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Cops Chase Drugs on the Internet |
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Written by Jim Krane
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Tuesday, 21 December 1999 |
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Page 1 of 5 When narcotics officers swarmed over Rhonda Bankens car in the Wal-Mart parking lot here, they knew she had marijuana stashed somewhere in the vehicle.
They knew in advance that Bankens drove a green 1998 Chevrolet Cavalier. They even knew the license plate number. And the cops knew Bankens was a 30-year-old ex-cop, and they feared she might have a gun.
Bankens, of DeQuincy, was arrested in May on charges of narcotics distribution after officers found an ounce of marijuana in her car. In the scheme of drug busts, Bankens arrest in this bucolic town on the Louisiana-Texas border was small change.
But the tools and methods police used to meet Bankens, learn her background and finally arrest her are entirely new. Bankens, who declined to comment on her arrest, owes her capture to an undercover narcotics officer armed with a laptop computer connected to the Internet.
HARNESSING NET FOR BUSTS
That officer, Louisiana narcotics Detective Luke Erickson, said he met Bankens in an America Online chat room, developed an online relationship with her and used three weeks of online conversations to coax Bankens to supply him with marijuana.
Erickson, whose undercover profile describes him as a party-going New Orleans lawyer, has used the Internet to meet and eventually arrest some 50 drug buyers and sellers in the past two years.
Its like fishing, said Erickson.
The Internet is a known haven for pedophiles and scam artists, but now, in an expansion of that trend, a few pioneering police officers like Erickson are using modems and fake identities to infiltrate a flourishing online drug culture. But, investigators say, most cops lag far behind the online criminals they chase. Lawmen are still learning computer skills that underground drug communities have mastered years ago. Narcotics trafficking especially in so-called rave drugs such as ecstasy and LSD has spread far beyond the enforcement abilities of traditional cops.
You have to learn to adapt to the computer world, said Sgt. Jim Doyle of the Computer Investigation and Technology Unit of the New York Police Department. You've got to learn the phraseology, the online demeanor. You cant just pop into a room and say, ‘Hi, can I buy drugs?‘
CRIME GOES UNSEEN
And, some lawmen say, the Internet hasn't yet proved itself to be a reliable tool to catch large-scale dealers sought by federal agents in the FBI or U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The same encryption and security technology that protects e-commerce also keeps higher-level drug deals hidden from investigators probing eyes.
The online trade that cops stumble across is mainly small-time sales for personal use.
Further dampening law enforcement's enthusiasm is the fact that this Internet trade is invisible to most Americans. Online drug sellers don't blight neighborhoods by appropriating street corners or abandoned homes. And when they buy, customers don't carry guns or worry about getting mugged.
But if Erickson has his way, more cyber-buyers might have to worry about getting arrested.
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