For a week back in the summer of 2010, the Albuquerque Police Department conducted a sting operation in Downtown Albuquerque. Officers placed backpacks on the sidewalk containing a laptop computer and other items and watched them.
When people picked up the backpacks and didn’t immediately call police to report finding a lost item, they were arrested and charged with felony larceny.
Sting operations are an effective tool police use to catch criminals by presenting them with the opportunity to break the law. A prostitution sting, in which an officer poses as a prostitute, is likely to lure in only the people who would break the law by hiring a prostitute. A bait-car sting, in which police leave the keys in a vehicle and wait for someone to drive off in it, tends to nab car thieves.
The backpack bait operation had an unintended consequence: the possibility of arresting law-abiding citizens.
The city’s then-public safety director, Darren White, quickly pulled the plug on the backpack sting, stating the obvious: “Someone could pick up the backpack with the intention of trying to find the owner maybe at a later time and isn’t necessarily something they may do immediately. They may take it home and find out who the computer belongs to.”
Before it was nixed, the backpack sting resulted in 10 arrests. Nine of the cases, including this one, were dropped immediately, and the 10th was also eventually dropped.
No harm, no foul?
Hardly. At least two lawsuits have been filed as a result of the sting in which people who were jailed and who maintain they weren’t stealing the backpacks allege their rights were violated by false arrest and police entrapment.
Federal judges and juries can sort out whether the sting was a legitimate police tactic, or whether it violated the U.S. Constitution and caused damages.
I’d like to look at the episode through the eyes of one kid and what he’s learned about right and wrong.
Fabian Chavez is 10 now and in the fifth grade at Central Elementary in Belen. He’s a good swimmer, a happy student and, from what I hear, an ace on the tetherball court.
He was 9 on the day in July that he went with his mother, Laverne Gonzales, and his mother’s boyfriend, John Quinn, on an errand in Downtown Albuquerque. Fabian and his mother ate lunch at Lindy’s Coffee Shop, then walked a few blocks to meet Quinn and take him back to the restaurant.
As the three were walking along Gold Street near Fifth, they noticed a backpack sitting on the sidewalk at an ATM near a bus stop. They looked around, didn’t see anyone nearby and assumed it had been left behind, lost.
“I thought somebody maybe had forgot it when they got on the bus,” Fabian said.
Fabian’s family had taught him what to do when you find something that isn’t yours. “We try to figure out who it belongs to, and then if there’s a number, we call, and then we go and return it,” he told me.
Do you ever keep it? “No,” Fabian said. “That’s the wrong thing to do.”
They didn’t want to leave the pack on the street because they thought it might get stolen. None of them had a cellphone, so Fabian hitched the backpack onto his shoulders and they all went back to Lindy’s and sat back down at their table, and Quinn ordered a hamburger.
When he had finished eating, they opened the pack and Gonzales pulled out some men’s clothing. There was no wallet containing a driver’s license or another ID. But there was a laptop computer, and Gonzales opened it to see if the screen might give any clue to its owner. Even though she was unemployed at the time, Gonzales’ background was in banking, and she said she never considered keeping any valuables the backpack might hold.
An Albuquerque Police Department icon popped up and Gonzales said, “This belongs to a cop.” Before anyone could think of how to contact police, police contacted them. Officers swooped in, ordered Quinn and Gonzales to their feet and handcuffed them. A police officer stayed with Fabian while Quinn and his mother were taken to jail.
Fabian was scared and crying and barely comforted by a waitress who told him it would be OK. “I just got all freaked out,” he told me.
His mother and Quinn both spent two days in jail before bailing out, and their arrest was on the TV news. When he went back to school, Fabian was taunted that his mother was a criminal. He finished out fourth grade and switched schools over the summer.
But the biggest switch was in the internal voice that used to tell him the right thing to do was to pitch in and try to help. It’s saying something different now.
I asked Fabian what he would do today if he saw a wallet or a backpack on the street that he thought was lost.
“Just walk,” he said. “I wouldn’t pick it up.”
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie Linthicum at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
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