In scanning the celebrity news and gossip sites it’s pretty obvious there are certain celebrities which are known to be notorious and habitual hard core drug abusers.
If I’m an undercover narcotics policeman in their jurisdiction, and want an easy bust why don’t I just infiltrate one of their drug parties as a supplier, or whatever, and bust them? Why don’t undercover police pursue these easy busts?
It always seems that when one of these celebrities does get caught with drugs it’s always because they were doing something stupid in public and got caught, or were so high on drugs the authorities had to be called to save them. It’s never because the police were investigating them or targeting them specifically as drug users.
Why don’t the police bother going after these (seemingly) easy arrests?
Probably it’s because situations like the above tend to put the user, or the public, in immediate physical danger, and this is normally a higher priority for the police. Someone sitting at home smoking pot, or even shooting up, while they are breaking the law, they are not presenting an immediate danger, at least in most cases. By rights, the police could walk through your neighborhood and have drug sniffing dogs check everyone’s front door, obtain warrants using wireless technology, and ram their way into private homes where drugs were detected.
But they don’t do this. Mainstream culture does not approve of recreational drug use, but it also disapproves of heavy-handed police tactics. If anything, they would probably try to catch the celebrity buying, or as suggested above, driving under the influence.
Also let us not forget the celebrity angle, as in, can afford pricey lawyers to generally walk away from such offenses a few times.
And there’s also the fact that many of them live in places like Beverly Hills, and it would be bad business for the police to start arbitrarily targeting their rich and drug-addled residents.
Out of curiosity, can an undercover cop (in the US) do this? Presumably “drug parties” take place on someones private property, can a cop get submittable evidence against someone by entering their property under false pretenses. My guess is that that would run into fourth amendment problems, but IANAL.
Sort of a hijack, but I suspect that its part of the reason cops don’t crack down on celebrities who aren’t doing “stupid things in public”, because its actually pretty difficult to catch someone doing something but non-disruptive and more or less victimless on private property. Especially since most celebrities are probably rich enough to put a few “middlemen” between themselves and their dealers.
Maybe because they have better things to do with their time, like going after real criminals. There isn’t any shortage of rape, robbery, burglary and murder in this country.
That’s sort of my question though? Can cops get around the need for a warrant just by gaining entry through false pretenses? It seems to me that would take a lot of the teeth out of the Fourth Amendment, so my guess is no. That said, my law-student gf thinks the answer is yes, but also says the issue hasn’t come up in any of her classes. Certainly the undercover cop gaining entry to some hive of scum and villainy by pretending to be a plumber or what-not and then arresting the various criminals engaged in obviously illegal activity (if not just shooting them then and there) is a staple of TV and movies, but of course, Hollywood is probably not a great place to learn Constitutional Law.
Eh, rightly or wrongly, cops in the US certainly put a lot of effort into making drug arrests. I don’t think the reason they let the members of the Greatful Dead walk free is because their just not interested in persecuting drug crimes at the expense of taking resources away from policing other offenses.
Are you asking if they can search after gaining entry by false pretenses? Probably not. Obtaining a warrant or arresting someone based what they see after someone allows them to enter (even under false pretenses ) is likely a different story. Certainly, a cop can arrest a prostitute even if he got invited into the hotel room under a false pretense.
The reason it’s not done is probably some combination of the difficulty , the lack of resources and the fact that generally, specific people aren’t targeted as drug users to be investigated. In my experience, most users get arrested either because the police observed a sale in public, or they were stopped for some other reason and the drugs were found during a search. It’s more efficient to target the dealers.
I disagree that these would be easy. High profile but not easy. I actually think it would be HARDER to get close enough to bust, Lohan, Britney, et al. [to name celebs that were recently in rehab]. They have handlers who buy the crap for them and are very, very select about who they let party with them- not because they are clever but because they don’t want I partied with Lohan stories and pictures appearing in the Enquirer.
Cops can infiltrate the club’s and probably catch scores of lower level fish for the effort it would take to bag on celeb &, then what? Get them into mandatory treatment diversion program for possession?
Just what kind of busts do you think they’d make? A lot of simple possesion and confiscate some quality shit (maybe some quantity) is my guess. What, you thought Keith Richards was dealing to support his habit? I bet he pays extra to keep his business in the misdemeanor zone.
Face a lot of high priced lawyers for chump change arrests? I’d rather they tackle “the problem” from a different angle.
A person many on this board would recognize made an appearance in our market a number years ago and ended the evening smoking a controled substance with someone I know.
He said that he travels clean. He has to. The moment it is revealed who he is at the airport he is taken aside and he (and his luggage) is given a complete search. Every time.
So there may be a little more enforcement going on than we are aware of, even if it’s airport authorities.
No, but instead of the little slap on the wrist, how about some serious slammer time? Britney ccould go to the slammer for child endangerment, drug charges based on blood testing [if they bothered tapping her for a few tubes when they dragged her in and analyzing them - I think that would definitly fall under justifiable] - what is the punishment for child endangerment in combination with drug abuse? Personally she would lose her kids, get slammer time and mandatory rehab. No parole.
Arresting a coked-out starlet with an 8-ball has a very slim chance of amounting to any real punishment for her, does not get dangerous drugs off the street, and does not exactly constitute a career-making ‘bust’. In fact, if anything, I would imagine it attracts publicity for the precinct, which generally is unwanted except when it’s in the form of stern-faced officers posing in a PR photo in front of a pile of trash bags full of seized pot. I think that most citizens understand that police are short-staffed and would rather them focus their efforts on public safety instead of wasting time on self-destructing entertainers. Britney Spears is probably the greatest living ‘Just Say No’ advertisement in existence.
As much as I detest the drug prohibition laws in this country, I have to say that generally they don’t go after individual users except when it may lead to busting a larger network, or when it’s an aggravating factor in another crime, or to take down a repeat problem child, or when an easy arrest opportunity drops in their lap (like flagrant public use).
I’m reminded of the @100 person IT department that I worked in circa 1990. Due to things I won’t go into here, they ended up with a whole new crop of managers in the place. I overheard one of them asking why they don’t drug test all the employees and fire the ones doing drugs. The second manager answered that they had no desire to have to fire half the floor and suggested that the first manager worry about real issues.
The point being that they know damned well who is doing the drugs, but there are so many of them that they can’t possibly bust them all and deal with it.
A celebrity prisoner/criminal case offers some royal pain for most jurisdictions, starting with their capacity for hiring expensive lawyers and costing the locals a lot of money to prosecute the case and continuing through the pain of dealing with all the media attention sucking up their time and energy. Then there’s a fair chance your local judge will either be star-struck or intimidated by the power of attention and want to get rid of the case as quickly as possible.
So you bust Willy Nelson (for example) for some pot. You spend all your time dealing with the media, their presence interferes with your ability to handle your normal caseload, and then the judge lets him off with a wrist slap and asks for his autograph. Whoo hoo! What a career bust, eh? Wanna do it again? :rolleyes: