The Drug War Evaluated

Direct Line Commentary

By J. Bradley Jansen
April 19, 2001

Beginning with a section of the Comprehensive Crime Act of 1984, the marginal
incentive mechanism for police shifted from protecting and serving to shaking down
citizens for cash. Our country would be better served by returning to respect for
our traditional rights and liberties.

Civil asset forfeitures mean that there is not a criminal offense—that would make
it criminal asset forfeiture. Why are cops taking peoples’ money, usually without
even charging them with a crime. What happened to innocent until proven guilty
and respect for property rights?

After 1984 change, local police departments augmented their own budgets by
circumventing state laws mandating the use of the confiscated funds to earmarked
uses—usually local schools. Federal law enforcement policies encouraged casting a
wider net: by using the federal statute, local cops could take people’s homes
away too, something only seven states had permitted. Landlords could loose their
apartments if police merely allege that renters only possessed, not sold, an
illegal substance.

Studies have shown evidence that indicates that many law enforcement bureaucracies
created misinformation in order to exaggerate the potential benefits of a drug war
(“The Market for Heroin before and after Legalization,” by Robert Michaels in
1987). Former police chief Joseph McNamara has come to believe that hundreds of
thousands of law-enforcement officers commit felony perjury every year testifying
about drug arrests.

Other studies suggest that law enforcement’s resources are being diverted away
from crimes against persons and property. From 1970 to 1984, drug arrests
relative to murder, manslaughter, sexual assault, assault, robbery, burglary,
larceny and auto theft were relatively constant. Since the change giving police
bureaucracies a financial incentive to pursue drug offenses rather than crimes
against people and property, the allocation of police resources has shifted
(“Predatory Public Finance and the Origins of the War on Drugs 1984-1989,” by
Bruce L. Benson and David W. Rasmussen, The Independent Review, Fall 1996).

Our streets are less safe with cops wasting precious resources chasing alleged
drug users rather than spending their time and our money going after murderers,
rapists, robbers, burglars and other violent offenders. Mandatory minimums force
wardens to free violent convicts in order to free up space by filling prisons with
non-violent offenders with.

Financial regulations such as the infamous Know Your Customer proposal and the
Bank Secrecy Act require banks to spy on their customers for the benefit of law
enforcement and possibly make decisions based racial and ethnic notations.
Colombian? Nigerian? It’s better for the bank teller to protect herself from
overzealous regulators by filing frivolous “Suspicious Activity Reports.”

This policy undermines public confidence in both the financial institutions and
the police. Proposals to extend these spying mandates for law enforcement to
lawyers and accounts will only exacerbate these tensions.

We must look at the racial consequences of our policies: Disproportionate

sentences based on type of drug injection that are more likely to lengthen
sentences of blacks; Drug Enforcement Agency racial profiling seminars; racist
drug courier profiles used by U.S. Customs, etc. The effects of these policies
are seen in the environment that manifested itself in race riots in my hometown,
Cincinnati.

Driving home from visiting me for Easter, my brother was pulled over outside
Cincinnati because of a warrant for a traffic violation—an erroneous warrant,
actually. Fortunately, my (white) brother did not have much of a problem.
Unfortunately, many others have reason to feel less trusting of the police. We
need to re-evaluate our drug war policies. We could start by respecting states’
rights and getting the Federal government out of a war on its own citizens that
has not worked and is not going to work.