Police and Community Relations in the Wake of the War on Drugs: A Historical Perspective

Mural outside of the 22nd Police District, North Philadelphia (2010)

In the wake of the murders of NYPD Officers Liu and Ramos, there are a lot of fingers being pointed at protesters and activists for somehow causing these killings by exercising their right to express disapproval in police actions which they believe to be wrong.  The message of these protesters and activists has been misconstrued in several ways: that all cops are racist, that all cops are killers, that cops are evil.  While a good deal of this misunderstanding, I think, comes from a sort of automatic process in which we translate “criticisms I don’t agree with” into “violently negative statements about everything I hold dear,” I also think there’s a more significant lack of understanding about what we mean when we say that policing in this country is prone to institutional racism.

Perhaps a historical perspective would help.  Some has been offered already: people, of course, recalling lynchings and segregation and police turning hoses on Civil Rights demonstrators in the Sixties.  All relevant.  But I think a more immediate progenitor of our current situation – the deep divide of distrust between inner-city communities and police, and the frequently brutal tactics used to enforce the law in these communities – is the War on Drugs and its legacy.

The War on Drugs, riding on a wave of popular hysteria, legitimized and institutionalized police procedures that target non-white minorities and the underclass.  Even as our drug policies slowly start to shift from the more draconian measures of the past, policing in the inner-city continues to display a militarized mindset, and people in those communities continue to view cops as an occupying army.  This is not an accident.  You don’t declare war on something, and then get surprised when people start drawing battle lines.

I realize I’m stating the obvious here.  But in all of the arguments I’ve read, no one’s provided a clear schematic of how, exactly, these two phenomena are related.  So that’s what I’m going to try to do here.

Fells Point, Baltimore (2007)

Part I: The War

Drugs were part of our counterculture long before the Sixties (and, indeed, we’d already racked up a notable history of drug penalties targeting non-whites by that point in history), but it was during that time that recreational drug use began to gain wider notice and acceptance.  Particularly, they became a trademark of rebelliousness and independence among America’s youth – and you know how much we freak out about new, dangerous teenage fads.  Combined with increased reports of heroin addiction (including among Vietnam veterans), national fear of drugs began to build.

In 1971, Nixon officially declared a “war on drugs,” implementing tactics that continue to characterize narcotics policing today: mandatory minimum sentencing and no-knock warrants.  Mandatory minimums prescribe a required amount of jail time for a certain offense – in this case, drug trafficking, drug importation or exportation, or possession with intent to distribute, on a scale based on the amount in the individual’s possession at the time of arrest.  No-knock warrants are exactly what they sound like: warrants that allow the police to enter a residence without first knocking, ringing the doorbell, or otherwise making themselves known.  These warrants provide police with the element of surprise when raiding stash houses, preventing dealers from disposing of drugs or other evidence (or, as I’m sure is a constant concern, rallying themselves to fight back).

These tactics boast a host of problems in and of themselves, so let’s look at that, briefly.  Mandatory minimums are, by nature, inflexible.  They can’t be tailored to individuals or situations (one of those things that the American people is totally against when it happens to Jean Valjean, but totally for when it happens to 17-year-old “Peanut” on Ocean and Stegman).  While standardized sentencing often makes sense, if only to streamline the judicial process and prevent disparities in sentencing, it’s more problematic than it appears.  For one thing, it doesn’t real prevent sentencing disparities – judges have to follow those restrictions in handing down sentences, sure, but power really lies in the hands of the prosecutors.  It’s entirely up to the prosecutor’s discretion what charges they bring (evidence permitting, of course – and even then, there are exceptions), meaning that they decide whether to charge a client with a mandatory minimum offense… or not.  Often, these decisions are drawn along racial lines.  A 2013 study in the Yale Law Journal found that prosecutors are twice as likely to pursue mandatory minimums for blacks as for whites charged with the same offense.

In the case of no-knock warrants, we see one of the earliest (in the drug war, anyway) examples of the paramilitary policing so widely criticized in Ferguson, MO, this summer.  Approaching a building undetected, busting down doors with weapons drawn, shouting: this is a military operation, a ground assault.  People on the other end of these warrants have, often, responded accordingly.  There have been numerous cases of civilians – innocent of whatever suspicions justified the warrant in the first place – thinking that their home was under attack, attempting to defend themselves with those Constitutionally-approved firearms we love so much, and being gunned down by police.  A quick Google search will provide more examples, but as a taste, here’s the story of Kathryn Johnson, a 92-year-old woman killed during a botched drug raid (and the subsequent attempt at a cover-up by Atlanta PD).

In order to really understand the War on Drugs and its effects, however, we need to look at where it was being fought. Because, like all wars, it both marred and, in a sense, defined the ground it was waged on.

North Philadelphia (2009)

Part II: The Battlefield

The War on Drugs began as the narcotics trade was really gaining a foothold in the black inner-city.  Just a couple of decades prior, major American cities saw the advent of high-rise project towers and increasing white flight to the suburbs, both of which would have a major role in defining the inner-city.  Construction of high-rises exploded after World War II, in order to house workers flooding into the cities to fill jobs created by the post-war manufacturing boom.  At first, many of these developments were mixed-race (or, at the very least, lightly segregated).  Over time, however, whites began to leave the city for the suburbs (often in order to escape integration, as in the case of Levittown and its descendents).  Desegregation increased this exodus, until many densely urban areas were majority black or brown.  Manufacturers, industries, and, consequently, jobs pulled up stakes soon after.  Minority communities – already economically disadvantaged by racist hiring practices – fell deeper into destitution.  The high-rises, once convenient residences for hundreds of workers, became concentrated zones of intense poverty.  Property values dropped, as did the ability to pay taxes, along with a comorbid dip in the quality of education and social services.

The police in these neighborhoods were, at the time, almost exclusively white.  Brutality and racism were common, as was anger from the community.  In 1964, Harlem, Chicago, Philadelphia*, and Jersey City all saw riots in response to instances of police brutality.

It was in this climate of anger, desperation, and shrinking opportunities that the drug trade established itself.  Again, drugs were already being sold in the black inner-city at this time, but the Sixties and Seventies saw a real expansion in black control of these enterprises (as in the case of Frank Lucas, who famously used his US Army connections to cut out the middle man and import heroin directly from Southeast Asia).  To borrow one of my favorite David Simon phrases, by the early Eighties, the narcotics trade was the only factory in the inner-city that was still hiring.  And there was certainly demand to meet the supply: what started as rebellion in the Sixties and partying in the Seventies soon became just drugs for drugs’ sake: drug use as a way to deal with depression and hopelessness, to give dead-end lives some spark, not to mention to feed the gnawing of addiction.  There were, as Simon’s The Corner and The Wire laments, rules at one point – a vain attempt to put some veneer of order on what was essentially industrialized suicide, but still, rules nonetheless.  Kids weren’t employed in the drug trade.  Violence was most often carried out with the same bloodless calculus that characterized Mafia killings – a series of approvals and justifications, a general (if not overwhelming) interest in avoiding collateral damage.

And then comes crack.  Crack: potent, highly addictive, and cheap.  Imagine if everyone on your block suddenly had the ability to start manufacturing and selling iPhones.  Prices would go down, sure.  So would quality control.  And competition would just go up.  Crack changed the entire face of the inner-city drug trade.  Now you didn’t need a serious connection: you could get a few friends together, buy a package from some guy down from New York for the weekend, and start selling by nightfall.  The drug’s potency meant more addicts – and more desperate addicts.  People willing to put up with more kinds of abuse in order to get what they needed; not to mention people willing to go to more extreme measures to do the same.  More and more young people got into the game, meaning an increase in reckless behavior (to borrow another great Simon line, a fourteen-year-old drug dealer is still only fourteen).  Crime and violence skyrocketed.

The advent of crack whipped public fears about drugs into an even greater frenzy.  And the nexus of those fears was the black inner-city.  Under Reagan the War on Drugs intensified, along with an explosion in mass incarceration for drug offenses -- adding one more factor, along with addiction, violence, and a dysfunctional government assistance program, that devastated black families and economic hopes.  The poverty that made the ghetto and the drug trade possible in the first place compounded, dug in its heels.  In many ways, the drug war worsened the threat it was supposed to alleviate.

Look at any contemporary cultural depiction of the inner-city from the Eighties and Nineties, and you’ll see a lawless shadow land, full of sadistic gangsters and constant gunfire.  This was how we saw these neighborhoods, and how we demanded that they be policed.  Any arguments about the history of racial exclusion, about the effects of compounded poverty and hopelessness, were swept away with appeals to “personal responsibility.”  The personal failings of a 17-year-old corner boy, in other words, somehow wipe away the decades, centuries, of institutional failings that contributed to him standing on that corner in the first place.

It’s at this point in history that we develop our national myth of the “welfare queen,” that we indulge in exaggerated reports of “crack babes” and wild-eyed, soulless crack addicts.  Conveniently, this is also the peak of our panic over HIV/AIDS, providing us with a modern-day leprosy to cringe away from.  As the situation of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens became worse and worse, we responded at first with fear, and eventually contempt.  It’s an attitude we hold onto today: a righteous fear that allows us to think of the black inner-city as a “jungle,” to call an entire group of people “thugs” or “animals” and then claim that it’s not about race.  It makes us totally understanding of violent police tactics: It’s the only thing these animals understand.  They see mercy as a sign of weakness and they’ll rip your throat out.

We viewed the inner-city as an enemy country, so the police approached it as such.  Those involved in the narcotics trade responded in kind.  The work of police became more dangerous as violence increased, contributing to what we often perceive as itchy trigger fingers: the idea that if you give an assailant half-an-inch, they will, undoubtedly, kill you.  This idea responds to a very real danger in the everyday life of police.  It’s also led to many instances of brutality, and wrongful deaths.

And after so many years of exclusion and oppression, even those citizens with no ties to crime were distrustful, and sometimes hostile, to police.  This distrust led to a general unwillingness to assist in any police investigations, especially because it was clear that the police could do very little to protect witnesses from reprisals in their own neighborhoods.  This, of course, made police work – especially murder investigations – exponentially more difficult.  Frustrations built on both sides.

Camden, NJ (2014)

Part III: Our War

The War on Drugs capitalized on these fears and frustrations.  It emphasized arrests, because that’s what creates numbers.  Arrest numbers are something you can put on a graph, a spreadsheet, a press release.  They’re comforting, because they give the illusion that something is being done about crime.  Consequently, the cop on the street can show his shift sergeant that he’s doing his job, the shift sergeant can account for himself to his commander, his commander can justify the retention of his job to the commissioner, and the commissioner can do the same to the mayor, who in turn uses the numbers to ingratiate himself to the voters.  However, these arrests don’t actually have any preventative or structural effects on crime, for the simple reason that most of them are street-level arrests: that is, someone standing on the corner selling drugs, or someone holding a stash.  These folks are generally bit-players in the drug game.  It’s the equivalent of discovering that McDonald’s the company has been secretly using cat meat in its Chicken McNuggets to cut down on costs, and arresting the kid at the drive-thru window at the nearest store.  These arrests don’t actually interrupt the business of narcotics, because street-level dealers are easily replaceable.  But they’re also the easiest arrests to make, which sates the brass and city hall’s need for increased numbers.  Arresting major figures in drug organizations takes time, money, and patience that voters usually don’t respond kindly to.

Consequently, we get street-level arrests and overcrowded prisons.  In 1980, there were 50,000 people incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses; by 1997, there were over 400,000.  In September of 2013, there were 98,200 federal inmates (about 51% of the federal prison population) incarcerated for drug crimes, and 210,200 in state prisons in 2012.  These inmates are, disproportionately, people of color.  Blacks comprise nearly one-third of those arrested for drug crimes, despite using drugs at comparable rates to other races (including whites), and account for more than forty percent of those incarcerated for drug offenses.  As further evidence of how our national panic shapes policy and priorities, note the vast disparity in sentencing for powder cocaine (used primarily by upper- and middle-class whites) and crack cocaine (primarily an inner-city drug).  Possession of 28 grams of crack results in a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for a first offense; you’d need 500 grams of powder cocaine in order to receive the same sentence.  

So, to bring us back to the original purpose of this blog post, what conclusions can we draw from this about policing?  First of all, I would say that most cops aren’t participating in these racist policies because they themselves are bigots.  Indeed, very few people are actually saying that.  It’s because the institution they work for is engaged, actively and with our support, in policies that target poor, non-white minorities and recommend the strongest possible tactics in response to any aggression, non-compliance, or disrespect.  This is not to say that police aren’t well-intentioned, that their jobs aren’t dangerous and often thankless, or that they don’t put their lives and safety on the line for others.  They do.  And while they enforce these racist policies, they didn’t decide on them.

We did.

As an electorate, this is what we’ve said good policing looks like.  This is the evidence we need in order to believe the police are doing their job.  We prioritized the war on drugs, we directed our fear and frustration towards the inner-city, and we signed off on whatever means were necessary to end the threat.  We want arrest numbers.  We want raids and seizures.  We want dope on the table.  We want comforting, easily-digestible sound bytes that tell us that law and order has prevailed and the barbarians are no longer at the gates of our developments.  And we can get that, certainly.  Just not in conjunction with good police work.

Good police work takes time, patience, focus, and a ton of support.  Whenever you hear about a major drug dealer being arrested, or a repeat violent offender (as most violent offenders are, by the way – we can talk about that some other time) is finally brought in, it’s usually the product of months, sometimes years, of tireless effort on the part of law enforcement.  But we don’t have the attention span for that.  Most of us can’t even read an entire newspaper article from start to finish without skimming (guilty).

As far as recommendations go, I’d encourage you (if you agree with what I’ve written here) to advocate for reforms in drug policy.  Just trying to remove “racism” from policing is too nebulous, and doesn’t lend itself easily to sustainable solutions.  But reforming drug policy, and our approach to policing narcotics, will hopefully have positive effects in the neighborhoods where the drug war is so often fought.  Another way to help improve the situation overall is by supporting programs aimed at breaking the cycle of poverty – after-school programs, job training programs, prisoner reentry programs (Jersey City is doing some great work with this issue, I’m happy to say!), etc.  I especially want to throw out a plug for my favorite, Homeboy Industries, which does incredible work and LITERALLY ALWAYS NEEDS MONEY!!!!  

In short, give people hope and the opportunity to see those hopes realized, and you’ll be amazed by what they can achieve.

Also, educate yourself on police work.  Read up on history and policy.  Learn about the various commendable efforts police departments are doing to better work with their communities – from PAL Gyms to more on-the-ground methods of fostering positive relationships.  Cops aren’t ignorant of the drug war and its negative effects, and many of them are working hard to find another way to do things.  Also, you’ve probably heard so much rhetoric about how hard a cop’s job is that it’s easy to forget how true that really is.  Being cop is often thankless and miserable, but it is, in its best form, an act of selfless service.  That’s something worth appreciating, even if you don’t agree with everything they do or, like me, believe that they’re wrestling with deep institutional dysfunction.

All right, I’m done.  Hope that made some modicum of sense.  Feel free to reply with your thoughts, I’d just ask that you do so respectfully.  I hope I’ve worded this argument as civilly as possible, but I also know that I can get snarky when I’m passionate about something, so I apologize if my tone comes off as offensive.

*As a historical footnote, the 1964 Philadelphia race riot took place the summer before my dad’s freshman year at St. Joseph’s Prep.  At that time, the school shot off horizontally from the Church of the Gesu, running all the way down Stiles Street to 17th, and featured an immense, marble entryway.  It had been built back in the 1860’s, when the area around it was open land.  Eventually a neighborhood – largely white and working-class, I believe – sprung up around it.  By the mid-Sixties, however, North Philadelphia had become increasingly black.  In January 1966, most of the Prep burned down in an accidental fire (the quick work of a Jesuit preserving both the church and the adjoined Jesuit residence at 18th and Thompson).  Although there was some debate over moving the school, in the end they decided to rebuild at its current location.  The new school that was completed in 1968 – and which I attended – had none of the Roman grandeur of the old building.  It was blocky, brick, with high, narrow windows that I used to call “arrow slits,” because I’m clever like that.  It was, for all intents and purposes, a fortress; a barricade to keep students safe and the rapidly-darkening neighborhood out.  Recent renovations have made the building more inviting, but you can still see the arrow slits along Girard Avenue or 17th Street, a reminder of the fear that’s shaped our cities.