Ham-handed searches

The overzealous pat-downs conducted by Drug Enforcement Agents on a group of Chinese tourists at the Saipan International Airport on Oct. 4 was unfortunate in that it has created yet another international embarrassment for the CNMI, at a time when we are trying to carve a niche on this rapidly growing travel market.

True, the DEA is mandated to stop the influx of illegal drugs into the CNMI and the rising scourge of drug addiction in the community places more pressure on law enforcers to plug all the holes through which all these illegal drugs are coming through. However, we are an island community; we don’t exactly have porous borders and there are very specific points through which any contraband may enter the local market. Previous Department of Justice reports have shown that most drugs enter the CNMI through cargo or the mail system. Shouldn’t the DEA put more effort into screening these? Packages and cargo don’t complain, so an intensive surveillance system on all packages entering the Commonwealth will hardly create the same bad publicity that we are now experiencing as a fallout from this ham-handed effort by the DEA.

The fact that they were screening tourists should have given them enough reason to handle the matter even more delicately. The agency certainly has the statutory authority to corral more than a hundred tourists and do intensive searches on them but just because it can legally do that does not make it conscionable. There is always no excuse for being boorish. DEA agents are supposed to undergo training on analyzing behavior; they’re supposed to know the telltale signs of a person who is trying to hide something. However, the incident at the Saipan airport, fairly or not, smacked of racial profiling rather than an intelligent application of psychology and behavioral analysis.

The local House of Representatives has already issued a strongly worded resolution demanding that the Justice Department conduct an investigation into this incident and the local visitors bureau has already apologized to the Chinese government for the humiliating searches its citizens were subjected to (which, by the way, only turned up plant and food produce and cigarettes above the allowable limit). The harm, however, has already been done. Short of going back to all these tourists, apologizing to each and every one of them, and bringing them back to the islands for a free vacation, the only thing now that could conceivably be done is to ensure that this fiasco doesn’t happen again. There has to be a better way to do these things. In fact, there already is: it’s called random searches. And just because one is doing this does not automatically mean one may dispense of basic courtesy and decent behavior.

The DEA, whether it likes it or not, must strike a balance between making sure that illegal drugs don’t enter the community and ensuring that tourists are accorded the utmost courtesy and welcome that is their right as paying visitors to the Northern Mariana Islands. Doing otherwise would unnecessarily jeopardize the only good thing going for the CNMI right now and, with the economy the way it is, we can’t afford to be boors. [B][I](Saipan Tribune)[/I][/B]