department's supervisor of the controlled-substance section. In the beginning there was some difficulty with the recipe, Sedgwick says: "We didn't know how to do it, but then we got it down. The chemistry of it takes less than half an hour." The first efforts produced a product that was "too good-looking, too pure," says Fitzpatrick. The police changed the proportions, making the drug more like street stuff, so prospective buyers wouldn't be suspicious.