Someone
recently asked me what my solution was, because I am always posting these
articles about racism and injustice. Well, it's not really just one problem, so
there can't really be one solution. It may be more useful to think in terms of
things that can help, like police wearing body cameras as I wrote about
yesterday. Another thing that would be helpful is ending the War on Drugs. I
have been thinking about it more because of this:
The
first impression reading over the article is the apparent racial bias in
choosing to not only prosecute Guy (who is black) but to seek the death
penalty, when Magee (who is white) was not even indicted by the grand jury.
(And yes, the use of the photos shows clear bias.)
After
that initial reaction, I started to wonder why there are still doing no-knock
raids after Magee killed Sgt. Sowders. It sounds like a dangerous practice
anywhere, but it seems like especially in Texas it would not be
unreasonable that many people will own guns, and will bring out those guns when
they hear people breaking into their house.
Surely
such a dangerous practice would only be taken in cases of urgent and
well-demonstrated need, right? Okay, they did not find anything that indicated
drug dealing, but they must have had a good reason to suspect it, right? No, it
was an informant tip.
Let's
suppose that there is no history of informants lying or simply being wrong,
where you would want more corroboration to go on, is it so important to arrest
a drug dealer that breaking in at night is a good idea? I ask this bearing in
mind that police raids in the middle of the night are more associated with
Eastern European dictatorships, and not really something we would want to
emulate as a democracy based on justice under the law.
That's
the way the War on Drugs has been going though. More military equipment, that
can now be used to suppress protests. More SWAT style tactics. More likelihood
of sweeps where you just arrest everyone. The one thing it really hasn't been
more effective at is reducing the amount of drugs being used.
That's
not really surprising, because that was never the intent. The War on Drugs was
code for getting tough on people of color, especially black. "Urban"
and "Tough on Crime" were similar code words, because they knew were
it would be targeted.
There
is a much better recounting of all of that in Michelle Alexander's The New
Jim Crow, and for anyone who hasn't read that yet, I highly recommend it.
One
thing that I learned from it, that I had never really thought of, is that
previously drugs were considered to be a social issue. If you found someone
using them, you would try and get them in treatment, but it wasn't really
criminalized.
I
don't fully know how decriminalization would work. Yes, you could definitely
quit conducting raids, and quit giving military equipment to police
departments, and there would be definite benefits to that, especially in light
of this interactive map:
We
can kind of watch how legalization of marijuana is working now, but would you
really allow legal manufacture of meth? That sounds questionable. Honestly, there
are a lot of questions that we haven't even looked at because there is so much
stigma. We can't even rationally discuss stopping seizures when the THC dose is
so low that there isn't even really a high:
And,
you know, I really hate drugs. I hate the stupidity that seems to accompany
marijuana use, as well as the smell. There are people I love who use it, but it's
not my favorite thing about them.
Still,
if I really wanted to wage a war on drugs, and get people off of them, I think
I would take some clues from this:
Maybe
parks would work better than tanks, and social workers can do more good than
SWAT teams. I don't know.
However,
knowing that the expensive program that gets people and pets killed, and fills
up the jails (also expensive) and plays into the worst racist stereotypes
doesn't work makes ending it a pretty easy decision.
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