Thursday, April 11, 2019

Police scandals are an untallied cost of the drug war Essay Example for Free

Police scandals be an untallied cost of the medicate war EssayThe FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and rase the Coast Guard have had to admit to corruption. The gravity of the natural law crimes is as disturbing as the volume. In New Orleans, a uniformed cop in league with a drug dealer has been convicted of murdering her partner in crime and shop owners during a robbery committed while she was on patrol. In Washington, D. C. , and in Atlanta, cops in drug stings were arrested for stealing and taking bribes.New York State troopers falsified drug evidence that sent people to prison. And it is not ripe the rank and file. The former police chief of Detroit went to prison for stealing police drug-buy money. In a fine New England town, the chief stole drugs from the evidence locker for his own use. And the DEA agent who arrested Panamas General Noriega is in remand for stealing laundered drug money. The drug war is as lethal as it is corrupting. And the police and d rug criminals are not the only casualties.An innocent 75-year-old African-American minister died of a heart attack struggling with capital of Massachusetts cops who were mistakenly arresting him because an informant had given them the wrong address. A rancher in Ventura County, California, was killed by a police SWAT team serving a search warrant in the mistaken belief that he was growing marijuana. In Los Angeles, a three-year-old girl died of gunshot wounds after her mother took a wrong moot into a street controlled by a drug-dealing gang. They fired on the car because it had invaded their marketplace.The violence comes from the competition for unlawful profits among dealers, not from crazed drug users. Professor Milton Friedman has estimated that as many as 10,000 additional homicides a year are plausibly attributed to the drug war. Worse still, the drug war has become a passage war in which non-whites are arrested and imprisoned at 4 to 5 times the rate whites are, horizonta l though nigh drug crimes are committed by whites. The Sentencing Research Project reports that one-third of dusky men are in jail or under penal supervision, largely because of drug arrests.The drug war has established thriving criminal enterprises which recruit teenagers into criminal careers. It was such issues that engaged law-enforcement leaders most of them police chiefs from fifty agencies during a two-day conference at the Hoover Institution in May 1995. Among the speakers was our familiar in this symposium, Mayor Kurt Schmoke, who told the group that he had visited a high school and asked the students if the high dropout rate was due to kids being hooked on drugs.He was told that the kids were dropping out because they were hooked on drug money, not drugs. He also told us that when he went to community meetings he would ask the audience three questions. 1) countenance we won the drug war? People laughed. 2) Are we winning the drug war? People move their heads. 3) If we keep doing what we are doing pass on we have won the drug war in ten years? The answer was a resounding No.At the end of the conference, the police participants completed an evaluation form. xc per cent voted no confidence in the war on drugs. They were unanimous in favoring more interference and education over more arrests and prisons. They were unanimous in recommending a presidential blue-ribbon commission to judge the drug war and to explore alternative methods of drug control. In sum, the tough-minded law-enforcement officials took positions directly contrary to those of sexual intercourse and the President.One hopes that politicians will realize that no one can accuse them of being soft on drugs if they vote for changes suggested by many thoughtful people in law enforcement. If the politicians tone down their cajolery it will permit police leaders to expose the costs of our present drug-control policies. Public opinion will then allow policy changes to decriminal ize marijuana and stop the arrest of hundreds of thousands of people every year. The tremendous savings can be used for what the public really wants the prevention of violent crime.

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