What Really Needs to Change
- Jun 5, 2020
- 10 min read
Hi all. Know it’s been a bit, I’ve been kinda bunkering down and taking a back seat from the news again, seeing as how the past few weeks have been all Coronavirus 24/7, and I feel like I’ve said what I needed to say on that subject. Now, though, as summer hits and we’ve all been dealing with mass unemployment and uncertainty across the entire country, it really is no shock that many people are taking to the streets over the very real and chronic racial injustices minorities across the country endure every single day.
Watching the video of the police officer laying his knee over George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes is truly horrifying. The callousness of the act by both the officer on top of Floyd and the other officers doing nothing and saying nothing as Floyd first begs for breath, and then bystanders beg for the officer to take his knee off as Floyd is unresponsive for minutes, leads me to accept that something is truly broken in our society. That Police at least in certain areas of the country, are somehow trained to believe this act is ok. Some are questioning what Floyd did before the video to warrant a response like this. Was he resisting? Did he yell slurs at the officers? What is his past record like? All of these questions are truly and completely irrelevant to the response garnered by the police in this instance. They are not judge and juror. None of those facts warrant the outright murder by strangulation of a man. Literally all the bystanders can clearly see that laying your body weight on a handcuffed man’s neck for nine minutes, after he becomes completely unresponsive within four, is a surefire way to kill a man. I don’t care what training these officers have received, they should know this fact plain as day and should have intervened to at the bare minimum, move the knee off the neck. The man was on his belly in handcuffs, he posed no threat. This is murder, right in the middle of the street, on camera. And the complete lack of care given by the police on the scene shows just how little they fear any type of reprisal, after decades of similar occurrences with minorities in police care have lead to little effects beyond suspension or maybe temporary firing.
I feel angry, tired, and scared for this country. We have had these issues bubbling across the surface for decades. Injustices go unanswered for the police involved, and even when there isn’t any overtly outlandish confrontations, there is the systematic dismantling of minority communities which has been endured for generations in this country. Coronavirus has set the stage for this to finally bubble to the surface, with so many scared and stressed and out of work and no answers for rent being due and little to no help offered from our government, everyone was reminded at how twisted our country truly is when they watched that video of George Floyd being murdered and nothing being done for it.
Going to the streets and protesting is good. We need change across this country. I worry many are downplaying the effects these mass protests will have on Coronavirus, but I am unsure of an answer to that. We have a government who is unable or unwilling to properly support the poor and unprivileged in this country. Now, finally, they are being heard. Trump finally got his wall built, but it wasn’t to keep Mexicans out. It’s around the White House to keep its own angry and upset citizens out. He shows how scared he is. He should be scared. He’s been dividing us and trampling on everyone for his personal gain for his entire term. He may have his rabid fanbase, but they are the minority of this country, and they aren’t the ones in the streets across the nation.
While I agree we need to demand change, I worry that just general protests aren’t going to see much change in this country beyond the occasional platitude of this city will cut police funding or DC will write “Black Lives Matter” on its street. Some organizations have put out a list of demands for police reform across the country, including independent bodies to investigate misconduct and demilitarization of the police. All of that is well and good, but I feel we are addressing symptoms and really missing the big disease that is at the heart of America: The Drug War.
The militarization of the police, bloated budgets, lack of de escalation training, systematic racism of minorities and minority neighborhoods, generations of young black men incarcerated or murdered leaving communities devastated, white flight and education standards failing in inner cities as a result, you can tie it all back to the fact that drug use in this country is a criminal justice problem, not a medical one. And it is statistically proven that minorities are vastly over targeted for low level drug offenses;
“The war on drugs precipitated soaring arrests of drug offenders and increasing racial disproportions among the arrestees. Blacks had long been arrested for drug offenses at higher rates than whites. Throughout the 1970s, for example, blacks were approximately twice as likely as whites to be arrested for drug-related offenses. By 1988, however, with national anti-drug efforts in full force, blacks were arrested on drug charges at five times the rate of whites.73 Nationwide, blacks constituted 37 percent of all drug arrestees;74 in large urban areas, blacks constituted 53 percent of all drug arrestees.”
Police right now spend most of their time dealing with drugs and the problems that drugs cause. They go around and they bust low level dealers, they spend vast resources dealing with the fallout of black market drug wars and fight for territory and the crime associated with drug addicts needing money for their next score. These policies have statistically targeted minorities over white people, even though white people tend to use illegal drugs just as much as minorities.
“-People of color experience discrimination at every stage of the criminal justice system and are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, harshly sentenced and saddled with a lifelong criminal record. This is particularly the case for drug law violations.
-Nearly 80% of people in federal prison and almost 60% of people in state prison for drug offenses are black or Latino.
-Research shows that prosecutors are twice as likely to pursue a mandatory minimum sentence for black people as for white people charged with the same offense. Among people who received a mandatory minimum sentence in 2011, 38% were Latino and 31% were black.
-Black people and Native Americans are more likely to be killed by law enforcement than other racial or ethnic groups. They are often stereotyped as being violent or addicted to alcohol and other drugs. Experts believe that stigma and racism may play a major role in police-community interactions.”
White people tend to have more wealth and access to private areas to hide their drug use. Police will frequently target poorer minority neighborhoods to find cheap, easy drug arrests from people who can’t afford to defend themselves well in court. They do this because they are incentivized to do so. Arrest more drug dealers and low level carriers, you fill out more paperwork and you get access to justify overtime, aka bigger paycheck. Beyond the individual level, entire police forces are incentivized to continue doing low level drug raids and arrests. Their entire budgets are justified around how many drugs and guns they take off the street, promotions are granted from large drug busts, and of course there’s civil asset forfeiture, a veritable slush fund for many police departments to use to confiscate and make a profit on all of the items that the drug war has indirectly purchased for them.
And then of course the prison system, both private and public, is incentivized to fill with bodies to justify their existence. We’ve already privatized healthcare and turned our hospitals into businesses, which have shown disastrous consequences when, being run like a business, they haven’t stockpiled any crucial medical supplies in case of a pandemic. Now, privatization of the prison system is springing up across the nation, and they’re being paid by the bed they fill, which creates a twisted and gross incentive across the board to further justify the war on drugs. The US outranks every single nation in incarceration rate per 100. We now have an entire lobbyist industry of prisons, donating to campaigns to make sure congress stays “tough on crime” so that everyone keeps the grotesque machine churning. And now we see whole towns where the private prison is being defended as “a jobs creator”. Something is truly wrong with our society if we have to sustain a system thats’ broken simply to make sure people have a job, even if that job isn’t something we desire or need as a society.
All of these incentives and policy decisions ripple out, and we see the effect of decades of institutional and individual racism across our police forces. They are trained to be soldiers fighting a “war” on drugs. And their occupied territory is the neighborhoods they patrol. And everyone in that neighborhood is an enemy. This is why we see so many videos of cops with shit training going around and beating on protestors and media. That is what they’ve been taught to do. Maybe not officially, but mentally and by their colleagues. Police have been transformed into low rent soldiers for decades now over this “war on drugs”, and you do that long enough no good police is left who even knows how to do the job right; to have connection with their community who can help them solve the real crimes; theft, murder, rapes, etc. You bust everyone’s head enough times and you’re basically just seen by the community as just another gang, not to be trusted.
“The Wire”, a show that was based right here in Baltimore, is regarded by many, including myself, as one of the greatest pieces of television media because it shows at length the results of the The War on Drugs in America. How it affects everything, from policing itself, crime, smuggling, education, globalization, and corruption. People always comment on Baltimore because of its depiction in the show, but I fear they are missing the entire point. Yes, the show very accurately depicts many portions of life unique to Baltimore, but the themes of the show itself reverberate throughout this entire nation, not just Baltimore. If you haven’t watched it, I strongly recommend it. The show concluded in 2008, and here we are, over a decade later, having changed almost nothing and are reaping the consequences for it.
People look at heroin junkies being arrested and at drug dealers running corners and fighting over territory and assume this is just the way it is. That minorities representing a much larger portion of arrests and prosecutions than whites is someone merely a problem with black and minorities, not the devastating socioeconomic effects that said communities have suffered as a result of Jim Crow, red lining, and the drug war itself over the decades. That there is no other way to deal with “the drug problem”. But, there are alternative paths. You take the illegality out of it, you can remove the heart of the black market itself. Yes, we are on the path to legalization for marijuana, and thats’ a critical first step, but we need decriminalization across the board, for the harder drugs like heroin and cocaine.
Not legalization, mind you. I think when people hear this type of proposal, they assume I mean to have black tar heroin hanging over the counter at your local pharmacy, next to the Advil. No, we aren’t legalizing all drugs. Marijuana, yes, because of the vast studies proving it to not be a harmful drug, least not any more so than alcohol or nicotine. But harder drugs like heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, etc, these drugs need to be regulated and the addicts treated as a public health crisis. You don’t solve drug abuse by throwing the users in prison, as decades of this policy have shown. You solve it through access to care and counseling and facilities that these people need. We can see this model successfully playing out in another country, Portugal.
“In the 1990s, some 5,000 addicts roamed the streets of the hilly neighborhood, searching for their daily fix as dirty syringes piled up in the gutters. An estimated 1% of the population—bankers, students, socialites—were hooked on heroin and Portugal had the highest rate of HIV infection in the entire European Union.
Over the course of two decades, the government’s response had been one that Americans will recognize: it introduced increasingly harsh policies led by the criminal justice system, while conservative critics spoke out against drug use. By the late ’90s, about half the people in prison were there for drug-related reasons—creating a large addicted inmate population. Nothing was working. On the other side of the Atlantic, the U.S. was doing the same: spending billions of dollars cracking down on drug users.”
Portugal went down the same path that we in the US are still careening down, two decades later. They, however, saw that it wasn’t working and took an entirely different approach; decriminalize everything. Drug dealers were still arrestable and prosecutable, but the users themselves were instead of being jailed, sent to treatment and counseling. And it helped.
“A 2015 study found that since Portugal approved the new national strategy in 1999 that led to decriminalization, the per capita social cost of drug misuse decreased by 18%. And according to a report by the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit with the goal of ending America’s “War on Drugs,” the percentage of people in prison in Portugal for drug law violations has decreased dramatically, from 44% in 1999 to 24% in 2013.”
Portugal has also proposed to have sites where users can safely consume their drug in private and with medical personnel on site to assist. This has already been a reality in many areas in Europe and Vancouver, and have shown statistical drops in HIV transmission and increased outreach for the users to help them receive the counseling and treatment they need. I believe the US needs to go one step further; make and give access to the drugs that the users need if they need it.
No, not have it for sale in a pharmacy. Have a medical product available by prescription only and only allowed to be taken under direct medical supervision. This is what really cuts the legs out of the drug war. You remove the product from the black market, you give addicts access to clean and relatively safe versions of these drugs, and everything changes. People stop overdosing across the country over illegal drugs spiked with fentanyl and other impurities. Gangs don’t have any product or profits to fight over. The profit for selling drugs illegally evaporates when they’re medically available for the users.
Police will no longer have an incentive to go around rounding up minorities for low level drug offenses. They can be trained to perform their actual functions and get back to community policing, solving actual crimes, not being soldiers in a war. And hopefully over time, that trust between community and police can be rebuilt. Along the way, there needs to be real consequences for those officers who clearly violate their oaths to protect all citizens. That people like Derek Chauvin and the other officers who stand by and do nothing pay for their crimes beyond a simple suspension or even firing. These changes won’t happen overnight, it will take time, probably decades more, and the entire structure of our policing across the nation will need to be overhauled. But its’ a clear step to actually fighting what is at the heart of the problem in this nation.
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