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> Cooperating with law enforcement is often morally and practically unthinkable for the city’s most vulnerable The article has a really big blind spot, in that

> Cooperating with law enforcement is often morally and practically unthinkable for the city’s most vulnerable The article has a really big blind spot, in that it fails to mention the Drug War even a single time. If you want to understand why America's police act like an occupying army- the militarization of weapons and approaches, the festering hostility between the police and the policed, the heavy-handed suspicion and disregard for those under their protection- then you have to start with the Drug War. Policing against victimless crimes is fundamentally a different endeavor than policing against normal violent or property crime. In a rape, assault, or robbery there's a clear victim to come forward. Crime gets reported, police investigate, criminal gets arrested, community improves from having a violent psychopath off the streets. It's a simple formula, everybody's happy. But when you're trying to police the crimes of drugs or prostitution or illegal lemonade stands, there is no aggrieved party. Just two or more people engaged in a mutually voluntary transaction. Hence there's no way to stop this activity besides butting into people's lives, violating their privacy, kicking down doors, and harassing random people on the street. You're no longer hauling away lunatics that hurt people. You're arresting mothers, sons, and boyfriends who are just trying to make a living. If you want the police to be respected and valued by the communities that they police, then focus on restricting their activities mainly to victim-centric crimes. The resolution of which provides tangible value to the policed. Adopt a Portuguese-Style approach to drug policy, where usage and low-level dealing of drugs is decriminalized and treated as a health rather than criminal issue.

Symmetry 7y ago
Parts of it go back to Prohibition too. The original push to get police into cars was partially just to let them cover more ground. But part of it was that cars would separate them from the neighborhoods they covered a bit and prevent them from absorbing local mores about what sorts of activities were harmless instead of what the law said.
jgeada 7y ago
Wish I could upvote the above comment more than once!
rjf72 7y ago
What you're saying is true but only in a society where you simply allow all drugs. Ideologically I am of this inclining since I don't think the government has a right to determine what people should or should not be able to put in their own body, but at the same time I also think this is a path that is detrimental for society. A few factors you don't hit on: - many drugs are addictive and this can lead to addicts turning to crime to try to fuel their addiction. yes we could offer more public support for such things, but these tend to be lifestyle choices that people revert to over and over. - some drugs themselves can have a strong connection with abnormally violent and dangerous behavior - for instance, PCP. - other drugs can have potentially extreme side effects even with minimal usage. olney's lesions / brain lesions are but one example. of course the same is true of e.g. alcohol, but the quantities involved are quite different. - any drug that is illegal will result in a black market. this black market tends to trend towards violence. there is potentially big money to be made in drugs and criminal enterprises tend to attract criminals who don't just constrain their violation to their product.
- jadell 7y ago
  It always felt weird to me that most of the rationale for policing drug use is based on preventing the crimes a user might commit while on drugs, rather than just the prosecuting the crimes they actually do commit while on drugs. "You can't do heroin because you'll get addicted and might steal in order to fuel your addiction." "But I haven't actually stolen anything yet, so what crime has been committed?" Are there any other cases of a victim-less activity where we preemptively arrest/prosecute people because that activity might lead to crime someday?
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Speeding. Public intoxication. Keeping an attractive nuisance.
    - geggam 7y ago
      All victimless crimes. Oddly enough in AZ you are supposed to have a victim for a crime yet you can be charged with criminal speeding and there be no victim.
c3534l 7y ago
The militarization of the police has come primarily from the militarization of criminals. Before the Valentine's Day Massacres, criminals had better cars and weapons than the police, allowing them to fight and win against the police. Prior to the LA shooting spree, police had no way to fight a criminal armed with assault weapons and no training on how to do so without endangering the public. When I lived in St. Louis, once the riots started to happen the police got tanks and other military equipment from out of state and then never let go of them (massive over-reaction to protestors that were not anywhere near as rough as you saw on TV, but that's what happened). I think you're right that the drug war was a factor, but I think you're wrong in why it was a factor. It's not some arbitrary distinction between what you deem to be a "victimless" crime, as if there was never such a thing in the 1700s and 1800s. The reason is that it's an arms race. The police always want to be better equipped and trained at dealing with a situation than they people they're up against. If it's unarmed protestors, they want organized formations and tear gas. If it's a drug cartel with assault weapons, the police want tanks and helicopters.
- wbl 7y ago
  British police had no weapons in the 19th century while the population had ready access to firearms.
- yardie 7y ago
  So if I have this straight in St Louis when the people are protesting against police brutality, the polices solution is to be more brutal? No kidding it’s an arms race. I’ll even bet they are using kettling to invoke a reaction from protestors. They aren’t passively responding to protestors, they are active antagonizing the public to justify their brutality.
  - CompanionCuuube 7y ago
    > So if I have this straight in St Louis when the people are protesting against police brutality, the polices solution is to be more brutal? No, they brought in that equipment to deal with the riots. If it was just protesting but not rioting then that would be a different story. The tools are a force multiplier which is necessary when you're outnumbered. There are fewer police than rioters.
jakelazaroff 7y ago
Criminalizing victimless behavior prevents enforcement of violent/property crime too. Would a prostitute report being raped by a john? Maybe, but it seems unlikely when they have to worry about getting thrown in the system themselves.
DanBC 7y ago
Other places have a war on drugs, or have regulations about lemonade stands, and they don't have the pathologically awful policing that the US has. The US is extraordinarily violent. That's where you need to start: why is violence so common and acceptable in the US?
- geggam 7y ago
  Violence is what every govt threatens its citizens with to ensure peace ( irony no ? ) What is not common in the US is a respect for others. The police do not respect the citizens. The citizens dont respect the police or the govt. Respect is earned. Tell me you think the police or govt has earned our respect ? Because of this mutual lack of respect violence is almost certain.
  - Retra 7y ago
    I'm going to quote a previous comment of mine here, because I think your rhetoric is shallow: >Violence is usually too far removed from the relevant abstractions. It's not difficult to see violence behind everything, because rules don't mean much if they aren't enforced, and it's all too easy to conflate violence with a threat of violence, or a threat of force with a threat of violence, etc. > But that's not a very useful perspective; a well-functioning society filters violence so that it is only applied when things go seriously awry, and most of us should only ever threatened by minor inconveniences. To focus on violence is to be reductive; it is like trying to talk about programming in terms of electromagnetic laws -- yes, computers ultimately run on electricity, and social powers are ultimately enforced through violence, but the abstractions we've built atop those facts are actually very relevant and useful.
    - geggam 7y ago
      Now you are saying a specific group of people get to define acceptable violence. This is insane... who defines that group ? Are all govts legitimate ? Do all govts get to define violence ? There is no ethical violence or all violence is ethical because your reasons arent more valid than someone elses
thatcat 7y ago
>Crime gets reported, police investigate, criminal gets arrested, community improves from having a violent psychopath off the streets. It's a simple formula, everybody's happy Wrong, even in simple assault cases it's possible for the victim to be charged with the assault if the person committing assault goes to the court house first and files charges. This blocks the ability of the victim to file charges and allows police to pursue them as the criminal.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  What jurisdiction do you live in that permits people to file criminal charges on their own authority at a court house?
  - thatcat 7y ago
    Is this not universal in US? If police on scene don't file charges or arrest anyone, it's a "race to the court house" with the first person to file having priority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_courthouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_courthouse
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      Not only is it "not universal", it's vanishingly uncommon. A small handful of states permit "private prosecution" of crimes, with very significant limitations. It certainly can't be used to shut down the victim in the fashion you describe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#United_Sta... The "race to the courthouse" article you linked doesn't even specify which country it applies to, and cites zero sources. It appears to refer to https://definitions.uslegal.com/r/race-to-the-courthouse/ https://definitions.uslegal.com/r/race-to-the-courthouse/, which isn't about criminal prosecutions at all. It's about certain civil law situations.
      - thatcat 7y ago
        Yea INAL, but the race to the court house was the way a lawyer explained it to me. This is in fact how it works in TN. It's not a private prosecution, it's public. https://www.marylandcriminalattorneyblog.com/carroll_county_maryland_assaul/ https://www.marylandcriminalattorneyblog.com/carroll_county_... "This is because without a weapon or serious injury the only crime would that could be charged is second degree assault which is a misdemeanor in Maryland. The police can only arrest in misdemeanor cases if they actually witness the events. Otherwise, the police are supposed to simply write a report and advise the combatants as to the procedures for filing charges against one another. " Re: here because out of reply subthreads: I'm not mixing the two up. I called the police after having my jaw broken in a one sided assault and filed a report. The assailant went to the court house and filed charges officially and one week later I was charged with assault. This was leveraged by the public prosecutor to prevent me from filing civil and criminal charges against the assailant as terms for myself not being prosecuted or subject to a trial by jury. The only people who seem to be aware of this situation are lawyers and law-savvy repeated violent offenders who use it to escape prosecution.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
Internationally, countries that export illicit drugs are countries that have a shortage of legal exports and desperately need a cash income. I think if you want to talk about The Drug War in the US, you need to talk about institutional racism and its roots in a history of slavery. There are myriad ways in which the African American community has been victimized in the US and it's all interrelated. You can't really isolate "this one thing."
- sandworm101 7y ago
  >> ... countries that export illicit drugs are countries that have a shortage of legal exports and desperately need a cash income. I don't think China lacks export opportunities, yet is the source of most all of the worlds fentanyl-type drugs. Up until a couple years ago Canada was a huge source of pot for the US. Canada has a thriving export market. Mexico too.
- danmaz74 7y ago
  I'm curious about this link between racism and drugs. When I was growing up in Italy, during the 80s, drugs were a pretty big issue, and we had our own "war on drugs", but at the time there were basically no black people here, so it couldn't be linked to race.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    A tldr for the US would be that we tend to arrest poor people and people of color more and punish them more than we do well-heeled white people. On average, blacks in the US are a lot poorer than whites, so they get subjected to that twice over. It doesn't necessarily mean they do more drugs than whites. It just means that "the war on drugs" is often just one more justification for a long history of coming up with excuses to throw blacks in jail and generally crap on their lives. The US has a talent for either framing rules in a way that causes trouble for people of color or interpreting behavior by people of color differently than the same behavior by a white person.
    - danmaz74 7y ago
sandworm101 7y ago
>> If you want to understand why America's police act like an occupying army... then you have to start with the Drug War. Go back much further than that. Go back to the civil rights movement. Go back to jim crow. The history of the American war on drugs was born of racism and continues its birthright. That is the real sticking point, the source of the high emotions surrounding drugs. The drug war is a proxy for much more difficult issues.
- merpnderp 7y ago
  There was definitely racism in the passing and enforcing of these laws. There was also definitely communities overran with drug related crime that were desperate for help. When a single mom can't buy her kid a bicycle because the last 3 have been stolen out from under him by addicts looking to score, she's going to ask the her elected representatives for help.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > When a single mom can't buy her kid a bicycle because the last 3 have been stolen out from under him by addicts looking to score That seems like burglary/robbery rather than a drug-related offense.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      How would a burglary intended to obtain money to buy drugs not be "drug-related"?
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        Does intent matter when you commit a crime? Do you get a different sentence if you use the money to buy drugs rather than food?
        ceejayoz 7y ago
        Intent absolutely matters - think murder vs. involuntary manslaughter, or even first degree versus second degree murder. A lot of legal definitions of crimes even include the statement "with intent to..." - "drug possession with intent to distribute" is a good example. It's also completely besides the point here, as we're discussing the statement: > There was also definitely communities overran with drug related crime that were desperate for help. arguing that these sorts of drug-related crimes motivated some communities to embrace "hard on crime" attitudes.
galkk 7y ago
As an immigrant, I entirely disagree with that. I believe it's not a specific city or "war on drugs" problem. As it was clear in the my own country (xUSSR), the criminals are developing their code, where "snitches get stiches" and any cooperation with law enforcement is forbidden by it (e.g. in a prison so called "thief in laws" won't to do any work). The drugs, especially hard drugs and prostitution are not victimless crimes. Human traffiking is a problem, the impact of drug addicts who is looking for new dose is real.

Symmetry 7y ago

Parts of it go back to Prohibition too. The original push to get police into cars was partially just to let them cover more ground. But part of it was that cars would separate them from the neighborhoods they covered a bit and prevent them from absorbing local mores about what sorts of activities were harmless instead of what the law said.

jgeada 7y ago

Wish I could upvote the above comment more than once!

rjf72 7y ago

What you're saying is true but only in a society where you simply allow all drugs. Ideologically I am of this inclining since I don't think the government has a right to determine what people should or should not be able to put in their own body, but at the same time I also think this is a path that is detrimental for society. A few factors you don't hit on: - many drugs are addictive and this can lead to addicts turning to crime to try to fuel their addiction. yes we could offer more public support for such things, but these tend to be lifestyle choices that people revert to over and over. - some drugs themselves can have a strong connection with abnormally violent and dangerous behavior - for instance, PCP. - other drugs can have potentially extreme side effects even with minimal usage. olney's lesions / brain lesions are but one example. of course the same is true of e.g. alcohol, but the quantities involved are quite different. - any drug that is illegal will result in a black market. this black market tends to trend towards violence. there is potentially big money to be made in drugs and criminal enterprises tend to attract criminals who don't just constrain their violation to their product.

jadell 7y ago
It always felt weird to me that most of the rationale for policing drug use is based on preventing the crimes a user might commit while on drugs, rather than just the prosecuting the crimes they actually do commit while on drugs. "You can't do heroin because you'll get addicted and might steal in order to fuel your addiction." "But I haven't actually stolen anything yet, so what crime has been committed?" Are there any other cases of a victim-less activity where we preemptively arrest/prosecute people because that activity might lead to crime someday?
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Speeding. Public intoxication. Keeping an attractive nuisance.
  - geggam 7y ago
    All victimless crimes. Oddly enough in AZ you are supposed to have a victim for a crime yet you can be charged with criminal speeding and there be no victim.

c3534l 7y ago

The militarization of the police has come primarily from the militarization of criminals. Before the Valentine's Day Massacres, criminals had better cars and weapons than the police, allowing them to fight and win against the police. Prior to the LA shooting spree, police had no way to fight a criminal armed with assault weapons and no training on how to do so without endangering the public. When I lived in St. Louis, once the riots started to happen the police got tanks and other military equipment from out of state and then never let go of them (massive over-reaction to protestors that were not anywhere near as rough as you saw on TV, but that's what happened). I think you're right that the drug war was a factor, but I think you're wrong in why it was a factor. It's not some arbitrary distinction between what you deem to be a "victimless" crime, as if there was never such a thing in the 1700s and 1800s. The reason is that it's an arms race. The police always want to be better equipped and trained at dealing with a situation than they people they're up against. If it's unarmed protestors, they want organized formations and tear gas. If it's a drug cartel with assault weapons, the police want tanks and helicopters.

wbl 7y ago
British police had no weapons in the 19th century while the population had ready access to firearms.
yardie 7y ago
So if I have this straight in St Louis when the people are protesting against police brutality, the polices solution is to be more brutal? No kidding it’s an arms race. I’ll even bet they are using kettling to invoke a reaction from protestors. They aren’t passively responding to protestors, they are active antagonizing the public to justify their brutality.
- CompanionCuuube 7y ago
  > So if I have this straight in St Louis when the people are protesting against police brutality, the polices solution is to be more brutal? No, they brought in that equipment to deal with the riots. If it was just protesting but not rioting then that would be a different story. The tools are a force multiplier which is necessary when you're outnumbered. There are fewer police than rioters.

jakelazaroff 7y ago

Criminalizing victimless behavior prevents enforcement of violent/property crime too. Would a prostitute report being raped by a john? Maybe, but it seems unlikely when they have to worry about getting thrown in the system themselves.

DanBC 7y ago

Other places have a war on drugs, or have regulations about lemonade stands, and they don't have the pathologically awful policing that the US has. The US is extraordinarily violent. That's where you need to start: why is violence so common and acceptable in the US?

geggam 7y ago
Violence is what every govt threatens its citizens with to ensure peace ( irony no ? ) What is not common in the US is a respect for others. The police do not respect the citizens. The citizens dont respect the police or the govt. Respect is earned. Tell me you think the police or govt has earned our respect ? Because of this mutual lack of respect violence is almost certain.
- Retra 7y ago
  I'm going to quote a previous comment of mine here, because I think your rhetoric is shallow: >Violence is usually too far removed from the relevant abstractions. It's not difficult to see violence behind everything, because rules don't mean much if they aren't enforced, and it's all too easy to conflate violence with a threat of violence, or a threat of force with a threat of violence, etc. > But that's not a very useful perspective; a well-functioning society filters violence so that it is only applied when things go seriously awry, and most of us should only ever threatened by minor inconveniences. To focus on violence is to be reductive; it is like trying to talk about programming in terms of electromagnetic laws -- yes, computers ultimately run on electricity, and social powers are ultimately enforced through violence, but the abstractions we've built atop those facts are actually very relevant and useful.
  - geggam 7y ago
    Now you are saying a specific group of people get to define acceptable violence. This is insane... who defines that group ? Are all govts legitimate ? Do all govts get to define violence ? There is no ethical violence or all violence is ethical because your reasons arent more valid than someone elses

thatcat 7y ago

>Crime gets reported, police investigate, criminal gets arrested, community improves from having a violent psychopath off the streets. It's a simple formula, everybody's happy Wrong, even in simple assault cases it's possible for the victim to be charged with the assault if the person committing assault goes to the court house first and files charges. This blocks the ability of the victim to file charges and allows police to pursue them as the criminal.

ceejayoz 7y ago
What jurisdiction do you live in that permits people to file criminal charges on their own authority at a court house?
- thatcat 7y ago
  Is this not universal in US? If police on scene don't file charges or arrest anyone, it's a "race to the court house" with the first person to file having priority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_courthouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_courthouse
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Not only is it "not universal", it's vanishingly uncommon. A small handful of states permit "private prosecution" of crimes, with very significant limitations. It certainly can't be used to shut down the victim in the fashion you describe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#United_Sta... The "race to the courthouse" article you linked doesn't even specify which country it applies to, and cites zero sources. It appears to refer to https://definitions.uslegal.com/r/race-to-the-courthouse/ https://definitions.uslegal.com/r/race-to-the-courthouse/, which isn't about criminal prosecutions at all. It's about certain civil law situations.
    - thatcat 7y ago
      Yea INAL, but the race to the court house was the way a lawyer explained it to me. This is in fact how it works in TN. It's not a private prosecution, it's public. https://www.marylandcriminalattorneyblog.com/carroll_county_maryland_assaul/ https://www.marylandcriminalattorneyblog.com/carroll_county_... "This is because without a weapon or serious injury the only crime would that could be charged is second degree assault which is a misdemeanor in Maryland. The police can only arrest in misdemeanor cases if they actually witness the events. Otherwise, the police are supposed to simply write a report and advise the combatants as to the procedures for filing charges against one another. " Re: here because out of reply subthreads: I'm not mixing the two up. I called the police after having my jaw broken in a one sided assault and filed a report. The assailant went to the court house and filed charges officially and one week later I was charged with assault. This was leveraged by the public prosecutor to prevent me from filing civil and criminal charges against the assailant as terms for myself not being prosecuted or subject to a trial by jury. The only people who seem to be aware of this situation are lawyers and law-savvy repeated violent offenders who use it to escape prosecution.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

Internationally, countries that export illicit drugs are countries that have a shortage of legal exports and desperately need a cash income. I think if you want to talk about The Drug War in the US, you need to talk about institutional racism and its roots in a history of slavery. There are myriad ways in which the African American community has been victimized in the US and it's all interrelated. You can't really isolate "this one thing."

sandworm101 7y ago
>> ... countries that export illicit drugs are countries that have a shortage of legal exports and desperately need a cash income. I don't think China lacks export opportunities, yet is the source of most all of the worlds fentanyl-type drugs. Up until a couple years ago Canada was a huge source of pot for the US. Canada has a thriving export market. Mexico too.
danmaz74 7y ago
I'm curious about this link between racism and drugs. When I was growing up in Italy, during the 80s, drugs were a pretty big issue, and we had our own "war on drugs", but at the time there were basically no black people here, so it couldn't be linked to race.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  A tldr for the US would be that we tend to arrest poor people and people of color more and punish them more than we do well-heeled white people. On average, blacks in the US are a lot poorer than whites, so they get subjected to that twice over. It doesn't necessarily mean they do more drugs than whites. It just means that "the war on drugs" is often just one more justification for a long history of coming up with excuses to throw blacks in jail and generally crap on their lives. The US has a talent for either framing rules in a way that causes trouble for people of color or interpreting behavior by people of color differently than the same behavior by a white person.
  - danmaz74 7y ago

sandworm101 7y ago

>> If you want to understand why America's police act like an occupying army... then you have to start with the Drug War. Go back much further than that. Go back to the civil rights movement. Go back to jim crow. The history of the American war on drugs was born of racism and continues its birthright. That is the real sticking point, the source of the high emotions surrounding drugs. The drug war is a proxy for much more difficult issues.

merpnderp 7y ago
There was definitely racism in the passing and enforcing of these laws. There was also definitely communities overran with drug related crime that were desperate for help. When a single mom can't buy her kid a bicycle because the last 3 have been stolen out from under him by addicts looking to score, she's going to ask the her elected representatives for help.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > When a single mom can't buy her kid a bicycle because the last 3 have been stolen out from under him by addicts looking to score That seems like burglary/robbery rather than a drug-related offense.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    How would a burglary intended to obtain money to buy drugs not be "drug-related"?
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Does intent matter when you commit a crime? Do you get a different sentence if you use the money to buy drugs rather than food?
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        Intent absolutely matters - think murder vs. involuntary manslaughter, or even first degree versus second degree murder. A lot of legal definitions of crimes even include the statement "with intent to..." - "drug possession with intent to distribute" is a good example. It's also completely besides the point here, as we're discussing the statement: > There was also definitely communities overran with drug related crime that were desperate for help. arguing that these sorts of drug-related crimes motivated some communities to embrace "hard on crime" attitudes.

galkk 7y ago

As an immigrant, I entirely disagree with that. I believe it's not a specific city or "war on drugs" problem. As it was clear in the my own country (xUSSR), the criminals are developing their code, where "snitches get stiches" and any cooperation with law enforcement is forbidden by it (e.g. in a prison so called "thief in laws" won't to do any work). The drugs, especially hard drugs and prostitution are not victimless crimes. Human traffiking is a problem, the impact of drug addicts who is looking for new dose is real.