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Are random drug searches at a bus stop in Breezewood appropriate?
Sunday, April 09, 2000 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
BREEZEWOOD, Pa. -- Luzetta Zilch knows the drill as well as any of the other Greyhound Bus drivers.
She wheels her bus in for a half-hour layover at the Post House Cafeteria, a rest stop at this turnpike interchange made of rest stops. After passengers file off, plainclothes state troopers appear, asking if their drug dog can sniff the luggage in the bus cargo bay.
She agrees. Every time it's happened to Zilch, the drug dog comes up empty, the search goes no further, the passengers trickle back and the bus wheels back out of the parking lot.
"Most people don't seem to get bothered by it," she said as she talked shop with a few other drivers and finished a quick lunch at the Post House last week. "But a few of the passengers, people from Europe, get a little upset, though.
"They think it's strange that people in a free country would be doing this."
Thomas Crawford isn't European. He doesn't ride Greyhounds. But eight miles down the road, in Everett, at Bedford County Central Court, he was sitting before a district justice early that same afternoon, pitching his latest installment of the same sentiment.
Crawford is a defense lawyer from Pittsburgh. He has clients, like one at the hearing last week, who've been collared for drug possession when their buses stopped at the Post House and their luggage was pulled out and searched. Crawford gets worked up when he talks bus searches, labeling them as police bullying, an officially sanctioned snoop into private belongings by investigators who have neither search warrants nor probable cause.
"Everything the police are doing there is illegal," Crawford said. "What's going on differs little from a border search. But this is the Post House. This isn't on the border with Mexico."
"Nobody said, 'No, I don't want to consent to this. ... No, please get off the bus,' " said Robert Tempalski, one of the state troopers who arrested Crawford's client. "Everybody seemed to welcome the police and what we were doing. ... Ninety-nine percent of the passengers are happy we got on the bus."
The Post House is one of the state's prime bus layovers, bus drivers say. It's also a favorite spot for law officers to troll for drug carriers, according to state troopers. It is "one of the few places we can stop a bus," state trooper Roger Ohl said.
"The question is whether it's appropriate to subject bus passengers to these types of actions, as though they're going across the border from Switzerland to Austria," said Jeffrey Velander, a Stroudsburg, Monroe County, lawyer waiting for the Supreme Court to hear his argument against the arrest of a bus passenger during a suburban Philadelphia layover. "That's not the same thing that's happening to people in cars."
"There could be a class distinction here -- that people who ride a bus can't afford to take a car or a plane and thus they have a lesser expectation of privacy," said Larry Frankel, state director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Riding a bus is not, per se, a criminal activity."
The argument has no winner yet. The state Supreme Court has been asked to hear a growing handful of cases, bred by increased attention by state police and state drug agents on long-haul bus passengers as drug couriers.
The heart of the issue is whether bus passengers go along willingly with the searches or whether even those who would like to object are quietly forced into compliance, strangers in a strange place who feel too timid to refuse when they're nose-to-nose with lawmen.
"There'll be some interesting issues before the court on this," Velander said.
What nobody's going to argue is that the Post House is a good place for police to lay a drug trap.
On its own, Breezewood would have been an unremarkable collection of fields and houses at Bedford County's eastern edge. But the turnpike, Interstate 70 and Route 30 rub shoulders here, making this a town of motels, menus and unending traffic, a routine stop, a neon-lit outpost 120 miles east of Pittsburgh, 127 miles north of Washington, D.C., and 190 miles west of Philadelphia.
Up on a hill, barely peeping over the front line of restaurants and gas-and-gos, is the Post House, a cafeteria and gift shop that's a daily must-stop for a dozen Greyhounds and varying numbers of charter buses.
Maybe one in 10 buses stopping there will carry a passenger carrying drugs, said Ohl, one of the regulars in the bus-search teams.
"Sometimes, all we find is a little bag of weed on the floor of the bus. Somebody's kicked it there," he said. "We pick it up and say, 'I don't suppose this belongs to anybody.' And we never do establish who it belongs to."
Sometimes, it's like the Tuesday night 12 days ago. That's when police say their drug-sniffing dog led them through a bus search to just shy of 20 pounds of marijuana packed in luggage belonging to Lenworth Wilson, Crawford's client, a 43-year-old Jamaican living in Toronto.
"It could be worth $3,000 a pound, maybe more, if it's as high-grade as it looks," Ohl said.
Nine hours later, on another bus, police said, they found packets carrying $48,000 worth of heroin but never figured out to whom the packets belonged.
"It's a major interchange, so it's going to be a place a lot of drugs move through," said William Higgins, Bedford County assistant district attorney.
But the way law officers carry on the fight draws critics. The search, by formula, goes like this:
It starts as a drug-hunting shell game. Police have testified in Post House-related drug arrests that they target buses at random, not because they have advance reason to suspect which ones carry drugs.
Court rulings in bus stop-related cases say police don't have to have any reasonable suspicions to question passengers if the questioning is light enough to be deemed a "mere encounter" -- that is, there's nothing compelling the bus passenger to stop and answer. Standard uniform, according to testimony in several cases, isn't police uniforms but jeans, windbreakers and concealed weapons, an outfit court rulings cite as aimed not to intimidate.
"It all works because of the good will of the people," Higgins said. "The police know the procedure. You can't force people to go along if there's no probable cause."
But you do force them, Velander said, because passengers aren't going to walk off a bus in Breezewood to avoid police and then risk having the bus leave without them. "So, in effect, you're being detained," he said.
"What if I told you that it was none of your business?" Crawford asked the trooper at last week's hearing.
"If that's what you told me, I'm probably finished talking to you," Ohl said.
The troopers first approach the bus driver and get permission for the drug dog to crawl into the belly of the bus and paw through luggage.
"Did you ask any passengers if they were willing to have the dog search their luggage?" Crawford asked Ohl.
"No, sir," Ohl replied. "I get consent to search from the man in charge of the vehicle, the bus driver." Whether the driver actually has that latitude is on appeal to the state Supreme Court.
Bus drivers routinely allow the searches, but not always. One driver said he was upset at police who balked at removing a passenger who tried to attack him with a knife. "So I just said, 'No, no more searches,' " the driver said.
Willing drivers may be motivated by more than good will, though. In a case waiting to go to trial in Bedford County, a state police corporal told Crawford that troopers paid a driver in the case $50. The payoffs are made on a case-by-case basis and come only if police find drugs, the trooper testified.
If the dog indicates that a suitcase holds drugs, troopers wait for passengers to return to the bus, hold up the bag and ask the owner to claim it.
Routinely, nobody claims a bag packed with drugs, Ohl said. So, police have the bus driver declare the bag abandoned or lost property, then get the driver's permission to open it for a hands-on search, hunting both for drugs and any clue to the owner's identity.
"They demand that people identify their luggage, something they have no right to do," Crawford said. "A bus driver can't consent that something's abandoned just because nobody claimed it. ... How do you think the bag got aboard? It didn't walk aboard."
In an attempt to strengthen the link between a cocaine-bearing briefcase and a New Albany, Ind., man arrested at the Post House six months ago, police persuaded a judge to order a blood sample from the suspect so that his DNA could be compared with residue found on a toothbrush in the briefcase.
Police ask to see passengers' tickets, sometimes using them to pick out possible drug runners, according to police testimony in several cases.
In one 4-year-old Bedford County case now on appeal to the state Supreme Court, investigators said they bolstered their suspicions about two men charged with drug possession when they saw both carried tickets for an 18-hour trip from Indianapolis to New York, with only an eight-hour stopover before the return trip.
"People volunteer their tickets," said Ronald Keeler, a former Bedford County public defender who handled the case. "How do they know to refuse?"
George Gravley, a spokesman for Greyhound, said he knew of no passengers who have complained about the searches.
"These searches are made all over the country, and not just at Greyhound," Gravley said. "The DEA moves around from company to company, searching buses and trucks and delivery trucks all the time." In fact, he said, Greyhound's position is that it cannot refuse the searches by law enforcement.
Gravley said he believed that asking passengers for permission to look in their suitcases is a separate issue from randomly searching cargo bays, but that he had no complaints about either practice.
Expect no change in police strategies.
Even if state troopers don't catch bus riders with drugs, they figure they scare would-be drug carriers by making a certain amount of noise.
"If we can interdict the flow of drugs through this, it's worthwhile," Ohl said. "But just word of our presence gets around. And that has a deterrent effect."
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