| ▲ | itishappy 10 months ago | |
> In a management directive issued on Thursday, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General said it had been hearing complaints about the searches for years — and had recently learned new information that suggested there were significant problems with them, including potential constitutional violations. For years... The recent info is (of course) a passenger recording their encounter. > The IG said investigators could not come to any conclusions about whether the searches involved racial profiling because the DEA does not collect data on all the people it stops — only on the cases in which money is seized. Data on seizures seems like a solid start. Why don't they have data on searches? > “The Department has long been concerned — and long received complaints — about potential racial profiling in connection with cold consent encounters in transportation setting,” the report said, adding that the DEA between 2000 and 2003 “collected consensual encounter data on every encounter in certain mass transportation facilities as part of a Department pilot project to examine the use of race in law enforcement operations.” > But neither the DEA nor the Justice Department “drew any conclusions from the data collected about whether the consensual encounters were being conducted in an unbiased manner, and in 2003 the DEA terminated its data collection efforts,” the report said, and “its consensual encounter activities continued.” Complaints for years, yet decided to stop recording data... That's sketchy as hell. > The IG found that the search was based on a tip by an airline employee who passed on the names of passengers who had purchased flights 48 hours before departure. > That employee was being paid by the DEA a percentage of the cash seized, the IG found, and had received tens of thousands of dollars over several years. That arrangement is problematic, investigators concluded. "Fight crime with crime" seems to be a fairly widespread attitude amongst government agencies (reminded of the TSA article yesterday), but this seems particularly egregious. | ||