Organizing Law Enforcement as Well as Organized Crime

Abstract

The purchase and sale of heroin and cocaine occurs daily in American cities, and increasingly, in our suburbs and rural areas. Those illicit transactions, however, are but the last stop on a long and tragic international journey from distant fields and jungles, across seas and oceans, through the United States to our hometowns. Drug profiteers operate vast international organizations which grow, process, smuggle, and distribute heroin and cocaine. If government is to have any success in reducing drug abuse, it must be at least as well organized as the criminal enterprises trafficking in drugs. The Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF), established by President Ronald Reagan in October 1982, were conceived in the effort to make law enforcement as organized as drug traffickers. The OCDETF program was firmly based upon the premise that improved coordination was the key to fighting the criminal organizations importing and distributing dangerous drugs worth more than $70 billion annually. This article analyzes the process through which the federal government developed the OCDETF program. That process provides many lessons for government managers in law enforcement and elsewhere. It provides a model for administrators charged with the task of coordinating and redirecting several government agencies in the fight against a stubborn and pernicious problem.