Steller: Strike force addresses key problem — re-election

An urgent problem was presented.

An urgent solution was proposed.

Unfortunately, the solution proposed didn’t address the problem presented.

On Monday in Phoenix, Gov. Doug Ducey used a U.S. Senate Homeland Security committee field hearing on the heroin-addiction epidemic to introduce his new border strike force.

Our U.S. senators, Jeff Flake and John McCain, were there, and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson led the hearing. Ducey was the star witness and tried to build a rhetorical bridge between our inability to stop smuggling at the Arizona-Mexico border and the national heroin epidemic .

“We’re here today because our nation is plagued by a destructive, dangerous and deadly epidemic,” Ducey began. “Heroin trafficking, use, abuse and overdose is a growing problem in American society.”

Ducey said later in his testimony, “If you are serious about taking the fight to the drug cartels — and turning the tide on the drug epidemic ravaging our nation — join us. Arizona is on the front line.”

It sounded like a reasonable justification for what Ducey introduced at a press conference after the hearing — a request for tens of millions of state tax dollars to fund his proposed Border Strike Force Bureau. The idea is for the Department of Public Safety to partner with federal and local law-enforcement agencies to combat border-related crime.

Increased interdiction of drugs will, the argument goes, reduce the supply of heroin and help shrink the addiction problem. This isn’t a new argument, of course. It is the same War on Drugs approach that has justified decades of militarization at the border and in our polices forces.

Look around to see how well it has worked to reduce addiction in the United States. It hasn’t — it’s failed.

Ironically, expert witnesses at the same hearing made this exact point, and even Ducey himself seemed to recognize it, to an extent.

“Merely doing interdictions and arrests is not going to be enough to stop this heroin epidemic,” Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske said. “We need to focus on prevention and treatment, and identify the characteristics of developing cases of opioid use disorder before they escalate.”

He and McCain even said interdictions have proven unable to affect the price of heroin, which has fallen.

Responding to a question from Johnson, Ducey acknowledged, “You touched on this as well, chairman — the insatiable desire and demand for drugs that we have in this country is the other part of the equation we need to deal with here.”

But Ducey proposed nothing to deal with demand. He wants millions of scarce state tax dollars for interdiction, a proven failed approach.

Jeff Taylor, who lobbies on behalf of the Salvation Army in Phoenix and is a recovering heroin addict, was even more pointed.

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“We have put a lot of money into interdicting drugs, and yet they’ve never been more available and more powerful than they are now,” he said. “We have to put our effort into reducing demand.”

Not to be fatalistic, but in Arizona, this isn’t going to happen. This was made clear during a Nov. 9 hearing of the Legislature’s Joint Border Security Advisory Committee.

House Speaker David Gowan, a Sierra Vista Republican, declared, “We have cartel movement down there. We have ISIS crossing over. Make no bones about it, that border is porous.”

The fact that Gowan stated as fact that Islamic State members are crossing the border — a claim without any factual basis — shows where they’re coming from. They want boots on the ground.

What will that mean?

Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels is enthused. He testified at the Nov. 9 hearing and the Monday hearing and is the only one of the four border sheriffs who usually shows up at these events. His department has been rewarded financially for his cooperation and political support.

The other border sheriffs’ response is more like “meh.” They’re too experienced to buy into hyperbole like this from Ducey: “I believe this is the most meaningful step toward securing Arizona that we’ve seen in decades.”

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos and Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada both told me they’d be OK with Ducey’s program as long as it involves cooperation with the agencies already on the ground, not dictation of what to do by the state.

They’ve been around too long, and seen too many task forces, to have any illusion about what a new “strike force” is likely to accomplish. Estrada called it “another task force to deal with border issues.” Nanos understood it to involve 100-200 officers on the ground — a small number in the context of 4,000-plus Border Patrol agents and hundreds more from other federal agencies already in Southern Arizona.

“There’s a lot of law-enforcement representatives here in Santa Cruz County,” he said. “We’ve got the Border Patrol, ourselves, Nogales PD, DEA, ICE.”

He could also have mentioned the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, as well as the many inspectors who work at the ports of entry. The region is full of law-enforcement officers.

However, Estrada noted, DPS troopers usually leave the highway at 2 a.m., and more useful than the strike force might be to simply have coverage 24 hours a day. If there is any merit to the strike-force idea, it could simply be to catch more common criminals, some of whom are also involved with smuggling.

But there is little appeal in arresting more burglars and stopping more intoxicated drivers at 3 a.m. The politicians want to act as if they are taking on the Sinaloa Cartel. It burnishes their appeal to voters in Maricopa County who would not believe how normal everyday life usually is in the borderlands.

So while a new generation of politicians gets jazzed about taking on the cartels, addicts in Tucson, Phoenix and across the state will be unable to get the treatment that might save their lives and stop them from being threats to our property and to their children. No new money for that.

Still, you can’t say no problem has been addressed: Future re-elections may be secured with claims of defending the state’s and the nation’s security. That may even bring higher political offices within reach.

If that happens, problem solved.