Address of Dr. Joseph McNamara
9th International Conference on Drug Policy Reform, Santa Monica, 10/19/95
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(Joe McNamara is a veteran of the New York City Police Department and is
former Chief of Police of Kansas City and San Jose; he is currently a
Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.)
As David [Condliffe] mentioned, Barney Frank sort of gave us a wake up call
last year in Washington, when he warned us that it's not enough to be angry
at politicians and to denounce them. We'll have other politicians; we'll
have the same process. What he said is, give us some cover, so that we can
vote for at least a study, an analysis, an examination of the possibility of
new drug control policies.
I think it's not an overstatement to say that both political parties in
America are playing dead when it comes to drug reform. Why is that? Because
it's too easy to be tougher on drugs than your opponent. And we have to face
the political reality of that. How do we change that?
Well, one thought that we had was, suppose we could get the law enforcement
community to say to the politicians, as we finally got them to say on the
issue of gun control, look, help us, we need help. How, what would we do?
Would that be cover?
Out of that came the Hoover Law Enforcement Summit, which was held last May
9th and 10th. We invited the top leaders in American law enforcement -- and
indeed our steering committee was composed of some of the most well known
people in law enforcement -- and we had more than 50 agencies participate.
We had a wonderful two day conference. Ethan [Nadelmann] started it with an
overview of where we were in drug policy in the United States, and what's
happening internationally. We had criminologists Jerry Skolnick from
Berkeley, and Al Blumstein from Carnegie Mellon University.
Blumstein has done very important work, detailing the enormous increase in
juvenile violence, the doubling of the homicide rate by firearms among
teenagers, and related that directly to drug commerce and the easy
availability of guns in inner cities. He has characterized the Drug War as
an assault upon the African American community, where police tactics are
used routinely that would not be tolerated in a white middle class
neighborhood for a week. And I was a police chief for 18 years in two of
America's largest cities. Al Blumstein is right. We could never use the
tactics that are used routinely. And that's why DPF (Drug Policy Foundation)
deserves such enormous credit for making possible the Sentencing Project
report, which I think is a bombshell that we all have to pick up and run
with.
We had two federal judges, DPF board member [U.S. District Judge] Bob Sweet,
and Vaughn Walker, from the San Francisco Federal Circuit, talk about the
destruction that these drug cases and mandatory sentencing are causing in
the court system. George Shultz, former Secretary of State, spoke and gave
very eloquent evidence of his speaking out years ago, denouncing the Drug
War as wrongheaded and not making sense economically. He introduced our
keynote speaker, [Baltimore Mayor] Kurt Schmoke. And Kurt Schmoke got a
standing ovation from this audience of police chiefs.
And they're a tough group, and one of the tough questions to Mayor Schmoke
was, how does this medicalization approach that you favor go over
politically in your city? Because that's, after all, what's on their minds,
as police chiefs. And he said, I go to meet with people in the community,
and I ask them three questions: Do you think we've won the Drug War? And
people just laugh. Do you think we're winning the Drug War? And people just
shake their heads. And the third question is, if you think we keep doing
what we're doing now, in 10 years, we will have won the Drug War?
Well, that's one of the reasons he got a standing ovation. Because he's not
a professor some place, he's right in the front lines of a predominantly
African-American city where drugs and crime and violence are problems. And
he's a leader who has taken a position and survived reelection. And that
earned him enormous respect, as well as the way in which he dealt so
honestly with this subject.
In any event, after two days, we gave the people remaining an evaluation
form, and it was outstanding. I had done some previous work, and knew that
there was a great deal of disillusionment with the Drug War among law
enforcement people. But in the evaluation that we did after this two day
conference, we found 90 percent of the police leaders present repudiated,
did not support the federal War on Drugs -- 90 percent. The other 10 percent
didn't support the war. Those 90 percent were clearly against the war. The
group was unanimous in saying that this was not a matter of criminal law. It
was more of a social and medical problem. The group was unanimous in saying
more treatment and more education would be more effective than more arrests
and prisons. The group was unanimous in calling for a blue-ribbon panel to
study the harm done by the Drug War and alternative methods of dealing with
drugs. All of these things repudiated our national policy, and so I think
that's very striking.
Now why was it that these law enforcement leaders, who after all rely on
arrests in their job as a normal way of doing business, why was it they were
so strongly opposed to this when they got the chance? Well their comments
were very revealing: they never had the chance before. They never got an
opportunity to think for two days and to hear different opinions. Why not?
Because the federal government controls the game. All of the conferences
they go to are funded by the federal government. All of the speakers are
either federal officials, who speak with one voice, or they are other
people, recruited from different fields, who say what the government wants
them to say, what they're getting paid to say.
The other reason is there's something very, very wrong going on in American
policing. I'm going to just close by taking one minute to say that I think
as sad as what we're seeing in American policing is, that it does hold some
hope for reform for us. We have experienced a wave of police scandals over
the past 5 to 10 years that are quite different than anything we've seen
historically. One reason that this is not so apparent is the very nature of
American law enforcement is decentralized, because each city has its own law
enforcement agency. The federal government, the DEA and the FBI, get a lot
of publicity, but there are only a few thousand of them, believe it or not.
And many of you are saying "Thank God," probably, at the moment. [Laughter.]
But we have from four to five hundred thousand local law enforcement, state
and local law enforcement officials. Those are the guys filling the prisons
that Mr. Bushnell mentioned. And 70 percent of their arrests are for
possession of drugs. Now that doesn't mean 30 percent are big deal
distributors. The Drug War's a dirty war, and it's a racist war. The
dealers, the people arrested for sale are like Joycelyn Elders' son. They're
not bigshots. They're often people who got caught in the wrong place, and
some agent of law enforcement is wired to get them, bid them up to higher
and higher levels. And then they're ending up doing 10 and 15 years of a
mandatory sentence.
The Drug War cannot stand the light of day. And that's my hope, that we can
at least get some objective study of it. It will collapse as quickly as the
Vietnam War, as soon as people find out what's really going on. And I think
we can get that study, if we can mobilize the police, as we did in the first
Hoover conference. We're aiming at another Hoover conference.
I want to take a moment to talk about what you are sort of subtly aware of,
but because it's one story at a time, and because it's spread so far
geographically, we're unaware of the massive police scandals that have been
going on for a decade. In Boston, two white detectives frame an
African-American suspect for murdering a white woman, after her husband
complained that they were accosted and robbed in an intersection. It turns
out the husband did the murder, but it's only exposed after his suicide. In
New York, the police, once again, are exposed, in uniform, of conducting
armed robberies, of beating people, of framing drug dealers, of selling
drugs to the community. Similar cases in Philadelphia, Denver, Atlanta. In
New Orleans, a new shock, a new level -- a police officer murders her
partner and store owners, and then responds in uniform on patrol to the
crime scene. She's convicted now. Her boyfriend was a drug dealer, by the
way.
What we find in these police cases that's different, is the seriousness of
the police misconduct. It's not some cops taking a bribe from some madam or
bookie or something like that. It's cops doing armed robberies, beating
people, even murders. It's falsification of evidence on a wholesale nature,
in city after city. And it's easier to name cities that have not had
scandals, than to name all the ones that have.
Not only that, it's not just the lower ranking narcs -- it goes up to the
top. The police chief of Detroit, former chief, is in prison for stealing
drug funds. Police chiefs in little New England towns stole drugs from their
lockers. All kinds of sheriffs throughout the country have been convicted of
actually dealing in drugs. The formerly untouchables, the feds, now have
their people in jail. The DEA agent that arrested General Noriega --
remember, the narco drug gangster that President Bush named as justification
for invading Panama? Well the DEA agent that arrested him is himself in
prison, for stealing laundered drug money. An FBI agent had a very ingenious
idea: he stole drugs from the evidence room, and mailed samples to the
regional drug dealers, whose names he got from the FBI files, so they could
determine the purity of the product, and what price would be appropriate.
It's the market free enterprise system. [Laugher.]
So when we look at what's going on there, there's another couple of patterns
that are important. Very often, the misconduct, the police crimes, are
uncovered by outside agencies, not by the agency itself. And the standard
defense that we get, whenever these crimes occur, is of course, we've always
had a few rotten apples, and we have to do a better job at getting them.
We're not all Mark Fuhrman`s and so on. The point is lost, that of course
the majority of cops, thank god, are honest and not racist. But, the code of
silence in those agencies is allowing those officers to do what they do. And
so we have to appeal to the rank and file. The police leadership has to move
beyond the tradition, and this is a wake-up call that's occurring.
The verdict in the Simpson case has angered the police all over the country,
saying how could the jury just disregard the evidence so quickly and not pay
any attention. The march on Washington will also anger some people. But what
that jury did should not surprise us. It didn't surprise me. And it wasn't
just a reaction to the Rodney King case, or to Mark Fuhrman. It's a decade
long reaction in every large city across the country, and it can be traced
back to the Drug War treatment that people are getting in the inner city,
and their anger at the racism and the unfairness of the enforcement that's
going on on a daily basis. Almost always, the victims of the police crimes
are minorities, are African Americans or other minorities. So the public
opinion polls, that for 10 years have been showing eroding credibility of
law enforcement, don't show it as serious a problem among whites, for very
good reason. The whites aren't as sensitive to it, because they're not the
victims of this kind of police misconduct. And it's inconceivable for white
people to think that a black Mark Fuhrman would be allowed to exist in a
police agency. But we know, in all the large agencies in the country, there
are plenty of Mark Furhman`s, who go on and on, and are not purged out of
those organizations. Well, the inner city communities know that too, and the
juries know that as well.
I think all of these things, the violence, the tremendous corruption, are
one of the reasons that are leading more and more people in law enforcement,
who are responsible for these agencies, to begin a healthy self scrutiny.
When you're telling cops that they're soldiers in a Drug War, you're
destroying the whole concept of the citizen peace officer, a peace officer
whose fundamental duty is to protect life and be a community servant.
General Colin Powell told us during the Persian Gulf War what a soldier's
duty is. It's to kill the enemy. And when we allowed our politicians to push
cops into a war that they'll never win, they can't win, and let them begin
to think of themselves as soldiers, the mentality comes that anything goes.
We look at the rationalization of the crooked cops in New York, who robbed
the drug dealers -- guess what? The Los Angeles sheriff's deputies who
robbed the drug dealers here had the same rationalization. They said, why
should these guys keep all the money? They're animals. They're enemy. And
they told the drug dealers, you're nothing, you have no rights, we can do
whatever we want. It's a war, after all. When former police chief Daryl
Gates made his famous statement in Congress, that casual drug users should
be taken out and shot -- it was before the United States Senate, by the way,
not in some cop beer hall [laughter] -- he assured the Senators he wasn't
being facetious. Well, when he came back home, the LA Times said, did you
really say that? And Chief Gates said look, we're in a war.
And all kinds of police misconduct has occurred, the most serious which is
the cops who think of themselves as being innocent good guys, are routinely
violating the Fourth Amendment, routinely committing perjury. I'm going to
end now, but I think, you know, it boggles the mind, how many defendants do
give consent and get searched when they have drugs on them, and say "Sure,
officer, open my trunk." [Laughter.] How many times are they cooperative
enough to have the drugs in plain view, so that it's admissible evidence.
There's a certain healthy skepticism that the court has not yet taken
judicial notice of. But I think these things are a wake-up call for law
enforcement. We can trace back this changing police behavior to a kind of
malaise, in which good cops and bad cops alike have been conditioned to
think they can do whatever they want, because after all, this is a problem
that can only be solved by a War.
In the end, I hope that we will hold our next conference with full media
support. One of the chiefs suggested, why put it all on the police? Let's
get the mayors here, and the public health officials, and the police chiefs,
and let's all recognize that we're in this together. And at the next
conference, we hope to have the media present, and maybe begin to get out to
the politicians the information that it's really safe to call for a study of
what is an atrocious and indefensible public policy. It's not political
suicide, it's something that you owe to your constituents. Thank you.
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