Go to qualitypolicing.com

Tag: war on drugs

  • Those Slippery Stats

    Somebody tried to do to me what I tried to do to the Heritage Foundation. I was accused of playing fast and loose the numbers in my Washington Post op-ed.

    In the old days I could have just challenged him to a duel. I’d feel pretty confident going into that battle! Instead I have to defend my honor with a written reply to this:

    “In many ways, Dante Arthur was lucky. He lived. Nationwide, a police officer dies on duty nearly every other day.” [emphasis added]

    Let’s see – 365 days a year. That makes nearly 180 such deaths each year.

    I’ve been out of the crim biz for a while, but that number sounded high to me. So I went to the UCR. Sure enough, in 2007, 140 police officers died in the line of duty. As Moskos and Franklin say, nearly one every other day.

    But 83 of those officers died in accidents, only 57 were homicide victims – one every 6 days. Still a lot. But how many of those were drug-related? The UCR has the answer:

    One.

    Nor was 2007 unusual. In the decade ending 2007, 1300 police officers died on the job. About 550 of these were in felonies, not accidents. And of these, 27 were drug-related. Three a year is still too many, but it’s a far cry from one every other day.

    Maybe I should have looked at a DVD of The Wire instead of the UCR.
    …
    Moskos and Franklin argue that federal laws should allow states to make the manufacture and distribution of drugs legal and regulated rather than criminal. The authors make several good arguments against current drug laws, which have created many problems that legalization might ameliorate. But I’m skeptical as to whether legalization would make much of a difference in police safety.

    You can read the whole post here.

    The Wire line is ironic since both Franklin and I actually policed the streets of The Wire.

    I replied with this:

    I take my numbers seriously and I criticize others for exactly what you’ve criticized me for. So I feel I need to defend myself thoroughly. You’re not being fair to me.

    As is often the case, a little qualitative insight is needed to round out the quantitative data. The numbers aren’t showing the real picture. You have too much faith in the UCR numbers. For what it’s worth, I was in the unique position of actually putting data into the URC for a year before analyzing the same data coming out the other end. Sort of a unique position for a researcher (conflict of interest?), but I can actually identify some of the UCR homicides in 2000/2001 as “mine.”

    First the non-disputed part.

    The best source for info on officer deaths is The Officer Down Memorial Page. It’s much more detailed than the UCR (and probably more accurate, too). Over the past four years, the average deaths per year is 162.5. Not half of 365, but close enough to say “nearly one every other day.” But you grant me that.

    But Dante Arthur wasn’t killed. He’s not a UCR or officer-down stat. And of course we’re all happy for that. But his life-changing war-on-drugs injury (he got shot in the mouth) all but disappears from the public record after a few days in the Baltimore Sun. It would be great to have a database on prohibition violence, but we don’t have one.

    But the real issue you’re getting at is the circumstances of deaths and injuries. Fair enough.

    It’s a generally accepted figure in Baltimore that 80% of homicides are drug related. How do we come up with that. Well… yes, to some extent it’s just made up. But it’s based on experience and common sense and made up by homicide detectives. And it rings true. So grant me that 80% figure for Baltimore homicides if you will.

    Go to the UCR homicide supplement for 2006 (you could pick any year, but I just happen to have that file handy). There are 270 homicides listed for Balto. There were actually 276 murders that year, but that’s another issue.

    Run a frequency table for “Offender 1: Circumstance.” Narcotic drug laws are listed as the cause in 3 murders, or 1.1 percent of all homicides. 1.1 percent?! That’s a big difference from 80%

    At this point one of my favorite lines comes to mind, “What are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes.”

    I think it’s safe to assume that a similar under-representation exists for the drug-related circumstances of officers killed.

    If two drug dealers are fighting and one kills somebody, that’s not listed in the UCR as drug-related. It’s an “argument over money or property.” If a cop is killed in a car crash responding to the scene, it’s listed as a motor-vehicle death. If another drug dealer is found dead along the way with no witnesses, the death is listed as “circumstances undetermined.” But it’s all drug deaths. The UCR doesn’t tell the whole story.

    If the UCR listed officers injured, Arthur Dante’s injury would not be listed as drug related. It would be listed as “arrest” or “other arrest.” And I simply don’t believe the UCR data on officers assaulted. I think they’re worthless (but that’s not for this post).

    I like your pie chart, but you’re not looking at the meaning of the data correctly. Of those 103 “traffic stops,” how many of those are drug related. I don’t know. But I’d guess 80-90%. Man wanted a drug warrant. Police trying to conduct a discretionary search of a car for drugs. Officers don’t get killed pulling over my mom.

    “Disturbances”? I’d guess about 1/3 with the rest being domestic violence (though probably 1/3 of those are drug-related as well). “Other” and “Other Arrest”? Probably half. “Ambush”? Maybe 25% (I keep thinking of those crazy white kooks killing people. Those are not drug related.)

    And I’d guess probably 10-15% of traffic deaths are drug-related. My friend Crystal Sheffield died in such an accident, trying to backup another officer involved in, yes, a drug-related dispute. But you won’t find that in the UCR.

    So put it all together and what do you have? A lot of prohibition and drug-related deaths. And there are multiple times more injured than killed in similar circumstances. We don’t put a number in the op-ed because we don’t have a number (maybe you and I could keep that database?)

    But from our experience and my participant-observation research, we both know (often personally) officers hurt and killed in the drug war. We both have a pretty good idea about how it fits into the total picture. So UCR data be damned!
    …
    Writing a 800-word op-ed is different that writing an academic journal article. But I wasn’t and don’t play fast and loose with the numbers. It just so happens that the UCR numbers themselves play fast and loose with the facts.

    (and I do graciously accept apologies.)

  • Portugal and Drug Decriminalization

    The generally conservative and pro-legalization Economist reports:

    The evidence from Portugal since 2001 is that decriminalisation of drug use and possession has benefits and no harmful side-effects.
    …
    IN 2001 newspapers around the world carried graphic reports of addicts injecting heroin in the grimy streets of a Lisbon slum. The place was dubbed Europe’s “most shameful neighbourhood” and its “worst drugs ghetto”. The Times helpfully managed to find a young British backpacker sprawled comatose on a corner. This lurid coverage was prompted by a government decision to decriminalise the personal use and possession of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. The police were told not to arrest anyone found taking any kind of drug.
    …
    The share of heroin users who inject the drug has also fallen, from 45% before decriminalisation to 17% now, he says, because the new law has facilitated treatment and harm-reduction programmes. Drug addicts now account for only 20% of Portugal’s HIV cases, down from 56% before. “We no longer have to work under the paradox that exists in many countries of providing support and medical care to people the law considers criminals.”

    “Proving a causal link between Portugal’s decriminalisation measures and any changes in drug-use patterns is virtually impossible in scientific terms,” concludes Mr Hughes. “But anyone looking at the statistics can see that drug consumption in 2001 was relatively low in European terms, and that it remains so. The apocalypse hasn’t happened.”

    Read the whole article here.

  • Here’s the to 4th Amendment

    “One of the reasons we fought a bloody war against Britain was we didn’t like these soldiers stopping people on the street willy-nilly….We went to armed revolution against the strongest nation in the world in order to have these protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. They’re not technicalities. They’re real.
    …
    Indeed, the ability to seize a person’s private property is among the most awesome powers a government can wield. The authors of the Constitution cemented that notion in the Bill of Rights, decreeing in the Fourth Amendment that our right against unreasonable search and seizure “shall not be violated.”

    This afternoon, a joint legislative panel will convene at the Capitol to review a pair of reports that say some officers of the now-defunct Metro Gang Strike Force committed behavior that was “shocking” and listed a litany of abuses.
    …
    One issue legislators must wrestle with is fundamental: Was the gang task force a good idea badly executed by dishonest cops and supervisors who looked the other way, or was the whole concept — including the state’s administrative forfeiture law — fatally flawed?
    …
    By the time lawmakers re-created the elite unit as the Metro Gang Strike Force in 2005, it had become largely self-funding, through seizures and forfeitures. The more money and property the cops from the unit’s member agencies seized, the more fiscally sound the unit was.

    Not only did it put the profit motive in police work, the cops came to look at seizures as the key to the unit’s survival, the Luger report said.

    It is definitely worth reading David Hanners’ entire article in the Pioneer Press. It’s a good piece of journalism

  • Argentina Decriminalizes Marijuana

    Out of the blue (at least to me), the BBC reports:

    The supreme court in Argentina has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption.
    …
    The Argentine court ruled that: “Each adult is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state.”

    Supreme Court President Ricardo Lorenzetti said private behaviour was legal, “as long as it doesn’t constitute clear danger”.

    “The state cannot establish morality,” he said.
    …
    It also marks a shift a dramatic regional shift to the decades-old US-backed policy of running repressive military-style wars on the drug trade, she adds.

    Read the whole story here.

  • Stop the war on pot smokers

    An op-ed by Tony Newman in the New York Daily News.

    While New York has a reputation as a tolerant and open-minded city and New York State effectively decriminalized simple possession of up to 25 grams of marijuana more than 30 years ago, Gotham has made so many pot arrests that it now has the unfortunate distinction of being the marijuana arrest capital of the world.
    …
    Prior to 1997, the lowest-level marijuana arrests were 1% of all arrests in the city. Since 1997, marijuana arrests have averaged 10% of all arrests in the city.

    If possession of marijuana is supposed to be decriminalized in New York, how does this happen? Often because, in the course of interacting with the police, individuals may be asked to empty their pockets, which results in the pot being “open to public view” – which is, technically, a crime.

    New York City’s marijuana arrests show stark racial disparities. In 2008, 87% of those charged with pot possession were black or Latino. These groups represent only about half of the city’s population, and U.S. government surveys consistently find that young whites use marijuana at higher rates than blacks and Latinos. Yet blacks and Latinos are arrested for pot at much higher rates, in part because officers make stop-and-frisks disproportionately in black, Latino and low-income neighborhoods.

    Read more.

  • Bad News with Shake and Bake Meth

    “New formula lets meth users make drug in soda bottles, avoid anti-drug laws.”

    The AP story by Justin Juozapavicius.

  • Time Served

    Perhaps nothing speaks better to our broken justice system than the fact that people–guilty and innocent alike–are held in jail for more than year beforetrial.
    Lise Olsen reports in the Houston Chronicle:

    Though the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to a speedy trial, at least 500 county inmates [out of 11,500] have been locked up for more than a year as they wait to be judged.
    …
    Around 200 inmates, theoretically innocent until proven guilty, appear to already have served more than the minimum sentence for the crime they allegedly committed.
    …
    About a third of all county jail inmates face drug possession charges.
    …
    Many people who can’t afford to post bail simply stay in jail, including some accused only of misdemeanors.
    …
    Jurors decided [Holmes] was guilty after reviewing statements from arresting officers who said they found the pipe in his hip pocket. He got the minimum sentence of six months.
    …
    Holmes, his lawyer Joseph Varela says, insisted on his right to trial — even though in the end, it meant Holmes served far more time than he would have otherwise. In fact, Holmes has racked up about 800 days in jail at a total cost to taxpayers of more than $32,000 related to his charge of possession of a lone crack pipe — a minimum of $40 a day not counting legal or court costs, transportation and other expenses.

    For the life of me I can’t figure out why somebody would not be released on their own recognizance afterhaving served their maximum sentence.

  • Mexico Decriminalizes Drug Possession

    The story in the New York Times.

    The law sets out maximum “personal use” amounts for drugs, also including LSD and methamphetamine. People detained with those quantities will no longer face criminal prosecution; the law goes into effect on Friday.

    Too bad this won’t stop the narco violence.

  • Health Care or Prisons

    Nicholas Kristof sounds offabout our absurd priorities that funds incarceration instead of school and health care.

    Did you know a black boy born today has a one-in-three chance of serving time in prison? That’s right, not arrested, but prison. It wasn’t that way a generation ago. It’s not crime. Crime hasn’t gone up (it’s gone down). It’s the war on drugs.

    If one-in-three-white men served prison time, the war on drugs would have ended yesterday.

  • Food (or drugs) for thought

    John Tierney writes:

    Treating hard-core heroin addicts with their drug of choice seems to work better than treating them with methadone, according to first rigorous test of the approach performed in North America. In the study, the addicts who went to a clinic to receive injections of a heroin compound were more likely to remain in treatment and to refrain from illicit activities than were the addicts who were given methodone. The results are being published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

    “Methodone works decently well,” Ben told me, “but a lot of addicts just don’t like it, so they don’t go in and get treatment. The advantage of prescription heroin is that they’ll go in because they want it. It attracts a whole group of people who wouldn’t get treatment at all, so the likelihood is there’s less street use and crime as a result.”

    I’m not certain what I think about this. But I’m not fan of methadone. In fact, I’ve often said, “Why not just give them heroin?” It certainly would cut down on crime. I don’t think legalheroin would increase use. But what about free heroin?