Want to Stop Police Brutality: Decriminalize All Drugs
It is the height of absurdity to suggest that we do away with our police forces. There isn’t a country or a major city in the world that doesn’t have a police force. Even the Vatican City has a police force.
Like it or not, there are violent criminals in the world — murderers, rapists, kidnappers, child molesters, home invaders — and a whole host of less violent offenders who must be apprehended, investigated, and charged with the crimes they have committed. We need well-trained law enforcement officers and detectives to accomplish those objectives.
However, what we do NOT need is a militarized police force that functions like an army of occupation in low-income communities and among people of color.
How the Militarization of Our Police Forces Began
The militarization of the police departments of America began in June of 1971 when then-President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse to be “public enemy number one” and then declared the War on Drugs.
Make no mistake, there were terrible abuses of police power, most of them against people of color, long before Richard Nixon declared his war on drugs. While we would like to believe that those abuses were limited to the benighted states of the old Confederacy below the Mason Dixon Line, the truth is that those abuses took place wherever there were people of color from Boston to Miami to Texas (all of it) and on to California, up the West Coast and across the Northern Tier.
However, it wasn’t until Richard Nixon declared his War on Drugs that the arrest and incarceration of people of color became a growth industry.
The War On Drugs Is Really A War on Us
The War on Drugs was really a war on poor people, black people, Hispanics, hippies, and everyone else who was in any way connected to the drug culture.
Even if you never used drugs, never bought them, or sold them, if anyone you knew, if anyone you were related to, used drugs, bought them, or sold them, you ended up as a target for political oppression by the police.
The War on Drugs became the excuse for the militarization of American police departments. The sizes of the departments grew larger and larger, their budgets increased year after year, their tools became more and more frightening, and it was all justified because we were at war with drugs.
There were — and there are — vicious drug gangs here in the United States and around the world that are constantly at war with each other over territories and distribution rights. They are well-armed, well-trained and completely unshackled by any moral compunctions. So, of course, we needed armed police force with equal weapons and equal training, but what we ended up with is a police force that is as well-armed, as well-trained and as equally unshackled by any moral compunctions.
The Outcome of the War On Drugs
Well, we lost the war on drugs. Drugs are more prevalent and more dangerous today than they have ever been before…but the dealers are just as likely to be the doctor you’re seeing or the pharmacy that fills your prescriptions. In fact, the drugs sold on the street are often less dangerous than the drugs sold from behind the pharmacist’s counter.
We did manage to put several million Americans — most of them people of color — behind bars for various lengths of time, while building for-profit private prisons and while using cheap prison labor to provide the workforces for a dozen different industries. Those telemarketing calls you keep getting may be coming from Mumbai, but they might also be coming from a private prison in Montana.
The 9/11 Effect
Then, in 2001, in the aftermath of the World Trade Center, the Patriot Act further militarized municipal and state police forces of the United States, giving them additional powers, and offering them greater leniency, including even more immunity from prosecution from crimes committed in the course of doing their duty, or rather from behaviors that would have been crimes had they been done by anyone other than a police officer.
In terms of the actual number of incidents, American police officers have injured or killed only a very small percentage of the people of color they arrest each year…but the number of innocent people who should be injured or killed by police officers each year should be ZERO regardless of their race or creed. Come to think of it, even if they are guilty as sin, they should still be delivered to the lockup alive and kicking, unless they attempted to use deadly force to avoid capture.
Cops Are Victims Too
It is important to realize that a great many police officers have been members of the military and that many are still members of the National Guard or Reserve Units. A large percentage of them have seen combat in places where anyone — or everyone — might attempt to kill them at any time.
As a result, they come home and go to work as cops with a “siege mentality” characterized by the largely unconscious belief that they are in grave danger whenever they are out on the streets doing their jobs. They are constantly in a heightened state of alertness, keyed up and ready to go off like a pistol with a hair-trigger at the slightest provocation….and this is the reason that cops do the insane things we have seen them doing….because they are insane and their jobs make them even crazier.
Let’s face it. Anyone who wants to be a cop was crazy to begin with. The hours suck, the working conditions are horrendous. The stress leads to unhealthy lifestyles. They eat at odd hours, have trouble sleep, drink excessively, and, yes, use drugs. Cops have one of the highest divorce rates of any profession…and one of the highest suicide rates…and it just gets worse as they get older.
So what do we do about it?
The only people who should be cops are people who don’t want to be cops. Being a policeman should not be a lifetime occupation. After six years on the street, most cops are just as institutionalized as if they had spent six years in prison.
They should be drafted in the same manner in which we used to draft soldiers as one of the conditions of citizenship by lottery. Those people who qualify should serve no more than three two-year terms, at the end of which they should receive a 15% — 20% pension for the rest of their lives as they go onto other occupations.
Qualifications should include at least a bachelor’s degree in the humanities or social sciences and no one who has served in the military should be eligible. Among their fringe benefits, they should also get a percentage of their student loans paid off for them. If they have no student loans, they should get a similar amount of scholarship funds to further pursue their future educational goals.
It should go without saying that any applicant for the police department should be screened for membership in racist and fascist organizations, both through lie detector tests and reviews of their activities on social media. You cannot be a white supremacist and a police officer. You cannot be the member of a disorganized militia (a technical term referring to a militia that is not under the authority of a duly elected governor) and a police officer. I don’t even think you can be a Republican and a police officer.
That’s a nice benefits package, but it requires that you do your six years without ever having been cited and found at fault for conduct unbecoming of a police officer.
Of course, the only way to staff up the senior ranks of a police force is from the junior ranks and therefore the six-year limit would only apply to officers who have not made rank (sergeant, detective, or better) within those six years. (Just for the record, cops who don’t make rank after six years are usually on the street for the duration of their careers, which is very bad for them and very bad for us.)
The objective here is to ensure that armed officers spend no more than six years among the rank and file and that they not have had adverse military experience that makes them unable to handle the work of a police officer in a civilian environment.
End the Drug War = An End to Police Brutality
There’s one more step in this policing plan: decriminalize all drugs. Immediately. The single biggest reason for police brutality is that they spend much of their time arresting violent offenders who are high on drugs.
Decriminalization would mean the end to the illicit drug trade. Drug abusers would simply get prescriptions for what they need — just like a diabetic who needs insulin — that would be filled at the local pharmacy.
This step, alone, would reduce the number of incarcerated individuals by fifty percent. It would reduce the costs of the entire Justice establishment by a similar figure, and it would help to end the friction between police departments and communities of color which are, unjustly, seen as co-conspirators in the drug epidemic.
It is time to stop allowing this ridiculous obsession with substance abuse to continue to destroy the fabric of our society.
Poet and Essayist Alan M. Milner spent twenty years running drug rehabilitation programs in Boston, and ten years as the Director of the Massachusetts Drug and Alcohol Hotline
Ron Powell
06/08/2020 @ 1:42 am
Across the board, you get no argument from me.
Bitey
06/08/2020 @ 7:32 am
There are some important points to fine tune here.
Fir starters, “defund the police”, as it is currently being used, dos not mean abolish. That was my first impression as well, but it is incorrect. I think it is a poorly chosen slogan because it gives the wrong impression. Furthermore, it is causing many to jump on the bandwagon for that false impression. What it does mean is to transfer funds from strict law enforcement to other social support disciplines. As a general proposition, it has merit.
Secondly, it is important to know what you do not know when suggesting something like eliminating the professionalization of the field. To limit people to 5 years would be absurd. It would catastrophic. I guarantee you that there are sane, stable, wise people with 5 thru 30 or 40 years of experience who are a great value to police departments and to cities and states.
Consider if you take a person starting at the age of 21, right after college, then aging out at 26. A 26 year old barely has the life experience to be able to manage the complex nature of the job. You’re still a youngster that that age. Gravitas is a profound safe, quiet replacement for energy and force. 26 year olds tend not to have it. 40, 45, and 50 year olds do. Truncating an agency from its sagacity is the last thing you want to do.
What proportion of the profession do you think has military experience? It is a lot smaller than you imagine. My academy class started with 88 recruits, I think. (It numbered in the 80s). Out of that, 8 of us had military experience. Beyond that, the PTSD assumption is just that. Not all members of the military have PTSD, or whatever that assumption is in this theory. These are dangerous, assumptions lacking data. Doubt me?
When I was just getting started in the Marine Corps in the mid-1980s, I had an unexamined assumption that career military members were psychologically damaged to some degree, whether it be PTSD, or whatever from the Vietnam era. That notion came from most of the films and television I had seen from the end of the Vietnam era, until that point. I can close my eyes now and see the image of a Vietnam vet with long hair, a field jacket, and so on. While they exist, they are not representative of the people who make careers of the military.
If they remain, they tend to be stable and healthy. If they are not, they either leave, with medical support, or they remain…with medical support. I did not realize that I had such a notion about the previous generation’s veterans until I had instructors who would tell us about their experience in Vietnam. (Later I served with Gulf War veterans). Those who continue to function in their roles tend to be healthy people.
Dentists have a high level of depression and suicide. Would you mandate that dentists leave the profession after 5 years? Hell no. You’d destroy the profession. Not all dentists are sadists, or depressed, even though you may find a higher incidence of compared to the general population.
And as for “defund…”, there is another aspect of it that bears consideration. Different cities manage their institutions differently. Some have a very professional force, and pay their employees well. Pay is the main method of regulation in our society. Well paid, well regulated departments give the best results. Other cities, New Orleans is one example, pay their officers very poorly. Officers set up little fiefdoms within the community and this tends to involve a high level of corruption. A N.O. Office might have a salary that is 25% of what a LAPD officer might make, but bribes and such make for a substantial portion of their income. This is also part of how order is maintained. This is an extremely regressive method.
I agree that I can’t see how a city functions with no police force. Also, I think a completely private security force would not be in the interest of justice. It would make what we see currently look tame. Controlling the law enforcement agencies by their budgets is effective, if done correctly, and bears consideration. “Reimagining…” should be in this form, as opposed to abolishing. Also, legislators should be required to live in their districts rather than isolating themselves in Washington D.C. That would allow the citizens to have better control of their agencies as well.
Art W. Stone
06/08/2020 @ 9:28 am
I initially misunderstood the “defund the police” slogan.
I’m still seeking a better understanding and hope the phrasing can be turned to more accurately describe the desired results.
I would defer to the positions herein espoused by a former police officer who can report in detail the experience and need for an educated and responsible force.
As for legalizing drugs, I have in some form or another advocated for such, since first reading of the notion in the early 70’s, endorsed then by former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
Bitey
06/08/2020 @ 8:03 am
Oh, holy shit…the “institutionalized” and “six years in prison”, and “the only people who should be cops are ones who don’t want to be cops…”. Holy shit…those may be the WORST ideas about anything I have ever heard…about anything.
Let’s make people who want to be miners serve as architects. Let’s make people who want to be librarians serve as furniture makers. Set aside how wopper-jawed your civilization would become. Set aside systematically draining it of all experience…what about the notion of freedom? What about freedom to be what you want to be? How…? WHAT???
koshersalaami
06/08/2020 @ 9:41 am
The part of this I agree with is the legalization of drugs part, a position which was held by William F. Buckley. That’s not why I agree with it but there are bipartisan reasons to support this. Treating addiction as a disease rather than as a crime would have immense benefits for the country. We’d cut our incarceration rates to a fraction of what they are now. We’d save a fortune in policing and the courts. We’d eliminate an enormous revenue stream for organized crime. We’d have no trouble finding addicts because they’d have no incentive not to seek treatment.
I came here because of the title of the piece and I agree with the title of the piece. As far as the rest of the piece, your solution simply introduces too many major headaches. Let’s start with the fact that you’re in essence suggesting implementing a draft for armed service, just domestic instead of international. (Though I believe in a form of mandatory national service, but it would have to be universal.) Like most term limit suggestions outside the Presidency, where a multigenerational monopoly on leadership expertise has serious dangers, such plans purge expertise and experience from the ranks of whatever body you’re term limiting, and the more critical the job, the more of a problem that is. If, for example, you’re talking about the Senate, you’d want whoever serves on the Armed Services Committee to really understand the military for the good of the country, to use one example.
If you want to change behaviors, there are better ways. You get what you incentivize, not what you ask for. If you underpay your cops, you make graft necessary. This isn’t only true of cops; it’s also historically true of the Governors of the State of Maryland. And it’s true of the drug trade: If we limit employment opportunities in poor neighborhoods, we incentivize alternative ways to make a living, and those alternative ways tend to be illegal. We have a history of setting up systems that incentivize undesirable behavior, then complaining about that behavior. That’s true in police forces. We incentivize arrests rather than low crime rates, and that causes all sorts of problems. To begin with, people with money can afford lawyers while people without can’t, so we’ve incentivized arresting poor people disproportionately. Guess what that’s going to do to police/community relations in poor neighborhoods? For court systems and police departments that are underfunded by local taxes, they have to get their revenue from somewhere, and in Ferguson, MO that turned out to be fines on poor people, which the Justice Dept. under President Obama eventually concluded was a civil rights violation. And, of course, if you want the community to assist the police, antagonizing the community is precisely how not to accomplish that.
As has been pointed out by a whole lot of people lately (though it was becoming more and more obvious), police unions are incentivized to protect police misconduct. That has created a monster. The problem is not just police brutality, it’s police brutality with very limited consequences. We can’t prevent all murders (and I”m not talking about police murders here) but we at least have enough sense to criminalize and punish for murder. And yet we fail to do that to the police themselves? Guess what the result will be? or rather Guess what the result has been? Officer Pantaleo in Staten Island wasn’t even indicted for doing to Eric Garner essentially what Officer Chauvin did to George Floyd, a fact I’m pretty sure Officer Chauvin was aware of.
My position is a whole lot closer to Bitey’s than to Ron’s or yours.