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In an era where drug policies are evolving, the challenges faced by law enforcement have never been more complex. With the decriminalization and legalization of certain substances, the narrative around drug enforcement has shifted. Yet, the reality on the streets tells a different story. Organized crime, black markets, and overdose deaths continue to rise, posing significant threats to public safety.
On this episode of the Policing Matters podcast, host Jim Dudley speaks with Mike Sena, Executive Director of the Northern California High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area and the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, who provides a candid look into the ongoing fight against drug trafficking organizations and the societal impacts of drug-related crime.
About our guest
Mike Sena is the Executive Director of the Northern California High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (NC HIDTA) and the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC). Director Sena has a diverse twenty-eight (28) year law enforcement career as a veteran investigator with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, the California Department of Justice, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, and the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office.
Director Sena serves as the president of the National Fusion Center Association (NFCA), and chairs the Criminal Intelligence Coordinating Council (CICC) and the HIDTA Directors’ Intelligence Committee. He also serves on law enforcement and homeland security advisory committees for members of the President’s Cabinet, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Attorney General of the United States.
About our sponsor
This episode of the Policing Matters podcast is sponsored by Skydio. Learn more about how Skydio enhances public safety and operational efficiency by visiting Skydio.com.
Memorable quotes
- “When you look at the decrease in penalties on things like marijuana, we’ve seen an increase over the years of violence associated with marijuana trafficking.”
- “The concept that drug trafficking organizations would vanish with legalization was naive. The black market is alive and well.”
- “This rescheduling of marijuana just makes it even harder for us to deal with those drug trafficking organizations that are making so much money off of marijuana and fentanyl.”
- “It’s not a war on drugs; it’s a war on those organizations that are profiting off the death and harm to the members of our communities.”
- “We have more people dying daily from drugs than any man-made threat we’ve ever seen before, yet we’re still not at the point where people are saying we’ve got to deal with the addiction issue.”
Key takeaways
- Increasing violence and black market activity: Legalization and reduced penalties for certain drugs have not diminished violence or black market activity; in some cases, these issues have escalated.
- Fentanyl’s devastating impact: Fentanyl is a significant threat, with overdose deaths soaring across the country. The production and distribution of fentanyl by drug trafficking organizations, particularly those in Mexico, remain major challenges.
- The role of organized crime: Drug trafficking organizations are deeply entrenched, and their activities extend beyond drug distribution to include human trafficking and other forms of organized crime.
- Need for coordinated response: Combating the drug crisis requires a multi-faceted approach, involving law enforcement, public health, and international cooperation to disrupt the flow of drugs and dismantle trafficking networks.
- Ongoing debate on drug policy: As policies around drugs like marijuana continue to evolve, the debate on their impacts—both positive and negative—remains contentious. Law enforcement faces increasing challenges as the legal landscape shifts.
Additional resources
- National Fusion Center Association
- High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas
- Drug Overdose Death Rates
- Drug Overdose Deaths in the United States, 2002–2022
- DEA will move to reclassify marijuana as less dangerous drug
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Episode transcript
Jim Dudley: Many of you would agree that law enforcement has given away the drug issues as more and more states decriminalize or even legalize drugs, or reduce the penalties to those similar for other nuisance crimes. Despite drugs being declared a health issue, we have seen the harms of drug-related crime, including the black market, robbery, illegal grow facilities, organized gang activity, human trafficking, and even homicide. Overdose fatalities have grown annually in our nation from 20,000 deaths in 2000 to over 100,000 annually. The CDC shows that the age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths has increased from 8.2 deaths per 100,000 standard population in 2002 to 32.6 in 2022. I’ve got the links below if you’re interested in reading more from the Centers for Disease Control.
In May 2024, we had news that the White House is signaling moving marijuana from the number one Schedule I drug—the most harmful, the most addictive with no medical benefits—to now a Class III drug, less harmful on the scale. Our guest today has been the Director of the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC) and the High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) for more than 20 years. It’s great to see you again, Mike Sena. Welcome to Policing Matters.
Mike Sena: Jim, thank you, and I really appreciate the invitation to be on this program.
Jim Dudley: Yeah, I’ve worked with Mike for several years during my career. He’s been a great help. He provides the Northern California region with training and equipment and even personnel in some cases to fight the war on drugs. Mike, we gave up our part of the—I guess we claimed an armistice in the War on Drugs. We turned it over to Public Health. How’s that going so far?
Mike Sena: Well, I have to tell you, I never looked at this as a War on Drugs. It’s combating the threats to our country from drug trafficking organizations, organized crime—those folks that are harming our nation. When the HIDTA program was originally established in 1988, the High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas around the country—there are 33 of those right now—cover over 60% of the U.S. population. There are over 22,000 Task Force officers full-time that are dedicated to this mission space.
When we look at the movement towards legalization of narcotics, bringing down penalties, adjusting penalties for even theft—which, unfortunately, you’ve got theft being driven by this drug market—if a person’s a drug addict, in many cases, it’s hard for them to work or have a desire to work, so they’ve got to make money to support these habits. We had a lot of things change, especially in California, with adjustments in the law: reducing penalties for possession, reducing penalties for even distribution in some cases, and also reduction in penalties for theft. We saw an insane change in our environment across law enforcement, especially since those changes were made. The impact is what we’re seeing in cities like San Francisco, probably one of those cities that has been hit the hardest. You look at just a small concentrated area where distribution of things like fentanyl has blown up.
As you looked at the decrease in penalties and things like marijuana—we talk about the scheduling of marijuana—we’ve seen just an increase over the years of violence associated with marijuana trafficking. The concept and thought that drug trafficking organizations and individuals who are illicitly growing marijuana are all going to change all day and the market’s going to dry up because of regulation—well, it’s actually harder for those businesses that are trying to comply with the regulations. And why would a person that’s selling the drugs for a lot less leave? So, a whole gray market has built out—a gray market that is so flush with money right now that that’s where the violence comes from. It comes from people who are heavily engaged in distribution and exchanging cash every day. We’re talking about millions of dollars that, of course, isn’t being taxed.
The end result is, in many ways, when you talk about people who get addicted to and start using marijuana, people go, “Well, you can’t get addicted to that.” No, there are people going into treatment for addiction to marijuana because they smoke it all the time. It’s impacting their life. We’ve seen what marijuana consumption does to the brains of adolescents, and everyone agrees that’s a bad thing. So, if it’s bad for the kids, why is it good for the adults? It’s a hard thing to see out there because the same groups that are moving marijuana are moving other drugs. It’s poly-drug organizations. You can get your marijuana, your fentanyl, your cocaine, your meth, and your marijuana any way you want it. We saw that as legalization occurred in California for marijuana, there was too much in the state of California, so it started getting pushed out across the country. Our marijuana bled off to violence and other crimes across the entire United States.
We haven’t seen a lot of great changes with legalization. So, this rescheduling of it just makes it even harder for us to deal with those drug trafficking organizations that are making so much money off of marijuana and fentanyl right now.
Jim Dudley: Yeah, and I think that’s where the narrative is being pushed, right? You have, you know, follow the money once again. We see an industry pushing for legalization—or at least, I mean, it’s been a decade-long fight of lowering marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III. It opens the door a little bit wider, just like you said. But then the black market—you know, I’ve had economists at the university that I work at tell me the black market’s going to go away. This is what they said 10 years ago. The black market is going to disappear. You just talked about the gray market, but I’d counter that the black market is indeed alive and well. They don’t have to pay the tariffs. They don’t have to pay the taxes. They don’t have the overhead. We’ve seen the consequences of the “legitimate” pot stores being robbed, being burglarized, and organized crime as part and parcel of the marijuana trade. It’s a dichotomy. You have the proponents saying it’s safe; there are definitely medical benefits to it. Then, on the other side, you see, well, nobody wants to flood the prisons with people selling marijuana or using marijuana. But just like you said, I think if we go back to the CDC, you’ll see study after study that shows some really chronic health problems that come from chronic marijuana use.
But, you know, we’re not where Oregon was a year ago when Oregon essentially declared drugs legal. They saw, you know, that plane hit the ground, and then they repealed it just this January. Are we going to have to go through another phase of filling up hospitals and psychiatric facilities until we get back to level again with the whole drug issue?
Mike Sena: I mean, that’s a hard point. I see a lot of this as an experiment with people’s lives. There’s a core group of folks who have been on a long mission of saying, “Hey, we think that all drugs should be legal,” but the consequences of that—and when you look at Oregon and the toll it has on people’s lives and the community—I mean, let’s look at fentanyl. As you mentioned, the hundreds of thousands of people that have died—if we had a mass casualty incident with 800 deaths in the city of San Francisco, you would think we’d have the mobilization of every organization to combat that, and it would be done. If we had an Al-Qaeda attack, an ISIS attack, or whatever the terrorist group is attack in San Francisco, we’d have every national asset in the country mobilizing to deal with that threat. In the past, when we’ve had attacks like in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania—9/11—all those incidents end up exploding. You look at how we mobilized every asset in our nation and military to combat that threat. We have more people than that dying daily in our country from all the threats that we’re seeing across the board. It has not changed.
I have to say that we started a project back in May of last year to combat the fentanyl threat, and we are dealing with enormous obstacles. Many of those obstacles are political obstacles. But we’re looking at a threat from individuals that we’ve identified—up to 500 subjects operating within the Tenderloin that are fentanyl dealers, and, of course, dealing other drugs. At what point do we change the paradigm? Do we say that this is a bad idea, that there is an actual threat killing more people in America than any man-made threat we’ve ever seen before? Unfortunately, I don’t think nationwide we’re at that point.
A lot of times, we look at the community that is addicted to drugs, and people don’t associate that with friends and family. But as we look at the fentanyl and opioid overdose issues, I can’t go in a room and ask people, “Does anyone who is impacted by this have a friend or family member addicted or someone they know who has died?” It’s rare to find a person in that room that doesn’t raise their hand. But we’re still not at the point where people are saying we’ve got to deal with the addiction issue. Enforcement is part of it, and the HIDTA program is big on enforcement, but we also have to work with the public health piece of it. Just saying it’s one group’s problem to deal with is wrong. It’s a societal problem.
Jim Dudley: Oh, the domino effect—you mentioned it. The theft, the car break-ins, all of it—the homelessness, the drug-addicted, the mentally ill. Mental illness and drugs seem to have this symbiotic relationship where people tend to self-medicate because of the mental illness.
Mike Sena: Yeah, and we can’t ignore it. But it’s one of those things where people have said, “Well, the War on Drugs failed.” Well, the War on Drugs—I mean, there was no War on Drugs. We’re not fighting drugs; we’re fighting the organizations that are profiting off the death of Americans and the enslavement of Americans. When you think of a drug addict, nobody wants to be a drug addict. Nobody, when they were a little kid, said, “Oh, I want to grow up to be an addict.” That’s not the way it works. It works with somebody out there being offered some type of narcotic at some point in their life and going, “I like this narcotic; I like the way it makes me feel better than this, better than that, better than anything in life eventually.” That’s why fentanyl is one of those huge issues out there. Sometimes it starts with marijuana usage, it starts with lower prescription drug usage, it starts with something else. No one just—rarely do you have people who say, “Yeah, I want to be a fentanyl addict.” They start with other drugs and are chasing that high that whatever drugs they used to start with gave them, that feeling they had in their body that nothing else would match.
When you look at people who are addicted to fentanyl, many of them started out with other drugs. There are those who accidentally take fentanyl because they think they’re taking some other drug—Xanax or something like that, a pill—and that’s why that campaign of “one pill can kill” is so important. But there are those out there who start with some other drug and are chasing that greatest high they ever had. Every person who has taken fentanyl that I’ve ever talked to said it’s the best high they’ve ever had in their life. There’s nothing that will ever feel like that first time. But then they have to take that drug every day, and that costs money. They’re enslaved to that drug, so they will do anything for that drug. Some people do—they rob, they steal, they lie, they sell their bodies, they traffic other people. Trying to stop this cycle that our nation is in is what we’re engaged in. We work with public health; we work with those folks. But it always worries me whenever I get out there and somebody says, “You know, we shouldn’t do this War on Drugs; people should not be incarcerated.” I agree. I don’t want a bunch of people in prison who are addicts; I want them in treatment. But if you can’t get a person with a hammer over their head sometimes and say, “We need you to get treatment, and if you don’t get treatment, you’re going to go to prison,” we don’t have that anymore. We don’t have that ability to say, “All right,” because here’s the thing: if you’re given a choice of, “All right, you can get yourself drug treatment, or you can spend 30 days in jail,” some will say, “I’ll spend 30 days in jail. I like drugs, and withdrawal is painful. Who wants to go through that?” So they’ll do and buy their time, and potentially they can get drugs there too.
Looking at that from the aspect of how we stop this cycle—we’ve got to stop it from the beginning. We’ve got to stop it from those lower-level drugs that are kind of the kindling to the fire of a lifetime of addiction, which we all pay for. We pay for that person’s— We pay for that person’s time that they are repeatedly in the hospital, and there are people that are literally dying over and over again on streets across America, especially every day in San Francisco. You have three people, but we’re reviving them, reviving them, reviving them.
Jim Dudley: Yeah, we are. Hey, so let me ask you this: Putting on your HIDTA hat, your High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area—you say you have 33 HIDTAs around the country?
Mike Sena: Thirty-three, yes.
Jim Dudley: And we know marijuana—you could grow it just about anywhere, really. We’ve got the good climate here in California. But the initiation of fentanyl—it’s not like a meth lab, right? It’s coming up from the borders? Is it made here? Can we control the chemicals that are used to make it? Where’s that fight right now?
Mike Sena: That one’s even more complex. When you look at the chemical production of it, initially—and it’s got great medical use, I mean, there is nothing that kills pain more quickly, more effectively than fentanyl when medically dispensed. But the problem is, when we started seeing it blow up in the United States, the majority of the labs were in China—unregulated labs. A lot of that fentanyl was coming right into SFO, coming in through the airmail facility there, and being distributed across the country. We’ve got these great logistics for shipping things these days—you can order anything from anywhere in the world and get it here in days, right? So, same thing with fentanyl. People could go onto the black market, go online, and order as much as they wanted. We had that fentanyl being shipped into San Francisco and then being distributed all across the country through mail shipments and through carrier shipments.
We had actually set up a task force to work at that airmail facility, and they’re doing a phenomenal job. Within about six months, they figured out, “Hey, we’re getting all this dope seized, and we need to change operations.” At about the same time, Mexican drug trafficking organizations were having those conversations with Chinese groups, saying, “Hey, you’re having problems with distribution; we’re great at distribution.” I was there in the ’90s, working narcotics in Southern California when the Colombians were looking for better ways to move their dope with less liability into the country, and the Mexican drug trafficking organizations took that over. Same thing—Mexican drug trafficking organizations said, “Hey, we’ve got meth labs; we’ve had meth labs since we did a lot of work in the ’90s. I was part of that, to combat meth lab production in California. It became so hard to produce meth in California that they moved the labs down to Mexico. They already had a lab production mechanism in place; they just needed to know how to do it. They just needed the right people to show them how to produce the fentanyl, and the chemical supply—still China, still India, still other countries in Asia that are shipping those chemicals into Mexico. They’re producing ton quantities daily. That’s why we’re dealing with the 14,000-plus kilograms that HIDTA task forces have seized. That’s a lot of freaking fentanyl when you think that micrograms will kill a person—14,000-plus kilograms seized. That’s only a portion of what’s out there.
So that production level now in Mexico—it’s out of control. It really is. The price at the bulk is being produced and shipped from pills is pennies, and those pennies at the border are $20 pills, or maybe more, in a city like San Francisco if you’re buying pills.
Jim Dudley: And that’s the intentional trafficking here. We know that people are buying pills that they think are one thing, but if it’s not a good quality product, it might be spiked with fentanyl, and the customer doesn’t even know it.
Mike Sena: No, and that’s the problem. That’s where we see a number of deaths. We’ve had, actually, in powder form where people thought they were buying cocaine, they snorted it, it’s pure fentanyl, and they just dropped dead. The other thing that we’ve seen, which is even more concerning, is xylazine. Xylazine is an animal tranquilizer, but adding that for a more sustained high—it’s cheap, it’s extremely cheap—using that and mixing it in, to them, is just genius. The only bad part is—and this is something that we looked at early on with fentanyl—there were a lot of people in the early days before fentanyl really blew up that said, “Why would drug trafficking organizations want to kill their customers? It makes no sense; you get no return business on that.” So, they just thought that was never going to happen—until it did. Until people started taking fentanyl and realizing that was the best high they ever had and that they were willing to die for it. Now, you’ve got people that are getting mixed xylazine. The bad part about xylazine is we talk about naloxone out there. Naloxone impedes and insulates those cells of the opioid in fentanyl and keeps it from killing the person—keeps them from going into pulmonary arrest and dying. There is nothing for humans that will counteract xylazine. They have it for dogs and animals because that’s what it was built for, but they don’t have a counteragent that will bring a person back from xylazine. So, if you have a person that overdoses on fentanyl and xylazine, you could give them as much naloxone as you want, it’s not going to bring them back.
That’s a current big fear of ours. We see this huge flood of xylazine, potentially in the future, mixed up with fentanyl.
If our one thing to bring people back doesn’t work anymore, what do you do? When we talk about the model that the drug trafficking organizations use—that philosophy of “Why would they ever let their customers die?”—it’s because not all of them die. New customers are coming in, new addicts are coming in.
Jim Dudley: Yeah, there’s no shortage of customers.
Mike Sena: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Before we started our heavy operations in May of last year to combat the street dealing of fentanyl, dealers were lined up, and customers were lined up. The dealers we had were taking turns. There was so much business out there that they could literally take a break and let another guy deal while they took their break. It was like this non-compete: “Hey, we’re all making money here, and we could be on this corner all day long selling.” It was almost like unionization: “We’re going to take a union break here, and you can sell while I’m on my break.”
Jim Dudley: Wow, craziness.
Mike Sena: That’s why we had this flood of dealers in San Francisco on every corner. They were selling right in front of the federal buildings in San Francisco, right across the street from the federal buildings, and in some cases, right on the curb of the newer federal building. It got to the point where even judges were saying, “What can we do to get these people to stop selling out on the street?”
Jim Dudley: That’s ironic because they are the last stand against these dealers, and we’re still seeing the lenient sentencing.
Mike Sena: Yeah, it’s really hard to see. We have a whole group of juvenile dealers because, as you know, the juvenile justice system doesn’t deal that well on many levels, but dealing with drug dealers—oftentimes, there was no one in major cities that’s like, “What do you do with all these kids?” In many cases, they return to their parents, and then they’re right back on the street dealing drugs the next day—or sometimes even the same day.
Jim Dudley: And it’s no accident because the adult drug dealers know that the penalties are less harsh for the juveniles.
Mike Sena: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
Jim Dudley: Mike, you must be talking with your fellow directors across the country. What’s the common thread these days? Is the drug issue worse in some parts of the nation? Are we an epicenter here in Northern California?
Mike Sena: It’s bad across the entire country. I wish I had good news saying, “Hey, there are pockets of success where fentanyl doesn’t exist or overdoses don’t exist or the black market, gray market for marijuana production isn’t leading to violence because of all the cash that’s being moved back and forth.” But it’s probably in the worst state I’ve seen in the 31 years I’ve been working. That’s based on the number of deaths, the level of violence. We had the early 90s—gang warfare that we saw in the 80s and 90s with the crack epidemic out there—but what we are seeing now is we’ve got a greater number of deaths. That’s because of the overdoses and because of people getting in that cycle of addiction. The property crime and all the other things that are associated with sustaining that—we’re in a bad place.
The things that we are trying to do are, one, we know the major drug trafficking organizations in Mexico that are the primary distributors of the drugs. There’s a huge effort to focus on those drug trafficking organizations and try to cut profits. That’s the one thing we have to figure out because they keep producing the narcotics—they can’t print money. Although for five to ten years now, selling drugs has almost been a license to print money because there’s so much cash that is produced, and so many addicts are enslaved every day to do their criminal activity to support the drug habit and pay these drug trafficking organizations large, huge amounts of money.
The things that we are doing: focusing on those dealers out there, targeting them. Just to give you an example, in San Francisco, we started a fentanyl distribution disruption working group in May of last year to bring together federal, state, local, tribal—all of our partners in public safety, along with our partners in public health, emergency management—everybody working together to try to address the threats on multiple levels. Along the way, we did have the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting last year. That was a huge event, and there was a huge push to say, “We’ve got to deal with all these dealers. There’s a dealer on every corner—or I should say one dealer, multiple dealers in certain parts of the city.” Primarily in the Tenderloin area, where there was just such an influx and people dying every day and overdosing every day. Not a day goes by without an ambulance and fire truck going by, picking up overdose victims.
Our goal has been to, one, identify those dealers. We’re over 700 dealers identified. Over 450 of those dealers were actually identified as Honduran nationals. Thanks to some great investigative reporting by a reporter at the *San Francisco Chronicle,* Megan Cassidy, she actually spent time with those drug dealers, and they told her a lot of things that she printed about where their money was going, how they were making cash, and how much they were making. Some of these folks were saying they’re making $350,000 a year as a drug dealer on the streets of San Francisco.
Jim Dudley: And they’re not spending it here in San Francisco; they’re taking it back to their— I read the series. They’re taking it back to their home country and building these mansions there.
Mike Sena: Oh, absolutely. There have been some news episodes recently in the last few weeks of reporters going to those same locations and seeing these folks off the deaths of 800 people a year in San Francisco are building great homes in their own villages and their own areas in Honduras. To top it off, they’re putting the logos of the San Francisco sports teams on the gates of their homes and murals on their houses because they’ve made such a profit, and their lives have changed for their families down there at the expense of the families here.
Part of that effort, beyond identifying those folks, is finding out how they’re moving their money. We did, over the last year, thanks to some partners at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, IRS, FBI, and DEA, find money service businesses that were laundering money for these Hondurans, who were sending money back to Mexico and back to Honduras to build these very large homes. We’re trying to cut out that portion of it from the federal and local prosecutors.
I have to say that, thanks to San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, thanks to our U.S. Attorney Ismail Ramsey, they have actually been stepping up to the plate to start working on the prosecution side. There were no consequences in San Francisco prior to Brooke coming in—very minimal. So, not a lot of great prosecution going on, not a lot of trying to take down this organization. On the HIDTA side, our part was, “We need to identify the bad guys. We need to help coordinate the entities and partners and bring them together to the table to talk about how we’re going to combat the threat.”
Jim Dudley: Are you doing that as a RICO Act sort of prosecution through the feds?
Mike Sena: Well, it hasn’t got to the RICO piece yet. That probably is the next iteration of this. The initial phase of this was, “We’ve got to take care of the dealers on the streets immediately.” The U.S. Attorney’s Office has taken cases and has already done over 75 cases on the Honduran traffickers, where they’re given a short sentence, immediate deportation, and longer prison sentences if they return. That has a greater impact because, I’ll tell you, before, when SFPD would arrest somebody, they would laugh it off. They’re like, “Hey, I’m going to go in for a day, maybe, and I’ll be back out making money.” Then, they’d get in the car, and they’re like, “Oh no, you’re going to the federal building. You’re going to be prosecuted federally, and you’re going to get prison time.” You got people crying then. It has that immediate impact of taking that person out of circulation—they’re no longer going to be dealing drugs in San Francisco.
So, that’s one part of the push. The other part of the push is working on those that are buying. We don’t want to harm the addict; we want to get the addict treatment. But if we can’t get the addict into a system where they can get treatment, where they can get off the streets, it’s not going to work. Working that angle is part of this as well. But I have to say that the combination of all those agencies working together, going out there and getting those dealers off the street, is one piece of it. True, those dealers are getting a supply from Mexico. That’s where DEA has a huge foothold in that international drug trafficking aspect of it, trying to work with the Mexican authorities and other government partners to combat and really go after those groups in Mexico. Until we can get that mitigated, until we can get those labs taken down, they’re going to keep producing drugs, and they’re going to keep getting across the border. So, that’s the strategy that we’re working right now—we’ve got to deal with it at the international level and the local level at the same time. We’ve got to identify their money flow and how that money is getting out there. We did have a money services business person who was laundering money for them who was recently sentenced for laundering that cash.
Trying to figure out that cash flow, stop that—but also, San Francisco is an epicenter for distribution for hundreds and hundreds of miles because everyone knows if they get to the Tenderloin, they don’t have to know anybody. They just have to get on the street and find those guys who are dealing, and they’ll get their supply. That supply is going to other places.
Jim Dudley: And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg, right? We’ve seen it, like you said. I was working on the streets in the ’80s and the ’90s, and one of the things that seemed to happen overnight was it went from street corner dealing to inside, to going electronically. First, it was through pagers, and now it’s the internet—you can buy just about anything on the internet. There are apps that are pretty secure. You’re a regional crime center, a fusion center, and an intelligence center. You don’t have to say all that you’re doing, but I’ve got to think that you’re using AI and you’re using technology as well.
Mike Sena: Technology is a huge part of looking at the threat. Some of the downfalls of technology—we’ve worked out coordination with social media companies on threat-to-life, where there’s somebody that’s saying, “Hey, I’m going to go kill someone,” or, “I’m going to kill myself,” and getting streamlined reporting on that. We don’t have the same for narcotics. That is something that’s gravely missing right now because we can’t catch everything online, not with the current technology and access that we have as far as the tools and resources. Trying to get those companies to also support that—now, it’s a violation of policy. In the past, they’ll turn off accounts if they identify narcotics trafficking, but that didn’t always get reported to law enforcement. So, we need some mechanism in place like that, like we’ve done for threat-to-life, where this is a threat to people’s lives. Narcotics dealing is dangerous and deadly, and so we need support from the companies that are out there in reporting that information.
But there’s so much activity also on the dark web, and that’s the wild west of information sharing that is not that easy for people to get to in the first place, and it’s hard to look at all of the markets that are out there and identify those that are trafficking. We had a person who was operating one of the largest online narcotics operations in the country when they first started doing that online, like crazy. He was doing it right, in many cases, from local locations in San Francisco, like the public library. All he needed was the internet to do his work. So, that market is still out there—that online market of distribution and mailing drugs is still alive.
But in many cases, that’s why those street dealers have also blown up because it breaks down barriers for having to know somebody, having to find that online market or store, knowing that you’re actually going to get something with an online payment. You’re going to get something handed to you—it may not be the dope you wanted in San Francisco, but there’s going to be a cash transaction. It’s very anonymous—you don’t have anything online that tracks back to you. That’s why we kind of saw this market blowing up with those street dealers in San Francisco, because people are fearful about what the government’s doing. “They might be able to find me doing a transaction online, but if I drive to San Francisco, find some random guy on the corner that’s selling dope, it’s just that one-time transaction, and I’m driving off until I pick up the next supply.”
Jim Dudley: But that’s a roll of the dice, and I guess that’s something they’re living with—or not living with.
Mike Sena: Exactly, exactly.
Jim Dudley: Totally thankful for your time, Mike Sena. We’ve got our law enforcement listeners out there, and we’re a NCRIC here in Northern California—there are RICs all over the country. How can our law enforcement people out there find their RIC?
Mike Sena: Absolutely. There are 33 High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas with over 60 investigative support centers within each of those HIDTAs. We also have 80 fusion centers across the country. There are 50 state centers—each state has one. We have 27 major urban area centers, and then we have three territorial centers. If folks are looking for their fusion center, they can go to the National Fusion Center Association website, which is https://nfcausa.org/. They can find their fusion center. If they’re looking for their HIDTA, it’s HIDTAProgram.org. They can go to either of those sites and find their HIDTA and their fusion center.
Jim Dudley: Yeah, and so at the top of the show, I mentioned the resources that you have available. How are you doing these days with budget and resources? Are you able to give the agencies what they need?
Mike Sena: We have been. We’ve had phenomenal support from our Bay Area Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI), from our State Homeland Security Program, and the support we get from the California Office of Emergency Services, all through the Department of Homeland Security grant funds, and then, of course, through the High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, which is administered under the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Our budget’s about $12 million a year for our program. We have lots of resources, services available, and training available to our law enforcement and public safety partners and homeland security partners. We train about 6,000 people a year. If there’s a listener here that’s in law enforcement, public safety, homeland security, public health—there are classes that we have almost every week for folks out there, both online and in person.
Technology is available to law enforcement for use in their investigations. We have a great team of analysts, detectives, sergeants, and others that are there to help support these major investigations across the region. Although we are probably looking at some looming Department of Homeland Security cuts this year or next year, our goal is to make sure that we provide our region and our nation with all the services they need to protect the communities that they serve—all of our law enforcement and all of our public safety partners. It’s not just law enforcement that works in our center—we also have fire, we have emergency management personnel, and we also have public health folks. We have a public health analyst that works, thanks and courtesy to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation. They’re in the office, all these folks working together to look at all these major threats that we’re dealing with and come up with the best strategies possible to leverage our regional resources.
We have hundreds of agencies in the Bay Area. Individually, we can’t really address the threat. Together, we can drive change, we can make change, and we can push back on all the criminality and all the death that we’re seeing in our region. We can’t give up. This is not a War on Drugs. This is a war on those organizations that are profiting off of the death and harm to the members of our communities.
Jim Dudley: Nice. Thank you, Mike. And it’s happening at 32 other centers across the country. So, wherever you are, take a look at the websites. We’ll list them in our show notes below as well. Thanks for being on the show, Mike Sena, Director of the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center and the High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA). Thanks, Mike.
Mike Sena: Oh, thank you, and I really appreciate your time on the show. We’re here for you and all of our partners.
Jim Dudley: Great. Hey, to our listeners, thanks for listening. Let me know what you think. Are you working with your HIDTA, with your information centers? Do you have somebody on a task force? Let us know. Drop us a line at policingmatters@police1.com, policingmatters@police1.com. If you don’t know the center near you, check out the links below and find out what they’re doing. Take good care, stay safe, and hope to talk to you again real soon.
