If you wander through any drug infested community you will hear the same complaint, that when police lock up one dealer, there are another fifty to take his place. The objective is to arrest as many dealers as possible, sweeping the neighborhood clean of every dealer and possible reinforcement. This technique involves undercover officers making controlled drug buys from street level dealers, at which time the dealer is stopped, photographed, positively identified and searched. But rather than take the suspect into custody and run the risk of having information about the operation leak out, the dealer is released to be arrested later along with all of his or her cohorts.
Neighbors simply wake up and the dealers are gone.
Either they arrest the suspect on the spot or not at all. Our position is that these suspects are arrested even if they are not initially charged or taken into custody. We see no reason why police should be forced to place a suspect through the entire booking and bail procedure when it could jeopardize a much larger operation and serves no useful law enforcement purpose except to take the dealer off the street for only a matter of days or even hours. Currently, we are in the process of taking this case, called Maryland v. Evans, to the Court of Appeals. In fact, police may find it more useful to stop a suspect who has allegedly committed a crime, gather the evidence and release the person on a citation.