Breaking Rank (7 page)

Within the criminal justice system, police departments, prosecutors, and judges need to be held to a much higher standard of performance. For years it was the cops who sat in the cellar of learning and acumen about domestic
violence; now it's mostly our judges, some of whom continue to make spectacularly stupid decisions when it comes to the protection of women and children.

Our communities at large need to insist on a vastly improved social and governmental response to prevention, enforcement, shelters, and other services, including batterers' treatment. I've never seen an instance of
sustained
community pressure that didn't exact significant changes in the priorities or performance of a public agency.

Every person convicted of domestic violence who has undergone batterers' treatment or who has been previously sentenced for domestic violence, and who re-offends (and is convicted a second time of stalking or felonious spousal assault or child abuse)
should be sent to prison for life.
Such a person is simply too dangerous to live in the free world. The victim/survivor needs to know that her assailant will never again harm or terrorize her or her children.

To end on a positive note, a story of at least one exclusively male sports organization that did the right thing by women. In 1995 the Seattle Mariners came from thirteen games back in August to win their division. “Mariner fever” gripped the city, and a slogan—“Refuse to Lose”—was born. “Refuse” signs and T-shirts cropped up everywhere. My staff and I scurried down to Pioneer Square near the old King Dome and purchased armloads of the shirts. I set aside a day where all nonuniformed personnel could wear them and show off our Mariner spirit (it must have worked—we beat the Yankees in the playoffs). And all this has
what
to do with DV?

The next year, I joined a group of state and local DV advocates who presented a proposal to Mariners' management. They loved our idea, and soon thereafter launched the “Refuse to Abuse” campaign. The club dedicated a ball game at Safeco Field to the cause, and invited my Seattle colleague on the national advisory council, Dr. Marie Fortune (and rabid Mariners fan), to throw out the first pitch of the night. Throughout the game anti-DV messages were flashed on the scoreboard. Our new
“Refuse” T-shirts were all over the ballpark. But the strongest component of the campaign, which resonates to this day, was a series of TV ads, featuring Mariner stars (carefully vetted to make sure we weren't showcasing a batterer).

Here's Joey Cora's, a favorite of Seattle fans: “When I'm on the field I do everything in my power hit the ball. But I will . . . never . . . ever . . . hit . . . a . . . woman.”

CHAPTER 2

WAGE WAR ON CRIME, NOT DRUGS

I
FLOATED INTO THE
conference room and settled into a chair that seemed to have been constructed of warm air and goose down. A moment later my colleagues filtered in, in slow motion, the contours of their bodies blurring into gold and cerulean auras. These were the finest individuals in the universe. Worthy, noble, virtuous. It was a marvelous meeting, each person respectful, no one interrupting. Everyone agreeing with my point of view on every item on the agenda. It was a perfect Percodan day.

Alcohol had always been my drug of choice, but in the mid-eighties I went to work with my pockets full of painkillers. I popped them throughout the day, long after the misery of a failed kidney stone extraction had worn off. Administrative problems vanished, or lost their weight; organizational enemies became pals; dreaded bureaucratic meetings turned into pleasant, almost cosmic out-of-body experiences. After a couple of months, though, I stopped. Cold turkey. Why? Because I ran out of pills, and as a deputy chief of police I was afraid to ask for more.

I wasn't the only doper in government. There were far more consequential personages into the drug scene. Richard Nixon, depressed over the public's reaction to Vietnam and Watergate, scored a dealer-volume supply of Dilantin and wolfed down hundreds if not thousands of the mood-altering caps from 1970 through the end of his presidency in 1974.
*
Bill Clinton
denied inhaling but confessed to puffing. Al Gore copped to being a heavy weed smoker in college. George W. Bush refuses to refute accounts he was a cokester in school. And Marion Barry? Please.

Where does it end? It doesn't, and it's not just politicians, of course, or the occasional police official. It's
everybody
—every demographic, every occupation in the country is well represented, including shock-talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh whose housekeeper kept him supplied with cigar boxes full of OxyContin and other narcotics. We do like our drugs.

And so what? If I want to inject, ingest, or inhale a mood- or mind-altering substance—whether to find God, flee personal problems, or just feel good—that's my business. Not the government's. Unless . . . well, exceptions to follow.

I say it's time to withdraw the troops in the war on drugs.

For a jaw-dropping illustration of drug enforcement's financial costs, take a look at
drugsense.org's
“Drug War Clock.” To the tune of $600 a second, taxpayers are financing this war. For the year 2004 the figure will have added up to over $20 billion, and that's just for
federal
enforcement alone. You can add another $22 to $24 billion for state and local drug law enforcement, and even more billions for U.S. drug interdiction work on the international scene. We're talking well over $50 billion a year to finance America's war on drugs.

Think of this war's
real
casualties: tens of thousands of otherwise innocent Americans incarcerated, many for twenty years or more, some for life; families ripped apart; drug traffickers and blameless bystanders shot dead on city streets; narcotics officers assassinated here and abroad, with prosecutors, judges, and elected officials in Latin America gunned down for their courageous stands against the cartels; and all those dollars spent on federal, state, and local cops, courts, prosecutors, prisons, probation, parole, and pee-in-the-bottle programs. Even federal aid to bribe distant nations to stop feeding
our
habit.

“Plan Colombia” was hatched under the last year of the Clinton administration to wage America's drug war on Colombian soil. Costing over $1.3 billion ($800 million going to the military), the plan sought to “eradicate” that nation's coca and heroin poppy plants (Colombia supplied 95 percent of this nation's cocaine). The chemical used was the herbicide
glyphosate which, sprayed on crops, does untold damage to the environment; when sprayed on water supplies or unprotected people it causes a host of serious to fatal medical problems. Similar efforts in Peru and Bolivia have reduced production only temporarily, and always at high cost: recall that the Peruvian air force, on the strength of mistaken U.S. drug intelligence, shot down a civilian aircraft carrying an American missionary and her infant daughter in April 2001.

In Afghanistan, the Bush administration supported the Taliban, to the tune of $125 million in foreign aid, plus another $43 million for enforcing its ostensible ban on poppy production—right up until September 10, 2001. (As Robert Scheer makes clear in his May 22, 2001, column in
The Los Angeles Times
—“Bush's Faustian Deal with the Taliban”—the president knew all along that the Taliban was hiding Osama bin Laden.)

Today Afghanistan's drug lords give the country's warlords (when they're not one and the same) a run for their money. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) in the summer of 2004 issued a scathing report citing the phenomenal growth in Afghan poppy production—and the Bush administration's failure to monitor its own anti-drug aid. The United Nations estimates the value of the 2004 crop at $2.2 billion, with production up 40 percent, breaking all records for a single year. According to Peter Rodman of the Pentagon, “profits from the production of illegal narcotics flow into coffers of warlord militias, corrupt government officials, and extremist forces” (BBC News, September 24, 2004).

The United States has, through its war on drugs, fostered political instability, official corruption, and health and environmental disasters around the globe. In truth, the U.S.-sponsored international war on drugs is a war on poor people, most of them subsistence farmers caught in a dangerous no-win situation.

Another casualty of the drug war: the reputation of individual police officers, individual departments, and the entire system of American law enforcement. If you aspire to be a crooked cop, drugs are clearly the way to go. The availability, street value, and illegality of drugs form a sweet temptation to
character-challenged cops, many of whom wind up shaking down street dealers, converting drugs to their own use, or selling them. Almost all the major police corruption scandals of the last several decades have had their roots in drug enforcement. We've seen robbery, extortion, drug dealing, drug stealing, drug use, false arrests, perjury, throw-down guns, and murder. And these are the good guys?

There isn't an unscathed police department in the country. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Miami, Oakland, Dallas, Kansas City—all have recently suffered stunning police drug scandals. You won't find a single major city in the country that has not fired and/or arrested at least one of its own for some drug-related offense in the past few years, including San Diego and Seattle. Smaller cities have not been spared. The cities of Irvington and West New York, New Jersey, and Ford Heights, Illinois, saw cops transporting, peddling, using, protecting drug shipments, and/or extorting dealers. In Ford Heights, it was former police chief Jack Davis. A twenty-five-year veteran, he was convicted of extorting heroin and crack cocaine dealers, allowing them to operate on the streets of his own city as he pocketed their dirty money.

Tulia, Texas, offers another example of a cop—and a
system
—gone bad. Tom Coleman, an ex-police officer, was hired by the federally-funded Texas Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Taskforce to conduct undercover narcotics operations in Tulia in 1998. In 1999 Coleman arrested 46 people, 39 of them black. He put dozens of “drug peddlers” behind bars—for 60, 90, 434 years (we're talking Texas, here). The only problem? Coleman made up the charges. He manufactured evidence. Working alone, he never wore a wire, never taped a conversation, never dusted the plastic bags he “scored” for fingerprints. He testified in court that he wrote his notes of drug transactions on his leg. Who
was
this Tom Coleman?

A 1997 background investigation revealed that he'd been disciplined in a previous law enforcement job, that he had “disciplinary” and “possible mental problems,” that he “needed constant supervision, had a bad temper and would tend to run to his mother for help.” According to
New York Times
reporter Adam Liptak, Coleman had “run up bad debts in another law enforcement job before leaving town abruptly in the middle of a shift. . . . Eight months into the undercover investigation, Coleman's
supervisors received a warrant calling for his arrest for stealing gasoline. They arrested him, let him out on bond and allowed him to make restitution for the gas and other debts of $7,000. The undercover investigation then continued.”