The raid was a serious mistake, and somebody in the department should suffer the consequences.
On the other hand, there's times when the police chief and his subordinates really screw up, like this:
Police raid El Rey, say antibiotics sold illegally
Officers arrest five people at two stores; drugs are available over the counter in Mexico
By JESSE GARZA and LEAH THORSEN
jgarza@journalsentinel.com
"We don't make drugs here, we make tortillas."
- Ernesto Villarreal,
owner of Mercado El Rey
Last Updated: Sept. 18, 2002
Squads of armed Milwaukee police officers swarmed through two south side grocery stores and a tortilla factory Wednesday, executing search warrants for prescription antibiotics they suspected were being sold over the counter at the stores.
But owners of one of the businesses said the brand-name remedies are commonly sold at many Latino-owned stores and said officers trained weapons on customers and employees and used other "heavy-handed" tactics.
"How dangerous can (the remedies) be that you would have to put a gun to the back of an employee's head?" asked Olivia Villarreal, who, along with her husband, Ernesto Villarreal, operate Mercado El Rey, 1023 S. Cesar Chavez Drive.
Police raided the store and its warehouse and tortilla factory at 1530 S. Muskego Ave. They also raided El Campesino Grocery, a separate business at 635 W. Greenfield Ave.
Five people were arrested on suspicion of unlawfully delivering prescription drugs, a felony charge, Police Chief Arthur Jones said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.
Since May, undercover officers made 10 buys at the stores of prescription drugs, including ampicillin; all are used to fight infections. The drugs are widely used antibiotics that are sold commonly without prescription in Mexico.
The drugs were sold from behind the counter, meaning they weren't sitting on a store shelf.
Police received information from the state Department of Regulation and Licensing that illegal sales were taking place, Jones said.
Neither store is licensed to dispense prescription medicine, he said.
Those arrested at El Rey are a 23-year-old clerk and the 34-year-old store manager. At El Campesino, the 40-year-old owner, his 35-year-old sister and a 28-year-old clerk were taken into police custody.
Uniformed officers are involved in all search warrants as part of department policy, Jones said. He said the warrants executed Wednesday followed that policy, although he wouldn't give details.
That same policy is followed whether executing search warrants in a crack house or a grocery store, Jones said.
"The process by which we execute search warrants is legal," Jones said, adding that Spanish-speaking officers took part in the raid.
But Ernesto Villarreal said police would have employed much different tactics had the object of their investigation been a white-owned business outside of the Latino community.
Police "went up and down the aisles and said, 'Drop everything in your hands, and put your arms up,' " he said, adding that weapons were also trained on customers in the store's restaurant.
"The customers were here 20, 30 minutes with their hands cuffed until (police) could decipher who was an employee and who was not," Olivia Villarreal claimed. "The rest of the employees had their hands up for 40 minutes."
Ernesto Villarreal said the items confiscated included products such as "Mejoral," a pain remedy manufactured in Mexico that his store buys from a Chicago distributor.
"They also have Mejoralito for children," he said. "These are household items found in many Mexican-American households."
Harvey Bernstein, a family physician for more than 30 years in private practice in Milwaukee, said it is absolutely necessary that a doctor evaluate a patient to determine whether antibiotics are the best treatment for the patient's safety.
For instance, people may know they are allergic to penicillin but may not know that amoxicillin and ampicillin are versions of penicillin that could cause adverse health reactions, he said.
Former state Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske, now interim dean at Marquette University Law School, said that the state statutes alleged to have been violated by those arrested are in place to protect consumers.
"This is certainly not the classic selling-cocaine-on-a-corner case, but it's still important these laws be enforced," Geske said. "But a prosecutor always needs to look at what justice demands in any particular case."
"If there's no prior record and no knowledge that these were prescription drugs, the likelihood that (the clerk) would be charged with a felony is not great," she said.
"The store owners are more at risk," she said. "If it is shown they had no idea that these were prescribed drugs, I think there will be compassion shown to them in the process."
Olivia Villarreal said they had no reason to believe that it was illegal to sell the products, and, had investigators approached the business about the matter, the business would have cooperated fully.
Her husband wondered why police searched the tortilla factory, delivery trucks and the store with drug-sniffing dogs.
"If they thought we were selling cocaine or something, I could see that," he said. "I think they thought they were going to find real drugs or make it look like we were making the stuff here."
"We don't make drugs here, we make tortillas," he said.
Employees at the tortilla factory, including two pregnant women, were forced to the ground at gunpoint, handcuffed and not allowed to shut off machinery used to make tortilla chips, Olivia Villarreal said.
"They begged them if they could shut off the machines," she said. "If the machines keep running with no product, they can overheat and cause a fire."
About 30 employees and 15 customers were in the store and about 20 workers at the factory at the time of the raids, she said.
Many of the employees are immigrants from Latin American countries where police officers are indistinguishable from military and paramilitary forces that terrorize civilians, said store employee Blanca Ferrusquia.
Ferrusquia, 35, said she immigrated to the United States in 1980 from El Salvador, where her two sisters were taken from her family's home by men in uniform and later executed.
"That's the way (police) came in here," she said. "The first thing you see is the rifles, and they say, 'Put your hands in the air.' "
Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Sept. 19, 2002.
:barf: