Police try shift in tactics to boost drug arrests

Buglaries rise, drug arrests drop as police struggle to regroup after the loss of indicted narcotics agents

Jason Auslander | The New Mexican

12/16/2007 -

Carlos Quezada inhaled a dollar bill full of cocaine at DeVargas Park one day last month and told his customer more of the drug would arrive in five minutes.

A few minutes before that, the customer had approached Quezada, 31, and Fernando Macias, 43, and asked to buy $50 worth of cocaine, according to court documents. Macias then placed a call to an unknown man and left the downtown park — popular with teenagers, thanks to its skateboarding facilities — to meet him.

When Macias returned, he handed two baggies of cocaine to the customer in exchange for two twenties and a ten. The customer left the park. When the two alleged drug dealers tried to depart, they were arrested for cocaine trafficking.

The customer was an undercover Santa Fe police officer.

This story would not be noteworthy under normal circumstances. While the last year has been anything but normal for the Santa Fe Police Department, the undercover sting at DeVargas Park on Nov. 16 was the first of its kind in the city in more than a year.

Chief Eric Johnson suspended all city narcotics investigations in early November 2006 after the FBI and U.S.

Attorney's Office informed him they were investigating the head of his department's burglary/narcotics unit. Street-level narcotics investigations didn't resume in the city until the sting a month ago.

In the interim year — from Nov. 1, 2006 to Oct. 31 — drug-trafficking arrests in the city dropped 80 percent over the previous year, according to police statistics. At the same time, residential burglaries — not surprisingly — increased 64 percent.

The link between narcotics and property crimes is indisputable, as any police officer will concede. Drug addicts often break into homes in search of easily pawnable items like jewelry, electronics and tools, which can be exchanged for drugs. It's the reason the department paired the two crimes in the same investigative unit.

Johnson cited several reasons — including lack of manpower, a dearth of experienced detectives and rumors of a continuing FBI investigation into the department — for his decision to stop investigating street-level drug trafficking. He also said he wanted to review the department's narcotics investigation procedures.

Six months later, when it became clear the residential burglary rate was skyrocketing, Johnson left the problem to his beleaguered and undermanned patrol division, with some help from a regional, multiagency, anti-narcotics task force. "A lot of narcotics (was) being done out of patrol," the chief conceded in a recent interview.

Most, if not all, of the city trafficking cases filed in the last year resulted from street cops coming across people with drugs packaged for sale, not from investigations, according to Johnson and a review of grand jury indictments.

But now, as department manpower problems begin to ebb, a new city plan to combat street-level drug traffic is taking shape, he said. Under it, supervisors from the Region III Narcotics Task Force will oversee two Santa Fe police officers tasked with concentrating on the city's drug problem.

However, at least one city councilor took issue last week with Johnson's decisions, though Mayor David Coss continued to express support for the chief.

"When you have new detectives, it takes time and training for them to develop sources and figure out who's involved in what crimes," Johnson said. "We're a young department because of retirements over the last few years. I'm 40 years old and I'm one of the old-timers. We're building a new police department here."

Starting over

The department calculated the city's residential burglary numbers in April and discovered a 91 percent spike over the first quarter of 2006. Johnson announced publicly that he was ordering his officers to begin investigating narcotics again.

But it wasn't that simple.

Sgt. Steve Altonji and Detective Danny Ramirez had been indicted by a federal grand jury in May for allegedly stealing money from drug dealers. Because of their long history investigating drugs, the two men knew the players, had the contacts and intimately knew the details of the department's recent narcotics operations. With them gone, the department not only lost its most experienced narcotics investigators, it lost its institutional memory when it came to drugs, Johnson said.

The department had no one with narcotics experience to replace them, he said. The remainder of the detectives in the burglary/narcotics division — with the exception of one detective who worked drug cases with Altonji and Ramirez and was suspected by the FBI of possible illegal behavior — concentrated on burglaries, Johnson said. The chief said he asked them to keep their focus on solving burglaries.

If either detectives or patrol officers came across information about drug trafficking, they were to pass it on to agents assigned to the Region III Narcotics Task Force, he said.

The task force — supervised by state police but composed of officers from police agencies in Santa Fe, Rio Arriba, Los Alamos and Taos counties — has few men and a vast territory to cover, said Lt. Jimmy Glascock, task force supervisor. While task force agents can make a fleeting difference in street-level drug traffic in any one area, they also have to pay attention to other parts of the four counties, he said.

Also, regional agents tend to focus on higher-than-street-level traffickers, although Glascock said those cases often start at the street level.

Johnson replaced Altonji — an effective officer by almost all accounts — with Sgt. Michael LeBlanc, a seven-year veteran with little experience investigating drugs or burglary in Santa Fe. His previous assignment was as a DWI officer, Johnson said.

"He was the best choice," the chief said.

Rio Rancho police charged LeBlanc with domestic violence in July after an incident with his estranged wife — the second time in 31/2 years he has faced a domestic violence charge. LeBlanc, who is still head of burglary/narcotics, is set to go to trial on the latest domestic violence charge Jan. 8, according to the Albuquerque Metropolitan Court Web site.

Filling positions

On Nov. 12, the department's narcotics tactics changed again.

At that time, Johnson assigned two officers to the Region III Narcotics Task Force with the understanding they would focus only on street-level drug trafficking in Santa Fe, he said. Johnson said the new arrangement means the drug agents will be supervised "by more experienced people."

"The Region keeps a tighter handle on things," he said. "There's someone keeping a closer eye."

The change came about as the result of his review of departmental procedures on narcotics investigations, Johnson said.

A department sergeant and an officer already were working with the task force, bringing the total number of Santa Fe officers assigned to the task force to four, he said.

Johnson also has started a separate burglary unit, whose detectives are being trained by Capt. Gary Johnson, the supervisor of all the department's investigators. Chief Johnson plans not only to eventually start a separate narcotics unit but also to establish a street-crimes team that can respond quickly to problems as they flare up, from property crimes to gangs to narcotics, he said.

Those plans can be accomplished when the department fills its current
12 vacancies — down from a high of more than 20 a year ago — and obtains money to hire even more officers, Chief Johnson said.

Further, Santa Fe's fast-growing population also affects the rate, he said.

"Street-level narcotics is not the only factor in the burglary rate," Chief Johnson said. "Look at all the building in town. (The residential burglary problem) is not being ignored. We're working on it. These things take time."

The most recent census figures indicate Santa Fe's urban-area population is growing 2 to 3 percent a year.

Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano agreed that drugs are not the only factor affecting burglaries. The county area outside the city also has seen a significant increase in residential burglaries in the last year.

"I hate to say it, but we haven't had the same problems as the city (police department), and we've seen a similar increase in the number of burglaries," Solano said. "Property crime is up everywhere."

Burglary complaints

Santa Fe City Councilor Patti Bushee is not happy about the department's new arrangement with the task force.

"It's not acceptable for our police department to not have the capacity to investigate narcotics directly," said Bushee, who noted she hadn't heard of the arrangement before last week.

Bushee, who called for public hearings on the burglary/narcotics issue in April but was rebuffed, also said she was upset that police didn't restart drug investigations in April. "I was given personal assurances by the chief that there would be ongoing narcotics investigations by city police," she said. "This is really frustrating."

Bushee said residential burglary is the No. 1 complaint she's heard from her constituents. "(The police) answer to everything is, 'We have to start a neighborhood watch,' " she said. "It's my highest priority to get public safety back on track. We can't hide our heads in the sand over this."

Mayor David Coss said he disagreed that no drug investigations had happened in Santa Fe during the last year, citing the arrangement under which city officers were to pass on drug information to task force agents. While he said he's "not satisfied with the burglary rate," Coss refused to criticize Chief Johnson and lauded police efforts since the spring to focus on burglaries.

"I don't want to second-guess the chief," he said. "I'm satisfied with his decision-making on that."

As for the police department's new arrangement with the task force, Coss said it was too early to make any judgments. "It sounds like a rational piece of police leadership decision-making," he said.

Contact Jason Auslander at 986-3076 or :jauslander@sfnewmexican.com.