Collection of Articles about Police Officers Killed by Semi-Automatic ...

they need,'' said Jacqueline Parris, the president of the Guardians Association,
which represents black officers. ''The department is asking them to risk their lives,
but they're not backing them up.''
The Guardians are particularly concerned about the shooting because 70 percent
of undercover officers are black, as was Detective Carrington, or Hispanic. Minority
officers are sought for undercover jobs because they tend to have more credibility
on the street.
Ms. Parris said many young officers are lured to undercover assignments mainly
because they offer a fast track to the coveted detective's shield, in 18 months
instead of several years on patrol.
But once inside an undercover unit, the officers can find themselves faced with
life-or-death situations they are unprepared for and commanders who pressure
them to keep arrest numbers high.
In the field, police officials try to stage their undercover buys in such a scripted
manner that the site of the transaction is called ''the set.'' An undercover
detective, disguised as a drug buyer and equipped with a hidden transmitter
called a ''Kell,'' is assigned to make the purchase, using cash which has had its
serial numbers prerecorded. Two ''ghosts'' are assigned to pose as passers-by, to
keep watch over the buyer and track the seller once the buy has been made.
Hidden in the vicinity is a sergeant and another 5 to 10 back-up officers whose job
is to converge on the suspects, en masse, once the sale has been completed.
During the vast majority of the estimated 5,000 buy-and-bust operations
conducted annually, the script works perfectly: the buyer exchanges cash for
drugs, the ghost tracks the suspects and the back-up teams make the arrests
without firing a shot. But the volatile mixture of guns, drugs and felons means that
any operation can become violent, or fatal, at any moment, particularly indoors.
''You never have control of these situations,'' said Robert Strang, a former Drug
Enforcement Administration agent who now heads the Strang-Hayes security
consulting firm. ''Especially when you have an aggressive move to take them out.
You have to fight them on their own turf. These kinds of things happen every now
and then. I wish there were a better way to do it. But there isn't.''
For the rank-and-file officer, however, there are many rewards to undercover
work. Successful ones can advance more quickly in the department, and can make
$10,000 more a year in overtime in a force that has otherwise curtailed such pay.
But police officials say that the city's ''zero tolerance'' drug policies of the last five
years have fueled a kind of race between dealers and the detectives as they try to
outsmart each other, with detectives increasingly aggressive and dealers more
suspicious.
Undercover investigators are now trained to detect booby traps in drug locations
and are constantly updated on the latest slang, street colors and drug brands --
information culled from arrested drug buyers. But the meticulous legal
requirements of making a criminal case have also spawned more subtle
maneuvers by dealers.
Dealers now commonly use cellular phones to establish a network of lookout posts
around their businesses, detectives say. Another tactic is to use division of labor --
one person hands over the drugs, another collects the money -- to make it more
difficult for the police to meet the legal standard for a drug sale arrest.