The American War on Drugs is doomed to fail. A couple of weeks back I described how attempts to use the capitalist production model to operate the War on Drugs creates an impossible situation. It is law enforcement’s job to eradicate drugs yet at the same time they are dependent on the drug war to fund their operations. If American law enforcement were to somehow successfully eliminate all drugs in America, they would ensure mass layoffs and shrunken police budgets.
The financial incentive to prosecute drug offenders seriously skews police priorities. Nationally police tend to make more drug arrests than anything else. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report police made 1.57 million drug arrests in 2016 – an average of one every 20 seconds. There were three times more drug arrests than for all violent crimes combined that year. In 2012 drugs were again the most common reason for arrests. Of those 82 percent were for possession – and 42 percent of those were for marijuana possession.
A study by the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) looked at marijuana arrests by the New York Police Department. New York decriminalized marijuana in 1977, making possession of up to 25 grams worth only a $100 fine. Even so NYPD racked up more than 440,000 pot arrests between 2002 and 2012. The numbers started shooting up in the 1990s when “stop and frisk” policing came into fashion. The law decriminalizing marijuana had left a loophole that said possession was still illegal in “open or public view.” In 2011, for example, NYPD stopped and searched 684,724 people. As Matt Taibbi describes, one of the first thing an officer does in a stop is ask the person to empty their pockets “… and suddenly you’re standing there on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-First Street with half a joint sitting in your open hand.” Those 440,000 NYPD pot arrests added up to 1 million man-hours, because every arrest takes 2-3 hours to process per officer. According to the DPA study that is the equivalent of having 31 officers working 8 hours a day, 365 days a year for 11 years just busting people for something that was putatively legal in New York. And as a University of Chicago law review article concluded “We find no good evidence that the MPV [marijuana in public view] arrests are associated with reductions in serious violent or property crimes in the city.” Making arrests for drug possession are the low hanging fruit of law enforcement. Police pump up their arrest numbers by making the easiest possible busts.
To be fair, since recreational marijuana was legalized in New York in 2021 the number of arrests for possession and sales have dropped precipitously, from 46,726 in 2018 to less than a thousand in 2023.
Still, the emphasis on drug arrests takes scarce resources away from more serious crime. According to the Pew Research Center fewer than half of all crimes are reported to police – and of those fewer than half are ever solved. According to their numbers in 2015 only 47 percent of violent crimes were reported and only 47 percent of those were cleared – which is about 22 percent of the total. Only 35 percent of property crimes were reported and 19 percent of those crimes were cleared – less than 7 percent of the total. And clearing a case doesn’t even mean that police have solved the case and gotten a conviction. According to law enforcement parlance clearing a case simply means arresting a suspect or identifying a dead culprit. A murderer in the US has a one in three chance of getting away with it. The clearance rate for homicides is about 64 percent. That’s a big decline from 1965 when the murder clearance rate was above 90 percent. Crime experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of murders have gone unsolved since the drug war got rolling.
The unrelenting focus on drug crime has hit African American much harder than any other group. Black Americans, who make up 13 percent of the total population, represent 29 percent of drug arrests and 35 percent of those imprisoned for drugs. One 2017 study* looking at Byrne Grant funding for the drug war concluded “federal funding for the War on Drugs can be linked directly to the increase in racial disparities in arrest, disproportionally affecting blacks.” Studies show that white and black Americans use and sell drugs at similar rates, but a black American is almost three times more likely to be arrested for a drug-related offense. Why is that? If black folks and white folks use drugs at the same rates, why don’t police start sweeping college campuses or the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange? As Major Neill Franklin summarized: “Most of the people in these impoverished communities are always in the streets. They sell on the street corner. They have no political power or capital and no financial power, so there's also very little pushback.” Police bust minority communities because it is easy and there is no political “pushback.
It’s true that there have been reforms in how Byrne funds are distributed. There was a recognition that using raw arrest numbers as a main way to determine how much funding a law enforcement agency gets only encouraged police to boost their numbers by busting as many people as possible for low level crimes like drug possession. In 2014 “number of arrests” was removed from the list of accountability measures by the Department of Justice. While a step in the right direction, there is little reason to be optimistic that this change will slow drug arrests.
In the mid-1990s NYPD implemented a computerized comparative statistics program called CompStat. It’s sort of like Moneyball but instead of batting statistics the raw numbers are all law and order-related. In a production equation that Robert McNamara would have recognized murders, robberies, sexual assaults, and grand theft auto were offset by police activity – stops, arrests, summonses, and tickets. The data was kept for each police precinct or district as a way of measuring police productivity. After the numbers were crunched it was time for weekly or monthly meetings: “Toting binders packed with statistics, precinct commanders wait to be called on the carpet by police chiefs about what they are or are not doing to control crime. They have no idea what they will be asked or where the questions will lead. Not every commander will be called on, and stress levels are high. The attempt at intimidation by police chiefs is intentional.”
Hoping to counteract the negative impact of this internal pressure New York City passed a law in 2010 banning the use of quotas for tickets, stops, summonses, and arrests. In 2011 NYPD implemented a revised performance review that had “goals” for officers instead of quotas. But after New York City was sued over its stop and frisk practices U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin said that the new metrics were “nothing more than a euphemism for an acceptable number of stops, arrests, and summonses in targeted locations.” As Judge Scheindlin points out, simply changing the name from a quota to a goal is a meaningless distinction if nothing else changes. Matt Taibbi’s 2014 book The Divide says that New York patrol cops are still expected to empty one summons pad a month, which sounds kind of like a quota to me. Changing the language does nothing to change a national police culture that still applies technowar, scientific rationalization, to the War on Drugs.
This is part 2 of a 5 part series on how capitalist production theories have infiltrated our criminal justice system, and why the drug war has always been doomed to fail. In my next post we'll examine how criminal prosecutions fall into the same trap - which turns our justice system into a complete farce.
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