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> Caught on tape by a whistleblower cop, the officers said they witnessed or took part in alarming acts of police misconduct, from framing and beating residents

> Caught on tape by a whistleblower cop, the officers said they witnessed or took part in alarming acts of police misconduct, from framing and beating residents to collaborating with drug dealers, all as part of a culture of impunity within the department’s narcotics unit. Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. No-knock warrants were originally used to try to catch drug dealers before they could flush the drugs down the toilet. Civil forfeiture was originally created to try to take money from drug dealers. The war on drugs has taken a wrecking ball to the Fourth Amendment restrictions on search and seizure.

kyleee 6y ago
Yep, and the legal market prices must not be pushed too high due to excessive regulation and taxation, lest the black markets (and crime associated with them) continue to flourish
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > lest the black markets (and crime associated with them) continue to flourish Black markets of tax evaders are vastly superior to those avoiding criminal penalties up to life in jail.
  - kyleee 6y ago
    Agreed but tax evasion is not the only crime associated with black markets (especially the drug trade)
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      Most of the other crimes are associated with prohibition. When the penalty for drug distribution is a decade in prison which the government then uses as leverage to flip your distributors and then do the same to everyone in your whole organization, it makes it economically viable to use extreme measures to avoid prosecution. Snitches get stitches etc. Whereas when the consequences of tax evasion are paying what you owe plus penalties and interest, you just pay the money (or go bankrupt). There is no incentive to spend five million dollars to avoid a million dollar penalty as a gesture of loyalty to your people or to keep them from flipping; you just pay the million dollars. There is much less incentive to murder witnesses and risk prison when the alternative was only bankruptcy and not prison to begin with. The violence is primarily attributable to the harshness of the penalties in the War on Drugs and what that justifies in order to avoid them. Meanwhile prosecuting tax evasion is self-financing whenever tax evasion is prevalent, so it has a natural equilibrium at a low level of tax evasion. Prohibition is the opposite -- the harder you prosecute the higher the street prices get and the more lucrative it is to commit violence to bring in those high prices.
      - freedomben 6y ago
        Agreed. I highly recommend Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel[1] for a great look at the economics behind the drug trade. It's remarkable logical when you just consider the facts. [1]: https://smile.amazon.com/Narconomics-How-Run-Drug-Cartel/dp/1610397703 https://smile.amazon.com/Narconomics-How-Run-Drug-Cartel/dp/...
  - klyrs 6y ago
    From a harm reduction standpoint, this is wrong. I want heroin users to get pure, uncut heroin -- just as I never worry that a bottle of whiskey is going to be cut with fentanyl. Legalize it and regulate it, and price out the black market or it will have all the incentive to undermine the possible good.
    - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
      I used to be for complete legalization for the reasons discussed here, but now i struggle with that because of how much destruction there is to people from meth and opioids. If those were legally available in smaller "safe" doses maybe it would be better. But this is just tough to contemplate.
      - ken 6y ago
        How do meth/opioids change the equation? They're not (for the most part) legal. Alcohol causes tremendous destruction, too, but I thought there was general agreement that national prohibition was worse.
        colejohnson66 6y ago
        They change the equation when someone is advocating for “full legalization” with (sometimes) “no government regulation”. The argument is (rightly or wrongly) that certain drugs are actually so harmful that they should be kept out of the public.
        NotSammyHagar 6y ago
        Yes, that's what I was thinking. They are so destructive and addictive that people can't stop taking them. I worry that if they were legal and cheap people would get hooked on them and cause a lot of devastation ton themselves and their families. Of course there are people today who can't get methadone to treat their heroin addictions, because of legality concerns where it's not available.
      - 6y ago
- AuryGlenz 6y ago
  I’m curious - which drugs do you think should be available for sale commercially? All of them? The libertarian side in me says yes, but the pragmatic side says easily available meth wouldn’t exactly be a great thing for society.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    If Meth were legalized, somebody would figure out a way to make a safer Meth. Very few people would choose to use dangerous product that is often cut and has unknown levels of the drug in it, when there is a packaged/tested version available. A lot of the really terrible drugs only exist today because of prohibition. Some of them were invented as a way around the laws, and some were invented as an economical way to produce/traffic in the face of extreme danger (from law enforcement). Most people would opt for safer drugs if they had options. As it stands now you are basically at the mercy of the local illegal drug dealer that you know, and most of them don't have high quality standards.
    - AuryGlenz 6y ago
      You can already get a prescription for meth, but it's still neurotoxic. Better than something you can get on the street? Sure, but it's still straight up bad for you. The safer version of meth are the other amphetamines like Adderall.
      - freedomben 6y ago
        Agreed, but you can't legally get some without convincing another human to give it to you, and that human is on high alert for watching for someone who might abuse it - which is exactly the person who would benefit most from legality/availability of safer alternatives, but to that person it is illegal. That's why they turn to the black market.
- aidos 6y ago
  Your parent said decriminalise rather than legalise. It’s a strategy that Portugal has had a lot of success with.
- noarchy 6y ago
  This remains an issue in Canada with regard to cannabis, now that it is legalized. And we still have a thriving black market in cigarettes, due to high taxes.
swiley 6y ago
I’m honestly pretty pissed off with the Democrats picking a candidate that’s not pro legalization. The one alternative we have to the republicans is just doing the same crap.
- brenden2 6y ago
  Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin. They both represent the elite class, and do not care about these issues. They've had decades to do something about it, and instead gave themselves raises and made it harder for anyone to change anything. Edit: It's funny because I actually applied to YC to build a company that would try and fix this. Naturally they didn't even offer to interview me. YC doesn't care about fixing a system that helped get them where they are, either.
  - orf 6y ago
    The "both sides are the same" argument is a complete nonsensical distraction and wears really thin when faced with reality.
    - save_ferris 6y ago
      Sure, there are pretty significant differences in the day-to-day conduct between the two parties, but it is true that both parties are beholden to major corporate interests and are decreasingly supporting positions held by the public at large. The centrist wing of the Democratic Party refuses to seriously consider universal healthcare as a platform while we all watch the current healthcare system fall further and further into dysfunction via private bureaucracy. Numerous progressive policies have wide support across the political spectrum, but aren’t being seriously considered by either major party. And that is something that both parties are very guilty of.
      - Ididntdothis 6y ago
        The Democrats are the spineless party. They have no courage to take a position. It’s all wishy-washy trying not to offend anybody (especially not their donors).
brenden2 6y ago
And now the DEA has been mobilized against citizens to quell protests and criminalize dissent. The DEA is now the Gestapo.
- deleted 6y ago
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op03 6y ago
With the blame games, polarization and mistrust simple problems aren't getting solved. Forget about big ones. As Herbert Simon in his Nobel speech pointed out, if you can't solve 2nd grade problems don't run into the 10th grade classroom and cry about what's on the blackboard.
mschuster91 6y ago
> The war on drugs has taken a wrecking ball to the Fourth Amendment restrictions on search and seizure. The "war on terror" is probably even worse, given how many citizen rights were all but wiped after 9/11 across the world.
- wahern 6y ago
  How many Signal-using techies have been asphyxiated by cops kneeling on their necks or gunned down simply for daring to walking around in public? Let's not equivocate abuses. It's unnecessary. And moreover changing the way our most vulnerable citizens are treated will likely go a long way toward changing the way everybody else is treated.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    People in Afghanistan got killed by drone strikes or "exfiltrated" to Guantanamo or a load of "black sites". The "war on terror" is absolutely as murderous.
    - wahern 6y ago
      The War on Terror is an actual war waged using actual militaries. And non-American citizens don't have constitutional rights outside United States territory. Those facts in no way diminish the wrongness of what has happened, but we could just as well compare it to Global Warming and our complicity in the death of millions; the connection would be just as tenuous and unconstructive. That said, interestingly in 2016 ~1100 people were killed by police officers in the United States[1], while ~1600 people were killed by drone strikes in Afghanistan[2]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... [2] https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/drone-war/data/get-the-data-a-list-of-us-air-and-drone-strikes-afghanistan-2016 https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/drone-war/data/get-the...
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
pdonis 6y ago
> Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. I agree 1000%. I wish more people would realize this.
- akvadrako 6y ago
  That the protestors aren’t using this as one of their main demands gives a clue as to their motivations. They clearly aren’t above advocating extreme solutions and the far left generally seems to recognize the importance of legalization.
agustif 6y ago
In my opinion, politicians love wars on drugs because that way they can keep the monopoly of whatever they want to sell. If you make the laws, you make something illegal, and then don't follow your own laws because you're also the enforcer
- lowdose 6y ago
  Alcohol beverages was a $1,439 billion market in 2017. There is no movie recorded since the prohibition era without reinforcing this drugs as social acceptable every 30 minutes at least once. https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/alcoholic-beverages-market/ https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/alcoholic-beverages-mar...
  - jandrese 6y ago
    > There is no movie recorded since the prohibition era without reinforcing this drugs as social acceptable every 30 minutes at least once. Citation seriously needed. Your link certainly doesn't provide it. Off of the top of my head I can think of countless counterexamples.
    - agustif 6y ago
      1. Thank you for smoking (Go watch that movie) Weed industry in the US (Miraculously legalized in most key states in record times)
    - lowdose 6y ago
      > Overall, 86% of the total 655 movies included at least 1 alcohol scene, with a range of 0 to 617 and a mean of 68 (SD = 87) occurrences per movie. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4035596/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4035596/ If we take this mean and use a movie average length of 1.5 hour it was actually 10x worst than my estimation. Yes you are right it is probably better to take the median. I think it would be pretty easy for a ML pose algorithm to scan the whole Amazon Prime + Netflix archive for a real answer. Especially series like Mad Men are over the top in conditioning for alcohol and cigarette use. I started noticing when I quit smoking how much this was.
rch 6y ago
It's possible the 'war on drugs' was an excuse used to establish those capabilities. I think it's telling that the DEA has been given the authority to take part in other enforcement actions on a temporary basis in response to the current protests. The agency could easily shift focus to e.g. human trafficking and continue unabated post-legalization.
- toyg 6y ago
  There is only so much human trafficking one can do. I don’t see anything with the potential production volume of what is, essentially, a foodstuff (cheap to produce and consumed multiple times a day, every day). Scaling down would be inevitable at the first sign of economic crisis, in the same way the defense sector was hit significantly post-89.
  - bdamm 6y ago
    The point is that there's plenty of illegal behavior and only so many enforcement resources (which is by design right?) so we don't need to be worried for the officer's jobs, they can just switch to new legal focus area de jour.
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
      It's awfully hard to retrain a cop to be a forensic accountant. The judicialbranch has been failing to undertake anything but token measures against white collar crimes. Actual police work against white collar criminals is not as easy as coercing a junkie into selling felonious amounts of a plant by product or made in a bath tub chemical.
jrs235 6y ago
And get rid of two party recording consent laws?
splitrocket 6y ago
That, making civil forfeiture funds go to the general coffer, and forcing police departments to pay settlements out of their own budget. They socialize the costs and privatize the profits of their misbehavior. FYI, 1/3 of all people killed by strangers in the US are killed by the police. [0] Police take more money from people through asset forfeiture than criminals do with theft. [1] [0]https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/ https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/ [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
anigbrowl 6y ago
From a legalistic point of view you are correct. But if it wasn't that it would be something else. Already the DEA is being repurposed to investigate networks of 'professional anarchists' who are supposedly the architects of the current unrest. While support for the drug war is waning, reactionaries are just switching back to tropes about 'communist agitators' that were used prior to the drug war to delegitimize civil rights activism in the 1960s.
benmw333 6y ago
100% agree.
kingbirdy 6y ago
> Civil forfeiture was originally created to try to take money from drug dealers. I agree with your premise, but this statement is incorrect. Civil forfeiture originated from the British Navigation Acts of the mid 1600s. It continued to be accepted practice in the US after the revolution, and was relied on during Prohibition as a tool against bootleggers much as it's used against drug dealers now. Usage has certainly escalated due to the war on drugs, but it's not where it originated from.
- daseiner1 6y ago
  prohibition was just an earlier battle in the larger war on drugs as far as i’m concerned
  - solotronics 6y ago
    Before the Harrison narcotic act in 1914 there was never such a thing as an "illegal drug" there were laws about adultering products with poison but the concept of illegal drugs or a "war on drugs" didn't exist before 1914 in the US. I am not sure how addicts were treated by law enforcement historically but would be curious to hear about that. Just my own intuition says they probably were treated under existing vagrancy laws "Vagrancy laws took myriad forms, generally making it a crime to be poor, idle, dissolute, immoral, drunk, lewd, or suspicious."
    - kyuudou 6y ago
      Think about all the industries that profit from drug enforcement, incarcerating otherwise harmless citizens committing victimless "crimes". And where would hand-me-downs from the federal armed forces go!? Lots of cash cows...
      - greyhair 6y ago
        Commercial for profit prisons are a huge problem. Huge. There is a whole lot of sentencing and prison reform that needs to be taking place, particularly for non-violent crimes.
utkarsh_apoorva 6y ago
Police brutality videos on twitter have left most of us, even in the developing world, in utter shock. I am in Bangalore, India For most of us in developing world, US has been a model state - with problems yes. But a great example nevertheless. For God's sake, WE were supposed to be a third world country, always looked at with sympathy in popular media (usually grossly incorrect depiction though) In India, civil unrest is common, and has increased over the past decade. Cops know one thing very very clearly - they are outnumbered. If civilians start to become violent, it will be impossible to control them. So they stand down. I have read umpteen number of articles talking about how policing could be improved in the US, from removing powerful weapons to changing the training programs. I feel that the solution is probably simple - sensitisation to the fact that they are outnumbered. If war mentality is what they get into the field with, better factor everything in. No army in the world engages with a superior force unprovoked. People, the citizens, ARE the most superior force - not just morally, but Truly . F*ing . Practically.
- rcpt 6y ago
  Police may be outnumbered but the US already called in the military in many cities.
  - ChristianBundy 6y ago
    - US Police: 1.2 million full-time or part-time [1] - US Military: 1.29 million active [2] - US Population: 329.74 million [3] I believe they're outnumbered by about 131 to 1. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_States#Number_of_police https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_... [2]: https://www.cfr.org/article/demographics-us-military https://www.cfr.org/article/demographics-us-military [3]: https://www.census.gov/popclock/ https://www.census.gov/popclock/
    - nickpeterson 6y ago
      Most of that military/police population are adult physically able males. The regular population is everyone, if you constrained that population to males/females 18-60 then subtracted the military/police numbers, you’d be closer. It’s probably more like 150:1. Also consider all those officers know how to use weapons, have certain training, it starts to get closer than you think. We have too many police and active military and too many things are illegal that shouldn’t be. The problem is that the military is basically welfare for small towns and southern states.
mythrwy 6y ago
If they ended the failed and ridiculous drug war not only would police departments have less friction with the community they would also free up massive resources to deal with real problems. Maybe even start preventing property crimes! One can dream. The old adage about go catch some murderers instead of chasing kids around with a joint.
syshum 6y ago
Thank you for being one of the few people that recognize the real reason many people want to legalize drugs So many times it is countered with "You just want to get high that is why you want to legalize drugs"... No I dont want to have my home invaded at 3pm and be shot dead by a trigger happy gang member because the "informant" the police bullied in to snitching gave them a random address for their "dealer" //true story that has happened more than once in the USA
vkou 6y ago
> Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. No. No, no, no. A thousand times no. The war on drugs is just an objective of the police. The objective isn't why brutality happens. Brutality happens because of a systemic problem - the complete lack of accountability. Drugs are just the impetus for some fraction of police-public interactions. They are not the reason for how those police-public interactions are carried out. The police are completely out of control in my neighbourhood. There are walls of tear gas rolling down the streets, rolling into people's apartments, their living rooms and bedrooms. Nobody, not the city mayor, not the state government is willing to reign them in - which is why this is happening. The war on drugs is a bad thing, but if you end it tomorrow, it won't solve a single one of these systemic issues.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  >but if you end it tomorrow, it won't solve a single one of these systemic issues. Why not? The war on drugs is absolutely unenforceable - that leads to police picking and choosing what to enforce which amplifies systemic biases they have. You cannot enforce drug laws accountably, not least because it is largely racist in origin and as such targeted at specific minority groups - let alone practicalities There's a fantastic Vice interview of an British ex-undercover drugs officer: He summarizes most of his career as having been spent ruining the lives of poor people around him and his crowning achievement being a bust that (in the words of one of his colleagues apparently) "interrupted the illegal drug trade in stoke for upwards of 20 minutes"
  - vkou 6y ago
    The police can always pick and choose what they enforce. Have you ever called them? I am close friends with people who have, multiple times. Getting them to show up is an exercise in pulling teeth. They respond to calls - all calls - in an utterly discretionary nature. As they currently operate, they can't even do any part of their job accountably. Drug legalization is just a pet issue for techies, that is a smoke-screen that distracts from the real issues.
tonystubblebine 6y ago
This and cash bail are the two most obvious ones. 1/3 of incarcerated people on any given night are unconvicted people who just couldn't afford the bail. This gives police an enormous amount of power to coerce people. It's also deeply un-American because people are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. And then on top of that, it's serves no practical purpose as the vast majority of released people show up for their court dates.
jandrese 6y ago
The War on Drugs was really just a casus belli on black males. The civil rights movement had eroded the Jim Crow system the authorities had set up to keep themselves in power, and were seriously worried about more educated well spoken minorities starting movements in the country. They needed a way to suppress their minority populations without drawing the ire of the rest of America, so they manufacture a drug crisis by taking a small problem and blowing it way out of proportion as an excuse to crack down on their potential political opponents. It has worked amazingly well.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  To say that drugs were a small problem is rewriting history. We would have all been better off treating it like a medical issue rather than a legal / criminal matter, and the long tail effects of enforcement have definitely cemented a lot of structural issues in society- and admittedly, some drugs are far less harmful than others. Pot and crack use have two wildly different outcomes, obviously. You can look at examples in history when oppressors used the opposite tactic: wars were fought to force China to keep opium legal, lining pockets of mercantile companies while keeping China hooked (and earning it the old 'sick man of asia' moniker).
- camgunz 6y ago
  90% yes, 10% pharmaceutical/alcohol/tobacco companies lobbying.
georgeecollins 6y ago
This reminds me of the Ramparts Scandal in Los Angeles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal It's amazing how bad that was. I believe policing in Los Angeles has improved since then. It still has tons of problems, and the justice system in general in Califronia, has tons of problems. But it is amazing how bad it got in this incident.
jeegsy 6y ago
> Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. I have very much thought the same thing. We might be overly optimistic but it would solve so many problems.

kyleee 6y ago

Yep, and the legal market prices must not be pushed too high due to excessive regulation and taxation, lest the black markets (and crime associated with them) continue to flourish

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> lest the black markets (and crime associated with them) continue to flourish Black markets of tax evaders are vastly superior to those avoiding criminal penalties up to life in jail.
- kyleee 6y ago
  Agreed but tax evasion is not the only crime associated with black markets (especially the drug trade)
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    Most of the other crimes are associated with prohibition. When the penalty for drug distribution is a decade in prison which the government then uses as leverage to flip your distributors and then do the same to everyone in your whole organization, it makes it economically viable to use extreme measures to avoid prosecution. Snitches get stitches etc. Whereas when the consequences of tax evasion are paying what you owe plus penalties and interest, you just pay the money (or go bankrupt). There is no incentive to spend five million dollars to avoid a million dollar penalty as a gesture of loyalty to your people or to keep them from flipping; you just pay the million dollars. There is much less incentive to murder witnesses and risk prison when the alternative was only bankruptcy and not prison to begin with. The violence is primarily attributable to the harshness of the penalties in the War on Drugs and what that justifies in order to avoid them. Meanwhile prosecuting tax evasion is self-financing whenever tax evasion is prevalent, so it has a natural equilibrium at a low level of tax evasion. Prohibition is the opposite -- the harder you prosecute the higher the street prices get and the more lucrative it is to commit violence to bring in those high prices.
    - freedomben 6y ago
      Agreed. I highly recommend Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel[1] for a great look at the economics behind the drug trade. It's remarkable logical when you just consider the facts. [1]: https://smile.amazon.com/Narconomics-How-Run-Drug-Cartel/dp/1610397703 https://smile.amazon.com/Narconomics-How-Run-Drug-Cartel/dp/...
- klyrs 6y ago
  From a harm reduction standpoint, this is wrong. I want heroin users to get pure, uncut heroin -- just as I never worry that a bottle of whiskey is going to be cut with fentanyl. Legalize it and regulate it, and price out the black market or it will have all the incentive to undermine the possible good.
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    I used to be for complete legalization for the reasons discussed here, but now i struggle with that because of how much destruction there is to people from meth and opioids. If those were legally available in smaller "safe" doses maybe it would be better. But this is just tough to contemplate.
    - ken 6y ago
      How do meth/opioids change the equation? They're not (for the most part) legal. Alcohol causes tremendous destruction, too, but I thought there was general agreement that national prohibition was worse.
      - colejohnson66 6y ago
        They change the equation when someone is advocating for “full legalization” with (sometimes) “no government regulation”. The argument is (rightly or wrongly) that certain drugs are actually so harmful that they should be kept out of the public.
        NotSammyHagar 6y ago
        Yes, that's what I was thinking. They are so destructive and addictive that people can't stop taking them. I worry that if they were legal and cheap people would get hooked on them and cause a lot of devastation ton themselves and their families. Of course there are people today who can't get methadone to treat their heroin addictions, because of legality concerns where it's not available.
    - 6y ago
AuryGlenz 6y ago
I’m curious - which drugs do you think should be available for sale commercially? All of them? The libertarian side in me says yes, but the pragmatic side says easily available meth wouldn’t exactly be a great thing for society.
- freedomben 6y ago
  If Meth were legalized, somebody would figure out a way to make a safer Meth. Very few people would choose to use dangerous product that is often cut and has unknown levels of the drug in it, when there is a packaged/tested version available. A lot of the really terrible drugs only exist today because of prohibition. Some of them were invented as a way around the laws, and some were invented as an economical way to produce/traffic in the face of extreme danger (from law enforcement). Most people would opt for safer drugs if they had options. As it stands now you are basically at the mercy of the local illegal drug dealer that you know, and most of them don't have high quality standards.
  - AuryGlenz 6y ago
    You can already get a prescription for meth, but it's still neurotoxic. Better than something you can get on the street? Sure, but it's still straight up bad for you. The safer version of meth are the other amphetamines like Adderall.
    - freedomben 6y ago
      Agreed, but you can't legally get some without convincing another human to give it to you, and that human is on high alert for watching for someone who might abuse it - which is exactly the person who would benefit most from legality/availability of safer alternatives, but to that person it is illegal. That's why they turn to the black market.
aidos 6y ago
Your parent said decriminalise rather than legalise. It’s a strategy that Portugal has had a lot of success with.
noarchy 6y ago
This remains an issue in Canada with regard to cannabis, now that it is legalized. And we still have a thriving black market in cigarettes, due to high taxes.

swiley 6y ago

I’m honestly pretty pissed off with the Democrats picking a candidate that’s not pro legalization. The one alternative we have to the republicans is just doing the same crap.

brenden2 6y ago
Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin. They both represent the elite class, and do not care about these issues. They've had decades to do something about it, and instead gave themselves raises and made it harder for anyone to change anything. Edit: It's funny because I actually applied to YC to build a company that would try and fix this. Naturally they didn't even offer to interview me. YC doesn't care about fixing a system that helped get them where they are, either.
- orf 6y ago
  The "both sides are the same" argument is a complete nonsensical distraction and wears really thin when faced with reality.
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    Sure, there are pretty significant differences in the day-to-day conduct between the two parties, but it is true that both parties are beholden to major corporate interests and are decreasingly supporting positions held by the public at large. The centrist wing of the Democratic Party refuses to seriously consider universal healthcare as a platform while we all watch the current healthcare system fall further and further into dysfunction via private bureaucracy. Numerous progressive policies have wide support across the political spectrum, but aren’t being seriously considered by either major party. And that is something that both parties are very guilty of.
    - Ididntdothis 6y ago
      The Democrats are the spineless party. They have no courage to take a position. It’s all wishy-washy trying not to offend anybody (especially not their donors).

brenden2 6y ago

And now the DEA has been mobilized against citizens to quell protests and criminalize dissent. The DEA is now the Gestapo.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

op03 6y ago

With the blame games, polarization and mistrust simple problems aren't getting solved. Forget about big ones. As Herbert Simon in his Nobel speech pointed out, if you can't solve 2nd grade problems don't run into the 10th grade classroom and cry about what's on the blackboard.

mschuster91 6y ago

> The war on drugs has taken a wrecking ball to the Fourth Amendment restrictions on search and seizure. The "war on terror" is probably even worse, given how many citizen rights were all but wiped after 9/11 across the world.

wahern 6y ago
How many Signal-using techies have been asphyxiated by cops kneeling on their necks or gunned down simply for daring to walking around in public? Let's not equivocate abuses. It's unnecessary. And moreover changing the way our most vulnerable citizens are treated will likely go a long way toward changing the way everybody else is treated.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  People in Afghanistan got killed by drone strikes or "exfiltrated" to Guantanamo or a load of "black sites". The "war on terror" is absolutely as murderous.
  - wahern 6y ago
    The War on Terror is an actual war waged using actual militaries. And non-American citizens don't have constitutional rights outside United States territory. Those facts in no way diminish the wrongness of what has happened, but we could just as well compare it to Global Warming and our complicity in the death of millions; the connection would be just as tenuous and unconstructive. That said, interestingly in 2016 ~1100 people were killed by police officers in the United States[1], while ~1600 people were killed by drone strikes in Afghanistan[2]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... [2] https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/drone-war/data/get-the-data-a-list-of-us-air-and-drone-strikes-afghanistan-2016 https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/drone-war/data/get-the...
    - deleted 6y ago
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pdonis 6y ago

> Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. I agree 1000%. I wish more people would realize this.

akvadrako 6y ago
That the protestors aren’t using this as one of their main demands gives a clue as to their motivations. They clearly aren’t above advocating extreme solutions and the far left generally seems to recognize the importance of legalization.

agustif 6y ago

In my opinion, politicians love wars on drugs because that way they can keep the monopoly of whatever they want to sell. If you make the laws, you make something illegal, and then don't follow your own laws because you're also the enforcer

lowdose 6y ago
Alcohol beverages was a $1,439 billion market in 2017. There is no movie recorded since the prohibition era without reinforcing this drugs as social acceptable every 30 minutes at least once. https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/alcoholic-beverages-market/ https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/alcoholic-beverages-mar...
- jandrese 6y ago
  > There is no movie recorded since the prohibition era without reinforcing this drugs as social acceptable every 30 minutes at least once. Citation seriously needed. Your link certainly doesn't provide it. Off of the top of my head I can think of countless counterexamples.
  - agustif 6y ago
    1. Thank you for smoking (Go watch that movie) Weed industry in the US (Miraculously legalized in most key states in record times)
  - lowdose 6y ago
    > Overall, 86% of the total 655 movies included at least 1 alcohol scene, with a range of 0 to 617 and a mean of 68 (SD = 87) occurrences per movie. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4035596/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4035596/ If we take this mean and use a movie average length of 1.5 hour it was actually 10x worst than my estimation. Yes you are right it is probably better to take the median. I think it would be pretty easy for a ML pose algorithm to scan the whole Amazon Prime + Netflix archive for a real answer. Especially series like Mad Men are over the top in conditioning for alcohol and cigarette use. I started noticing when I quit smoking how much this was.

rch 6y ago

It's possible the 'war on drugs' was an excuse used to establish those capabilities. I think it's telling that the DEA has been given the authority to take part in other enforcement actions on a temporary basis in response to the current protests. The agency could easily shift focus to e.g. human trafficking and continue unabated post-legalization.

toyg 6y ago
There is only so much human trafficking one can do. I don’t see anything with the potential production volume of what is, essentially, a foodstuff (cheap to produce and consumed multiple times a day, every day). Scaling down would be inevitable at the first sign of economic crisis, in the same way the defense sector was hit significantly post-89.
- bdamm 6y ago
  The point is that there's plenty of illegal behavior and only so many enforcement resources (which is by design right?) so we don't need to be worried for the officer's jobs, they can just switch to new legal focus area de jour.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
    It's awfully hard to retrain a cop to be a forensic accountant. The judicialbranch has been failing to undertake anything but token measures against white collar crimes. Actual police work against white collar criminals is not as easy as coercing a junkie into selling felonious amounts of a plant by product or made in a bath tub chemical.

jrs235 6y ago

And get rid of two party recording consent laws?

splitrocket 6y ago

That, making civil forfeiture funds go to the general coffer, and forcing police departments to pay settlements out of their own budget. They socialize the costs and privatize the profits of their misbehavior. FYI, 1/3 of all people killed by strangers in the US are killed by the police. [0] Police take more money from people through asset forfeiture than criminals do with theft. [1] [0]https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/ https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/ [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...

anigbrowl 6y ago

From a legalistic point of view you are correct. But if it wasn't that it would be something else. Already the DEA is being repurposed to investigate networks of 'professional anarchists' who are supposedly the architects of the current unrest. While support for the drug war is waning, reactionaries are just switching back to tropes about 'communist agitators' that were used prior to the drug war to delegitimize civil rights activism in the 1960s.

benmw333 6y ago

100% agree.

kingbirdy 6y ago

> Civil forfeiture was originally created to try to take money from drug dealers. I agree with your premise, but this statement is incorrect. Civil forfeiture originated from the British Navigation Acts of the mid 1600s. It continued to be accepted practice in the US after the revolution, and was relied on during Prohibition as a tool against bootleggers much as it's used against drug dealers now. Usage has certainly escalated due to the war on drugs, but it's not where it originated from.

daseiner1 6y ago
prohibition was just an earlier battle in the larger war on drugs as far as i’m concerned
- solotronics 6y ago
  Before the Harrison narcotic act in 1914 there was never such a thing as an "illegal drug" there were laws about adultering products with poison but the concept of illegal drugs or a "war on drugs" didn't exist before 1914 in the US. I am not sure how addicts were treated by law enforcement historically but would be curious to hear about that. Just my own intuition says they probably were treated under existing vagrancy laws "Vagrancy laws took myriad forms, generally making it a crime to be poor, idle, dissolute, immoral, drunk, lewd, or suspicious."
  - kyuudou 6y ago
    Think about all the industries that profit from drug enforcement, incarcerating otherwise harmless citizens committing victimless "crimes". And where would hand-me-downs from the federal armed forces go!? Lots of cash cows...
    - greyhair 6y ago
      Commercial for profit prisons are a huge problem. Huge. There is a whole lot of sentencing and prison reform that needs to be taking place, particularly for non-violent crimes.

utkarsh_apoorva 6y ago

Police brutality videos on twitter have left most of us, even in the developing world, in utter shock. I am in Bangalore, India For most of us in developing world, US has been a model state - with problems yes. But a great example nevertheless. For God's sake, WE were supposed to be a third world country, always looked at with sympathy in popular media (usually grossly incorrect depiction though) In India, civil unrest is common, and has increased over the past decade. Cops know one thing very very clearly - they are outnumbered. If civilians start to become violent, it will be impossible to control them. So they stand down. I have read umpteen number of articles talking about how policing could be improved in the US, from removing powerful weapons to changing the training programs. I feel that the solution is probably simple - sensitisation to the fact that they are outnumbered. If war mentality is what they get into the field with, better factor everything in. No army in the world engages with a superior force unprovoked. People, the citizens, ARE the most superior force - not just morally, but Truly . F*ing . Practically.

rcpt 6y ago
Police may be outnumbered but the US already called in the military in many cities.
- ChristianBundy 6y ago
  - US Police: 1.2 million full-time or part-time [1] - US Military: 1.29 million active [2] - US Population: 329.74 million [3] I believe they're outnumbered by about 131 to 1. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_States#Number_of_police https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_... [2]: https://www.cfr.org/article/demographics-us-military https://www.cfr.org/article/demographics-us-military [3]: https://www.census.gov/popclock/ https://www.census.gov/popclock/
  - nickpeterson 6y ago
    Most of that military/police population are adult physically able males. The regular population is everyone, if you constrained that population to males/females 18-60 then subtracted the military/police numbers, you’d be closer. It’s probably more like 150:1. Also consider all those officers know how to use weapons, have certain training, it starts to get closer than you think. We have too many police and active military and too many things are illegal that shouldn’t be. The problem is that the military is basically welfare for small towns and southern states.

mythrwy 6y ago

If they ended the failed and ridiculous drug war not only would police departments have less friction with the community they would also free up massive resources to deal with real problems. Maybe even start preventing property crimes! One can dream. The old adage about go catch some murderers instead of chasing kids around with a joint.

syshum 6y ago

Thank you for being one of the few people that recognize the real reason many people want to legalize drugs So many times it is countered with "You just want to get high that is why you want to legalize drugs"... No I dont want to have my home invaded at 3pm and be shot dead by a trigger happy gang member because the "informant" the police bullied in to snitching gave them a random address for their "dealer" //true story that has happened more than once in the USA

vkou 6y ago

> Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. No. No, no, no. A thousand times no. The war on drugs is just an objective of the police. The objective isn't why brutality happens. Brutality happens because of a systemic problem - the complete lack of accountability. Drugs are just the impetus for some fraction of police-public interactions. They are not the reason for how those police-public interactions are carried out. The police are completely out of control in my neighbourhood. There are walls of tear gas rolling down the streets, rolling into people's apartments, their living rooms and bedrooms. Nobody, not the city mayor, not the state government is willing to reign them in - which is why this is happening. The war on drugs is a bad thing, but if you end it tomorrow, it won't solve a single one of these systemic issues.

mhh__ 6y ago
>but if you end it tomorrow, it won't solve a single one of these systemic issues. Why not? The war on drugs is absolutely unenforceable - that leads to police picking and choosing what to enforce which amplifies systemic biases they have. You cannot enforce drug laws accountably, not least because it is largely racist in origin and as such targeted at specific minority groups - let alone practicalities There's a fantastic Vice interview of an British ex-undercover drugs officer: He summarizes most of his career as having been spent ruining the lives of poor people around him and his crowning achievement being a bust that (in the words of one of his colleagues apparently) "interrupted the illegal drug trade in stoke for upwards of 20 minutes"
- vkou 6y ago
  The police can always pick and choose what they enforce. Have you ever called them? I am close friends with people who have, multiple times. Getting them to show up is an exercise in pulling teeth. They respond to calls - all calls - in an utterly discretionary nature. As they currently operate, they can't even do any part of their job accountably. Drug legalization is just a pet issue for techies, that is a smoke-screen that distracts from the real issues.

tonystubblebine 6y ago

This and cash bail are the two most obvious ones. 1/3 of incarcerated people on any given night are unconvicted people who just couldn't afford the bail. This gives police an enormous amount of power to coerce people. It's also deeply un-American because people are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. And then on top of that, it's serves no practical purpose as the vast majority of released people show up for their court dates.

jandrese 6y ago

The War on Drugs was really just a casus belli on black males. The civil rights movement had eroded the Jim Crow system the authorities had set up to keep themselves in power, and were seriously worried about more educated well spoken minorities starting movements in the country. They needed a way to suppress their minority populations without drawing the ire of the rest of America, so they manufacture a drug crisis by taking a small problem and blowing it way out of proportion as an excuse to crack down on their potential political opponents. It has worked amazingly well.

zdragnar 6y ago
To say that drugs were a small problem is rewriting history. We would have all been better off treating it like a medical issue rather than a legal / criminal matter, and the long tail effects of enforcement have definitely cemented a lot of structural issues in society- and admittedly, some drugs are far less harmful than others. Pot and crack use have two wildly different outcomes, obviously. You can look at examples in history when oppressors used the opposite tactic: wars were fought to force China to keep opium legal, lining pockets of mercantile companies while keeping China hooked (and earning it the old 'sick man of asia' moniker).
camgunz 6y ago
90% yes, 10% pharmaceutical/alcohol/tobacco companies lobbying.

georgeecollins 6y ago

This reminds me of the Ramparts Scandal in Los Angeles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal It's amazing how bad that was. I believe policing in Los Angeles has improved since then. It still has tons of problems, and the justice system in general in Califronia, has tons of problems. But it is amazing how bad it got in this incident.

jeegsy 6y ago

> Probably the single most effective thing to reduce police abuse in America would be to end the war on drugs and decriminalize drugs. I have very much thought the same thing. We might be overly optimistic but it would solve so many problems.