Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (19 page)

But they insisted. She had to agree. There was no choice.

“Fine, fine,” she said. She told them to follow her car—and then sped away faster than she had ever driven in her life.

Leigh would always know she made a difference in Elkton, getting violent racists put away. Thanks to her, fewer Americans were terrorized.

It wasn’t easy being a female cop in those days, but Leigh was proving she had balls, and she had some crucial allies. She drove the ninety miles to work every morning talking to her colleague Ed Toatley,
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a goateed African American undercover narcotics agent who had grown up just outside Baltimore. He was head of the union, and he stood up to the encrusted sexism on the force as Leigh rose higher and higher, cracking a series of glass ceilings.

Yet the work Leigh was most driven by was taking on the drug gangs. This was what got her out of bed in the morning. She was sure that her roadside stops and drug busts were disrupting the supply routes through Maryland—and this meant there would be fewer gangsters, fewer addicts, less violence, and less misery in the world.

This is one of the most important facts about Leigh, and one that it would be easy for somebody like me—with the politics that I have—to ignore.

Leigh’s support for the drug war was an act of compassion. She genuinely believed that she was making the world a better place by protecting people from drugs and drug gangs. She is a kind and decent person, and that is what drove her to fight the drug war.

She pictured Lisa, and fought for her.

Yet all over the United States—all over the world—police officers were noticing something strange. If you arrest a large number of rapists, the amount of rape goes down. If you arrest a large number of violent racists, the number of violent racist attacks goes down. But if you arrest a large number of drug dealers, drug dealing doesn’t go down.

Another police officer, Michael Levine, was learning this lesson for himself. As he made clear when I interviewed him in 2011, as with Leigh, the drug war was personal for him. His brother died of a heroin overdose in Harlem in the 1950s. His son was a cop murdered by a drug addict in the 1980s. So when he was told to go to one of the most notorious drug-selling corners in Manhattan—near the top of Ninety-Second Street—and “clean up that damned corner,
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once and for all,” he was delighted. In a long surveillance operation, his team identified a hundred likely street dealers within fifty feet who work from the moment the sun falls to the moment the sun rises. Within two weeks, he had busted around 80 percent of them.

He was satisfied, and for a couple of days, there was less drug activity. But within a week, everything was back to normal, “as if we had never been there,” as Levine puts it in his writing. Why? Because “as every dealer knows, if he is arrested, there are hundreds right behind him ready to take his place.” He asked himself: “If all those cops and agents couldn’t get this one corner clean, what is the purpose of this whole damned drug war?”

Back on the roads running into Baltimore, Leigh was discovering something that was going to change her life. It was even worse than Levine suspected. It’s not just that arresting dealers doesn’t cause any reduction in crime. Whenever her force arrested gang members, it appeared to actually cause an
increase
in violence, especially homicides. At first this puzzled her, but it was a persistent pattern.

Why would arresting drug dealers cause a rise in murders? Gradually, she began to see the answer. “So what happens is we take out the guy at the top,” Leigh explains, so “now, nobody’s in charge, and [so the gangs] battle it out to see who’s going to be in charge.”

As I try to understand this, I imagine if Chino had been put away for a really long stretch, or killed. The demand for drugs in Flatbush would not be reduced. There would still, every day, be people turning up on his corner in search of drugs. So there would either have been a war within Souls of Mischief to see who would be the new top dog, or a rival gang—like the older men whom they drove out that day—would have sensed weakness and swept in to fight for control of the patch. In the fighting or the crossfire, it’s easy to see how there would be killing.

Is that right? Is this why every crackdown triggers a turf war? I went away and read through the studies, trying to discover if what Leigh witnessed is part of a wider pattern. Professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University has studied the murder statistics
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and found that “statistical analysis shows consistently that higher [police] enforcement [against drug dealers] is associated with higher homicide, even controlling for other factors.” This effect is confirmed in many other studies.
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So Leigh was beginning to realize that while she went into this job determined to reduce murder, she was in fact increasing it. She wanted to bust the drug gangs, but in fact she was empowering them.

In her heart she suspected this had been the case for years—but she tried to avoid seeing it for as long as she could, until one night she was left with no choice.

One job in policing is, everyone told me, pretty consistently the toughest gig. Ed Toatley—the union head who championed Leigh as she rose through the force—had to pretend, every day, to be a drug dealer among drug dealers.

Back in the 1950s, Harry Anslinger had described what it takes to do this job. An undercover agent, he said, “must be a better actor than an Academy Award winner,
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quick on his feet, even faster with his hands, and ten times as fast with his mind . . . one slip—one false word—could cost his life.”

When they were being honest with themselves, Leigh and Ed admitted they were both adrenaline junkies. “There’s nothing like knowing you almost died [and] spending the next half hour saying—‘but I didn’t!’ ” Leigh told me, laughing. So she wasn’t surprised when, on the morning of October 30, 2000, Ed told Leigh how excited he was—he had finally been given the order to take out a midlevel dealer he’d been tracking for six months. He was given three thousand dollars to head to Washington, D.C., buy a kilo of cocaine, and do the bust. “This is like the pinnacle of my career,” he said.

That night, Leigh got a call from the duty sergeant. He was brief. As Ed handed over the three thousand dollars, the twenty-four-year-old dealer didn’t hand him cocaine. He shot him straight in the head. “I didn’t give it a second thought,”
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he said later in court.

A few minutes later, as she was hurrying to the hospital, her major called her. “Leigh, this is Mike,” he said, and all she could say was: “Who the fuck is Mike?” She couldn’t process anything. When she arrived at the emergency room, more than a hundred police officers were there. Ed was the head of the union and a popular man. As soon as they heard, they all came. One of them put his hand on Leigh’s shoulder and said, “Leigh, man—he’s gone.” Her chief appeared and said: “This is going to be hard, but you got to be strong for the troops—they need your leadership right now.”

The cops were waiting in line to see Ed’s body, and Leigh joined them. His head was wrapped in an improvised turban to keep his brains from spilling out. His body was still warm and soft when she touched it.

Years from that day, Leigh would explain in a speech: “As I rested my hand on his chest, I said a prayer—for his family, his friends, and for myself. And as I did so, I felt the presence of every police officer who had lost [their] lives to the war on drugs. I felt the presence of my dear friend Lisa and every other victim caught in the crossfire of our failed policies. I felt them in that darkened hospital room with me. Their spirits were careening down from the walls. Their spirits were jeering and mocking me. Justice? Justice? What is this of your justice? It was,” she says, “my Damascus moment.”
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Leigh tried to get back to work, but this time she knew too much. It is hard to be Harry Anslinger with your eyes and your mind open.

She had believed that by fighting the drug war, she was crushing the drug gangs that had killed her two closest friends. Now she began to see that her work in fact kept them in business and made them more deadly. The lesson of ending alcohol prohibition, she had come to believe, is that there is a way to actually stop this violence: legalize and regulate the drug trade.

After he was told about the killing, Ed’s five-year-old son Daniel
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insisted on leaving the hallway light on at night, so “Daddy could find his way home.”

While Leigh was studying for a law degree at night, another part of the drug war was slowly becoming clear to her. The shaft of light she had allowed in was illuminating more than she expected.

She knew that drug use and drug selling are engaged in by all the racial groups in America—hell, she smoked marijuana herself as a teen. But that’s not who she was arresting and imprisoning. The 1993 National Household Survey
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on Drug Abuse found that 19 percent of drug dealers were African American, but they made up 64 percent of the arrests for it. Largely as a result of this disparity, there was an outcome that was more startling still. In 1993, in the death throes of apartheid, South Africa imprisoned 853 black men per hundred thousand in the population. The United States imprisons 4,919 black men per hundred thousand (versus only 943 white men). So because of the drug war and the way it is enforced, a black man was far more likely to be jailed in the Land of the Free than in the most notorious white supremacist society in the world.

Indeed, at any given time,
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40 to 50 percent of black men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five are in jail, on probation, or have a warrant out for their arrest, overwhelmingly for drug offenses.

It’s easy to assume that Harry Anslinger’s prejudices at the birth of the drug war were just a product of their time, long since discarded. Leigh was discovering they are not. The race panics that drove the early drug war have not burned out.