News from the war on drugs: Kingpins, open borders, and shadow wolves
The National Virtual Pointer System has grown from 100,000 "active targets" to 609,000 suspects today. To participate, investigators must first enter the name of the person they're investigating.
"You have to pay to play," says Judith Bertini, DEA's deputy chief of intelligence. The NVPS is not a database; the system rapidly queries some 20 law enforcement bodies to check whether someone else is looking at the same suspect – which happens about 10 percent of the time – and investigators are then put in touch with each other. The system, piggybacked on existing technology for less than $1 million, won a 2005 government technology award. NVPS so far includes DEA, regional crime task forces, and various states. Notably missing: the FBI, which also wants to get on board.
Finally, a worrisome note about the fate of the Shadow Wolves, a celebrated unit of American Indian federal cops who patrol the 76-mile stretch of the Mexico-Arizona border in the Tohono O'odham Indian Nation. The Shadow Wolves combine traditional tracking methods with modern technology to thwart drug traffickers. The group is "one of our nation's most effective drug enforcement units, seizing over 100,000 pounds of narcotics annually" with fewer than two dozen agents, according to that March report from the House Government Reform Committee.
The problem: The Shadow Wolves were part of the now-defunct U.S. Customs Service until March 2003, when the new Department of Homeland Security put them under the Border Patrol. The new management hasn't worked out.
Only 15 of the 21 uniformed Shadow Wolves agents remain active, warns the report, "and there is a serious risk that the rest will retire or move to other employers if the problems are not addressed." The latest incident is Border Patrol insistence that the Wolves cut their hair, an action that, says one drug control expert, would "make them stand out like a sore thumb in Indian country."
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