'Cowboy' Tactics, Limited Oversight: How Missouri's Barbaric Drug Task Forces Avoid Accountability

Missouri’s federally funded multi-jurisdictional drug task forces often go by macho names like Mustang, Comet and Nitro. They buy flashy electronic equipment such as Stingray surveillance gear and military paraphernalia. But some of the most colorful task forces have dodged accountability, failed to hold required public meetings and used what critics call “cowboy tactics.”

'Cowboy' Tactics, Limited Oversight: How Missouri's Barbaric Drug Task Forces Avoid Accountability DK_assetforfeiture

'Cowboy' Tactics, Limited Oversight: How Missouri's Barbaric Drug Task Forces Avoid Accountability DK_assetforfeiture

Court records show that Missouri’s federally funded drug task forces have often failed to set up required oversight commissions, failed to hold oversight meetings in public and repeatedly failed to respond to Sunshine Act requests for public information.

Some of the task forces operating in secret have abused their power, critics say, by using coercive tactics, buying expensive surveillance equipment and focusing extensively on marijuana instead of more dangerous drugs.

St. Louis’s drug task force claimed for months that it didn’t exist. The Comet drug task force in Missouri's Ozarks region withheld records based on a terrorism exception to Sunshine Law. The Nitro task force in northwest Missouri claimed it didn’t have to respond to the Sunshine records requests because it is a federal agency, not a state one. The Mustang unit, in mid-Missouri, claimed it couldn’t be taken to court at all. St. Louis County’s task force failed to keep minutes of required meetings.

In addition, there are allegations of abusive tactics, including:

When a task force officer in mid-Missouri died of a gunshot wound at a fellow officer’s home, the task force refused to turn over records to the officer’s mother until a court forced it to eight years later.
A video from a National Guard helicopter shows Mustang task force officers chasing a suspect and, once they subdued the suspect, kicking and tasing him.
Defense lawyers accuse the St. Charles County task force of abusing civil asset forfeiture by conducting coercive interrogations of suspects at a towing company lot and pressuring the suspects to sign over ownership of cash in their car.

Supporters of federally funded multi-jurisdictional drug task forces defend them as a model of federal, state and local cooperation. They say they are well-suited for the “war on drugs,” which is inherently an interstate problem that affects individual communities. The federal funding targets the connection between violence and drug trafficking.

The 18 Missouri task forces — down from 28 in 2013 — are typically squads of about a dozen officers from neighboring sheriff’s departments who focus on drug enforcement. The task forces receive federal Edward Byrne Justice Assistance Grants from the Justice Department and additional state dollars from the Missouri State Highway Patrol.

https://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/cowboy-tactics-limited-oversight-how-missouris-drug-task-forces-avoid-accountability

FUCK THE POLICE

_________________
Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband
“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann

'Cowboy' Tactics, Limited Oversight: How Missouri's Barbaric Drug Task Forces Avoid Accountability

'Cowboy' Tactics, Limited Oversight: How Missouri's Barbaric Drug Task Forces Avoid Accountability

Anarcho-Capitalist Categorical Imperatives

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