Put drug dealer’s numbers on hold: Police
Police across the country are looking for new powers to seize, jam or de-activate the phone numbers of street-level “dial-a-dope” drug dealers.
Currently, when police make an arrest and seize a suspected dealer’s phone, its number lives on and can be used by associates or even hijacked by rivals to keep the flow of illicit drugs going.
At their annual conference last week, police chiefs passed a resolution calling on lawmakers to give them the ability to cut off those lucrative phone numbers.
“Once a telephone number or ‘drug line’ has been established, it can operate non-stop at all hours of the day and distribute drugs to a broad base of customers,” says a background document attached to the resolution.
“As a result, once established, each drug line has an inherent value within the drug trafficking realm and can be bought, traded or taken over by rival drug trafficking networks.
“Law enforcement has had limited success addressing these drug lines.”
Jonathan Dawe, a Toronto criminal lawyer, said one thing that concerns him is if police start unilaterally cancelling people’s phone numbers before charges have been laid.
“It would be something quite more disturbing (if ) police, on their own initiative, in cases where they don’t have sufficient grounds to lay a charge, can nevertheless interfere with people’s cellphones,” he said.
“If there was some provision that let (police) go around cancelling numbers willy-nilly … it would also create a new way in which people could harass their enemies — send a tip to the cops about a cellphone, get their number de-listed.”
Bill Fordy, chief superintendent of the RCMP detachment in Surrey, B.C., which has seen an outbreak of drug-turf violence this year and spearheaded the resolution, did not rule out the possibility of cutting off phones without a charge.
“Police are seeking lawful authority to disrupt these activities when reasonable grounds exist to believe that the line is being used for the furtherance of a criminal activity like the trafficking of nonprescription, illegal drugs,” he said via email.
“There will be occasions when an arrest has been made and charges submitted. The lawful disruption of the ‘line’ at this point would enhance police and public safety.”
Fordy said his drug investigators have explored several options, including asking service providers to suspend phone numbers associated with criminal activity, but providers have generally been reluctant to do so without a court order.
Investigators also looked into using auto-dialling computers to bombard a drug trafficker’s phone number with calls to make it unusable. But this technique would amount to a “denial of service” attack and would contravene the Criminal Code.
“As technology becomes more advanced and we see the private sector developing the ability to encrypt things at a greater level, we feel that creation of a law enabling us to seize that (phone line) rather than have to decrypt it is a much more effective use of our resources and time,” Fordy said.