Editor’s Note: The following article by PoliceOne Contributor Andrew Hawkes is the first in an occasional series he’ll be doing on interdiction operations that fall outside the scope of drug smuggling. In this introduction, Hawkes points out that when you’re out on patrol. In future installments, Hawkes will tackle subjects such as concealment techniques for digital contraband, dealing with human cargo, and tips for spotting trafficking vehicles like clones to decoys. If you have a topic you’d like investigated, send us an e-mail.
State, county, and municipal officers throughout the country have been working highway drug interdiction for years, and doing so successfully. As law enforcers we have definitely — and unfortunately — not seen a decrease in the amount of illegal drugs being smuggled into the country, and then being dispersed to their destinations within the United States.
Twenty years ago, just about all the marijuana and cocaine and other contraband drugs were coming from Mexico and South America. Now we’re seeing drugs coming south from Canada as well, with the likes of BC Bud and shipments of Ecstasy. The thought of 10 kilos of methamphetamine on an interdiction stop 15 years ago would have been a joke, but we see it daily now with the mass production of methamphetamine in the “Super Labs” in the Mexican dessert.
NAFTA opened up our borders and eased some smugglers’ operations. Hidden compartments being discovered by officers that once held only drugs or money are now being found on a regular basis holding humans, guns, or other items. Border Patrol Agents are increasingly finding non-drug hidden in dashboards, tractor-trailer trucks, and other hidden areas where they had not before.
The battle for supremacy among rival drug lords has caused increasing violence in Mexico as well as larger and more frequent shipments of firearms smuggled into and out of that country. Prescription drugs that are too expensive in the U.S. are being smuggled over the border in large quantities and making their way onto the black market.
Untaxed, foreign cigarettes shipments from Asia are increasing, and new, strange drugs that haven’t hit our drug schedules like Salvia and Kat (just recently listed as a scheduled drug) are increasing, and so are the seizures of them.
Child porn, pirated software, and other digital contraband is being concealed in vehicles and transported across the county covertly by use of our interstate highway system. I’ve looked for dope and uncovered shipments of body armor, police badges, and handcuffs, as well as white supremacist propaganda. A well-trained interdiction officer will undoubtedly uncover several of these contraband items, when they are out on the road looking for that mother of all loads of dope.
The criminal element on the interstate will often and frequently give themselves away to a trained interdiction officer, whether they are smuggling cocaine or kiddie porn.
Hidden compartments in vehicles can and are being used over and over, and often the same vehicle that is used to haul dope on one cross country run may be used on the next run to haul a shipment of stolen high powered rifles.
If you’re a cop who works “the big road” in your jurisdiction, learn the tricks of the trade that these smugglers are using. Then, when you recognize that something just isn’t quite right on your next traffic stop, and you eventually find that hidden compartment, (the one that took months to build but they left the instructions on how to open it in the glove box), it may just be like Christmas morning when you get to open that big present and can’t wait to see what’s inside.
