Category Archives: Police Watch

Arguing the Drug War

Over at Jason Pye’s blog, he wrote a post bemoaning the prevalence of no-knock raids, and asking what we can do to improve a situation which is clearly not working. Quite a long comment train followed regarding the entire drug war.

Head on over and take a look. The main tactics of argument on the other side are twofold– First, they claim drugs are bad and if they’re legalized, the world will go up in flames. Second, that if we want to really solve the problem, we need to fight harder.

I’ll address the second point first. The specific argument from one opponent was:

I realize it’s the law that they’re taking issue with, Jace. I happen to believe that more effort is needed in treating criminals like criminals with stiffer penalties, jail sentences and deprivation of luxury…….but we haven’t done that yet because some folks can’t stomach the thought of that kind of inmate treatment.

I wonder what we’ve been doing since the war on drugs began? Since then, we’ve seen stiffer penalties and jail sentences, where we now have “three strikes” laws and mandatory minimums for drug offenses that are worse than rape sentences. While we haven’t made prison into a dank, dark dungeon just yet, it sure as hell ain’t the Ritz Carlton.

But look at the tactic. We’ve been fighting the War on Drugs harder and harder for many years. Would we have accepted such long minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders when the drug war began? Would we have accepted paramilitary-style no-knock raids back then? Would we have accepted making possession of large sums of money evidence of a drug crime back then? Would we have accepted the destruction of civil liberties that has been a hallmark of the drug war?

We see no evidence whatsoever that we’ve made the drug problem any less prevalent than it was before the drug war began. We have made the inner city much more violent and dangerous, full of gang warfare fueled by the profits of drug sales. We’ve incarcerated hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of nonviolent drug offenders, at huge expense to the taxpayer.

We’ve been “fighting harder” ever since we started, and we haven’t made the problem better, as drugs are just as easy to find on our streets as they’ve ever been. But we have made the unintended consequences worse. One wonders just how far they’ll go to fight harder? Where is their limit, if no-knock raids resulting in the deaths of the elderly and three injured cops aren’t it?

But then comes the question of whether we could do better with a method of treatment rather than prosecuting a ruthless drug war. The same opponent demanded evidence:

Show me some “evidence” that legalizing drugs in America “with our mentality” is a better option.

So I did:

http://www.umich.edu/~umisl/articles/dec.htm

It references a 1994 RAND study on how to solve the issue:

In formulating such a policy, a good starting point is a 1994 RAND study that sought to compare the effectiveness of four different types of drug control: source-control programs (attacking the drug trade abroad), interdiction (stopping drugs at the border), domestic law enforcement (arresting and imprisoning buyers and sellers) and drug treatment. How much additional money, RAND asked, would the government have to spend on each approach to reduce national cocaine consumption by 1 percent? RAND devised a model of the national cocaine market, then fed into it more than seventy variables, from seizure data to survey responses. The results were striking: Treatment was found to be seven times more cost-effective than law enforcement, ten times more effective than interdiction and twenty-three times more effective than attacking drugs at their source.

The RAND study has generated much debate in drug-research circles, but its general conclusion has been confirmed in study after study. Yes, relapse is common, but, as RAND found, treatment is so inexpensive that it more than pays for itself while an individual is actually in a program, in the form of reduced crime, medical costs and the like; all gains that occur after an individual leaves a program are a bonus. And it doesn’t matter what form of treatment one considers: methadone maintenance, long-term residential, intensive outpatient and twelve-step programs all produce impressive outcomes (though some programs work better for certain addicts than for others).

Now, I thought that would score some points in this one. I thought that a serious academic study by a respected organization like RAND would carry some weight. After all, it’s not like this is a pro-drug organization; this wasn’t printed in High Times. Nor are they an obviously libertarian group like the Cato institute. If anyone’s study should hold weight, I would think it’s a group devoted to offering serious academic study to the way our government works. But not so:

This study is just that-a study- using numbers and “survey” responses not Human Beings- with today’s mentality. It has some impressive points but you’ll never get this concept to fly in this day and age.

How do you argue with that? I went on to argue that we’ve seen this before (the Prohibition of alcohol), which of course wouldn’t be accepted as evidence because alcohol isn’t as bad as “drugs”. I went on to argue that other countries have seen success with treatment programs, but that was responded to with “These other countrys you refer to don’t have the U.S. Constitution’s protection, the American mentality or Civil Rights activists around every corner…”

I think it’s clear what was going on. When points were brought up by my opponent, and I answered them, my answers were not accepted. It had nothing to do with the merits of my answers, because for any answer I gave, an excuse was offered. My opponent was not interested in actually arguing the merits of the case, he had made up his mind and was looking for any excuse not to change it. That’s what we’re fighting with. It’s a mentality that says “drugs are bad, and there’s absolutely no line that can’t be crossed fighting them.” It doesn’t matter if the collateral damage of fighting against drugs, drugs which are supplied through a violent black market, are worse and more expensive than treating drug users. It doesn’t even matter if it will work, when the people you’re arguing against aren’t listening.

Police Culture is the Problem

To all those who say that the problem leading to incidents such as the shooting death of Kathryn Johnston is not a police problem, I point you to some comments I’ve made about what police should be vs. what they are. Specifically, I’ve said that cops have an obligation to protect citizens and that protecting citizens, even ones that may be criminals, takes priority over their own life.

I firmly believe that the “War on Drugs” and the militarization of our police forces has led us to a position where police tend to shoot first and ask questions later. Further, police are now agents of a government executing a policy that this blog has stated, over and over, is immoral and unethical. We can see the outcome of such a situation. The deaths of Sean Bell, Kathryn Johnston and Salvatore Culosi, to name just three of the hundreds killed or wounded in paramilitary police actions are the outcomes.

To reinforce that view, let’s take into account some editorial commentary by Joseph McNamara. He has a strong position to speak from, as a retired NYPD deputy inspector and former police chief of Kansas City, MO and San Jose, CA. In an editorial [subscription required, so I posted most of the article in toto to comment on] in the Wall Street Journal today, Mr. McNamara said:

Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on “officer safety” and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed.

Yes, that is the police culture I remember. Certainly the one I see today, officer’s wearing military clothing, carrying military weapons and using para-military tactics is far different from that. Worse, it is the sort of police culture that I saw, and found abhorrent, in Europe when I lived there. It was one of the things I was proud of about America, that our police were there to protect citizens, not to make war on them.

Mr. McNamara goes on to say:

Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.

One of the predicted outcomes of the “War on Drugs”. Now that it has come to pass we have the perverse situation where self-proclaimed libertarians defend cops who take the lives of citizens when the citizen should never have been in lethal danger. These folks trumpet about the cops “right to self defense” and how “all the facts are not in”, completely ignoring that men and women voluntarily executing government policy are responsible for these deaths. They prefer, instead, to blame a policy and put the cops on pedestals. What happened to being skeptical, to questioning authority, to the realization that “following orders” is not an adequate defense, morally or legally?

Mr. McNamara then points out an interesting set of facts:

Yes, police work is dangerous, and the police see a lot of violence. On the other hand, 51 officers were slain in the line of duty last year, out of some 700,000 to 800,000 American cops. That is far fewer than the police fatalities occurring when I patrolled New York’s highest crime precincts, when the total number of cops in the country was half that of today.

You know, there’s one more statistic I’d like to see. What’s the increase in the number of citizens shot by a cop? As part of that, what would be very interesting is the increase in the number of citizens shot when there was no weapon present OR it was a no knock situation involving someone who was not the actual target of the warrant being served. I’d be willing to guess that the statistics would show a dramatic rise in such deaths completely out of proportion to the changes in numbers of cop deaths or changes in violent crime statistics.

A couple of final points from Mr. McNamara

Each of these police deaths and numerous other police injuries is a tragedy and we owe support to those who protect us. On the other hand, this isn’t Iraq. The need to give our officers what they require to protect themselves and us has to be balanced against the fact that the fundamental duty of the police is to protect human life and that law officers are only justified in taking a life as a last resort.

In the three cases I cite above, taking the life of the citizens in question was absolutely not the last resort.

After the Diallo case [ed: a shooting death in 1999 of an unarmed man in NYC], I wrote that I, my father, older brother and countless other relatives had collectively served the NYPD for more than a century and a half and that none of us would have fired at Mr. Diallo. I say the same about the lethal volley that took Mr. Bell’s life, based on initial reports.

So, a very experienced cop says that he, and other cops he knows very well, would not have used deadly force against Mr. Bell. That, to me, is the most damning indictment of the cops in question. But, more importantly, it is the most damning indictment of a law enforcement culture that has shifted from protecting our society to waging war on us.

The sad reality is that we citizens no longer view police as civil servants here to protect us. We view them as adversaries here to enforce laws we don’t respect. We view them as agents of a government waging a war on us. We view them as the enemy.

One more casualty of the immoral War on Drugs.

Update: McQ at QandO has a similar, although perhaps less indicting, entry today. The punchline?

Time to disarm the vast majority of them [AS: para-military police organizations].

Sounds like a plan to me.

Cato Institute Drug War Interactive Map

If you haven’t seen this, head over and take a look. They’ve compiled a google map where each “pin” is a botched paramilitary-style raid. Some are simply raids on innocents’ houses. Others are raids where either an innocent person, a non-violent offender, or a police officer was killed. Either way, it’s staggering how this “Epidemic of ‘Isolated Incidents'” fills up this map.

What does this map mean?

The proliferation of SWAT teams, police militarization, and the Drug War have given rise to a dramatic increase in the number of “no-knock” or “quick-knock” raids on suspected drug offenders. Because these raids are often conducted based on tips from notoriously unreliable confidential informants, police sometimes conduct SWAT-style raids on the wrong home, or on the homes of nonviolent, misdemeanor drug users. Such highly-volatile, overly confrontational tactics are bad enough when no one is hurt — it’s difficult to imagine the terror an innocent suspect or family faces when a SWAT team mistakenly breaks down their door in the middle of the night.

But even more disturbing are the number of times such “wrong door” raids unnecessarily lead to the injury or death of suspects, bystanders, and police officers. Defenders of SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics say such incidents are isolated and rare. The map below aims to refute that notion.

How to use this map

Click on each marker on the map for a description of the incident and sources. Markers are precise in cases where the address of an incident was reported. Where media reports indicate only a town or neighborhood, markers are located at the closest post office, city hall, or landmark. Incident descriptions and outcomes are kept as current as possible.

Other map features:

–Using the “plus” and “minus” buttons in the map’s upper left-hand corner, users can zoom in on the map to street-level, as well as switch between street map and satellite views. In some large metropolitan areas, there are so many incidents in such close proximity that they tend to overlap unless viewed on a small scale (try zooming in on New York City, for example).

–Users may isolate the incidents by type by clicking on the colored markers in the key (see only “death of an innocent” markers, for example).

–The search function just below the map produces printable descriptions of the raids plotted on the map, and is sortable by state, year, and type of incident.

Hat Tip: Boortz

The Problem With No-Knock Raids

There have been several posts here this week about what can go wrong when police execute a so-called no-knock search warrant, or more generally when they shoot first and ask questions later. In Atlanta, in resulted in the death of a 92 year-old woman. And, in New York, the shoot-first-ask-questions-later philosophy resulted in the death of a 23 year-old father on the eve of his wedding.

If these were only isolated incidents, we could possibly place the blame on over eager police officers in a particular jurisdiction, or perhaps a police force that doesn’t train its officers well enough on the use of deadly force. As Randy Balko, who has been on top of this issue for a long time now, points out, though, these are just the most recent incidents among many, and points to this report of another shooting in Merced, California:

Mary Silva, a 68-year-old retiree, said deputies got the wrong house when they burst into her Winton Way apartment at 6:30 a.m. on the day of the raids.

Silva said she was sleeping when she heard loud banging at her front door and a voice calling “Open up!”

Before she could answer, Silva said, deputies broke through her front door and threw a smoke bomb onto her carpet. As Silva stood in her nightgown, about 10 officers surrounded her with weapons drawn, she said.

They shouted, “Where is he? Where is he?”

Silva told deputies she lives alone. She said they responded, “Shut up! Don’t move!”

The team was looking for 24-year-old Reginaldo Ramirez, who lives next door to Silva.

But the search warrant deputies gave Silva lists an entirely different address — not Silva’s house or the house next door. Silva said deputies gave her the search warrant several hours after the initial raid.

Pazin said deputies may have transposed numbers in the address on the warrant, but that law enforcement acted in good faith when they entered Silva’s house.

The police are blaming the suspect they were looking for, who allegedly used Silva’s house when he was arrested at some point in the past. But, as Balko, points out, that’s just evading responsibility:

Police, on the other hand, are accountable to us. The least we can demand of them is that they do the necessary legwork before barging into our homes. Parzin’s men failed the people they serve in that regard. They took the word of a criminal. They did no corroborating investigation to see that the address he listed was indeed where he lived, or to see if other, innocent people may live there. Not only that, but they then transposed the numbers on the search warrant. They erred. Big time. They ought to cop to it. That is precisely where the “finger of blame” ought to be pointed.

The problem is, I think, that no-knock raids make it easy for the police to evade that responsibility. The warrant says they can go into a particular house without announcing their presence, so they do it. The fact that they may not even have the right house apparently doesn’t even enter their mind.

If nothing else Silva is lucky she didn’t have a gun in the house or that she otherwise didn’t try to defend herself, or she would’ve ended up like the woman in Atlanta.
Related Posts:

More Police Shooting Justice
Another Police Shooting

Shooting Shows Need For Reform
Another Victim Of The Drug War

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