To Get Beyond Ferguson, Legalize Drugs
The inherent violence and racism of drug prohibition makes the militarization of police against poor and minority communities inevitable.
One day, an unarmed African-American man is minding his own business. The metropolitan police are convinced he’s up to no good and they rush him. He tries eluding them but he’s outnumbered and they pin him to the ground. Despite his protests of innocence, the police cuff him. They witness the prone black man exhale his last breath of air. There is no indictment of any police officers in the man’s death.
In 2014, the death of Eric Garner in the chokehold of NYPD police officer Daniel Pantaleo was another tragic flashpoint in America’s long bloody history of civil rights evolution. But the paragraph you just read describes another tragic death, twenty years earlier.
On March 25, 1994, the Boston Drug Control Unit raided the apartment of 75-year-old Methodist minister Accelyne Williams. They chased him into his bedroom and cuffed him. While on the ground, he had a heart attack and died. The police were acting on a tip from a drunken informant who misremembered the location of an apartment he’d visited filled with weapons and drugs.
The killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson one hot August night in Ferguson, Missouri, shocked the nation. The overreaction by Ferguson police to the protests that followed — the use of tear gas, SWAT teams, and armored vehicles — caught many observers by surprise. But for anyone following the War on Drugs for over four decades, the death of yet another unarmed black man and aggressive, militarized policing seems to be the inevitable result of drug prohibition.
Prohibition creates the “crime”
That the War on Drugs is enforced disproportionately against the minorities and the poor seems incontrovertible. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Marijuana Arrest Research Project have documented how African-Americans and Latinos are far more likely to be arrested for drugs, more likely to be convicted for drugs, and more likely to serve a longer sentence for drugs.
Often these statistics are provided with the counter that blacks and whites use drugs at the same rates. Actually, it is worse than that. According to the most recent government surveys, for all ages, 10.7 percent of all African-Americans and 9.5 percent of all white Americans[1] have used some illicit drug in the past month. But that use statistic doesn’t reflect the fact that young people are the ones usually arrested for drugs.
People under age 25 make up 43.3 percent of all drug arrests, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for 2013. In that age demographic, 17.8 percent of whites and 16.5 percent of blacks used an illicit drug in the prior month, according to the National Survey on Drug Use & Health for 2013. We actually have a situation where, proportionally, more white people use drugs at the ages when most drug arrests happen, yet black people are much more likely to be busted.
Prohibition creates the “usual suspects”
If you’re over a certain age in America, the first media stereotype you associate with Italian-Americans isn’t “Super Mario” or “The Jersey Shore.” It’s “The Godfather” or “The Sopranos”, the portrait of the Italian-American as a mobster. Of course, very few Italian-Americans match any sort of Don Corleone or Tony Soprano archetype (or Luigi or Snooki, for that matter). So how did this Italians-run-organized-crime stereotype begin?
The prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s coincided with a wave of some four million Italians immigrating to America since 1880. As every wave of immigrants has been, the Italians were treated as second-class citizens and opportunities were scarce. For some, like an Italian immigrant’s son named Al Capone, the promise of prohibition profits presented him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Trafficking in illegal alcohol, however, meant Capone and his colleagues had to protect themselves with violence and weapons. The police, facing an increasingly armed set of organized criminals, had to increase their weaponry. Raids had to be conducted in the dark of night and sometimes, innocent people got caught up in the crossfire of gun battles in the streets.
Fortunately for America, we recognized that alcohol prohibition was doing nothing to stop drinking and everything to empower violent criminals. We ended alcohol prohibition after only thirteen years of it being associated with violent crime and the poor immigrants, largely Italian and Irish, who ran the big city alcohol trafficking mobs.
Over eighty years ago, just thirteen years of American Prohibition crime still fuels the stereotyped image of the mobster as Italian, despite the existence of mobsters of all ethnicities. What do you suppose over four decades of Drug War has done to shape the perceptions of black men by police charged with enforcing modern drug prohibition?
Prohibition doesn’t create racism, but does amplify it
Drug prohibition itself was borne of anti-immigrant racism against opium-using Chinese and marijuana-using Mexicans, and racism against cocaine-using blacks who were gaining visibility in the cities where jazz and blues music took root. Drug prohibition today fosters a systemic racism that has more black men under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850 and more unarmed black men killed by police than lynched by Klansmen.
Recently, researchers tested people of all races with a social science experiment. Images were quickly flashed on a screen that showed two men in a confrontation. The men could be either both white, both black, or one white and one black. Sometimes one of the men is shown holding a weapon, sometimes holding a non-weapon (like a cell phone), and sometimes nothing at all. The subjects were then asked to recall which man, if either, held a weapon.
Consistently people would over-criminalize their memories against the black man. A black man with a non-weapon was more often thought to hold a weapon. People would even recall the black man holding a weapon when it was the white man who held it, or even if neither man held a weapon. This pattern held true regardless of the race of the subject – that is, even black people were more likely to over-criminalize black people.
There is more than prohibition to blame for this and other factors of racism. The enduring legacy of slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow forced black people into the lowest economic classes and redlined them into the worst neighborhoods with the fewest resources. Where poverty and desperation exist, crime thrives. There are many reasons why NYPD patrols Harlem more than the Upper West Side and one of them is that there is more street-level crime that is easier to prosecute.
So today, after forty years of police making millions of low-level drug arrests of young black and Latino men, fighting against the violent battles between increasingly armed black and Latino gangs to control the street trade, and watching television saturated with criminal black men on the news and cop dramas, is it any surprise Americans associate violent criminality with dark skin? That’s a prejudice that existed before the War on Drugs, but the prohibition amped up the scare of violent black criminals with the actual violence borne of a criminal business sure to make the evening news.
Prohibition makes racism profitable
In 2010 the Village Voice reported on a former NYPD cop who had secretly taped other officers and superiors at work. What emerged were a series of embarrassing reports highlighting the pressure on officers to meet quotas for arrests and shakedowns. This pressure contributes to the use of stop-and-frisk, a tactic where police stop young blacks and Latinos for no reason and subject them to a simple pat-down. When that encounter suggests the subject may be carrying drugs, like the officer smelling weed or feeling a pipe or baggie in a pocket, the subject is told to take the items out of their pockets or bags. Once the drugs are in plain view, that is an offense calling for an immediate arrest.
As noted earlier, more young white people are using drugs than blacks. But how and where they use drugs makes all the difference. Young white people are smoking pot in mom and dad’s suburban basement like the teens in television’s “That ‘70s Show.” Young black people are hanging out on the city streets and parks where they are easier targets for police.
In addition to making quotas, the War on Drugs is also profitable for police departments through the Kafkaesque menace of asset forfeiture. When a person is investigated by police for possession of drugs, that person’s cash and property may be seized by police if they believe it was the ill-gotten proceeds of the drug trade. That person doesn’t even need to be charged with a drug crime for their property to be seized, and that property is guilty until the owner can prove it innocent of being ill-gotten gains.
As if free stuff from shaking down real and imagined drug users in minority neighborhoods wasn’t enough, there also exists a federal program called the Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants. These so-called “Byrne Grants” go to police agencies based on their success in combating crime. Since violent crime and property crime have been decreasing, police have turned to drug arrests to pump up their crime-fighting statistics. Along with the grants, post-9/11 federal programs have been outfitting our local police departments with the armor and weapons of war, supposedly for battling terrorism. That military hardware has been used for years in the service of search warrants for drugs.
Then there are the opportunities drug prohibition creates for police and prosecutors with a malevolent agenda. A cop or his K-9 claiming they detect marijuana smell is enough to bypass any Fourth Amendment protests against illegal searches. Anonymous tips about drug activity are all it takes for most judges to sign off on no-knock search warrants. And on the occasion one of those raids targets the wrong address and police are forced to shoot and kill an innocent citizen in self-defense, a rotten cop can plant drugs at the scene to justify their actions — as was the case with Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old black woman gunned down in her Atlanta home in 2006.
The Drug War must end to begin fighting racism
America’s problems with race were planted in this land 400 years ago when the first Africans were brought over as slaves. Our Founding Fathers simultaneously declared that “All men are created equal” and that an enslaved African was only three-fifths of a man. Half this country fought to secede from the nation to maintain systemic white superiority, a condition that persists, though weakened, to this day. Ending drug prohibition alone is not going to magically undo four centuries of ingrained anti-black prejudice.
But we cannot pretend to begin recovering from America’s original sin so long as the drug war system remains in place. Over-policing of black neighborhoods can’t begin to be addressed until black neighborhoods are no longer fertile ground for statistics-padding low-level drug arrests. Cops (and the occasional armed neighborhood watchman) treating every young black man in a hoodie as a dangerous criminal won’t end until violent gangs can no longer subsist on drug trafficking profits.
Simply put, drug prohibition creates crime and violence where otherwise little would exist. Economics dictates that the risks of crime and violence will be borne most by the underprivileged. That combination means that whether it is alcohol and Italian mobs or drugs and black gangs, the results of prohibition are always the same. We have a long way to reach forward toward our more perfect union with liberty and justice for all, and we’ll never get there as long as prohibition moves us backward.
“White” as defined by the survey, which is “Non-Hispanic White”, as opposed to “Non-Hispanic Black / African-American”, “Non-Hispanic Native American / Alaska Native”, “Non-Hispanic Native Hawaiian / Other Pacific Islander”, “Non-Hispanic Asian”, “Non-Hispanic Multi-Racial”, and “Hispanic”. Interestingly, when Al Capone’s parents immigrated to America, Italians and other Southern Europeans weren’t considered white. ↑
