OverKill: Police Brutality and Corruption in the War on Drugs

One thing often ignored when people report on the War on Drugs is the rampant police corruption and abuse that Prohibition breeds. While the main thing prompting reform in drug laws and sentencing is the racial disparity, that conversation usually stops at incarceration. There's a lot of other police abuses to discuss in regards to the way confrontations with law officers differ from white citizens to black citizens. There are also many instances where race was less of a factor than marijuana being involved. Time and time again, marijuana has been a factor in serious abuses from police. These confrontations can alter the lives of everyone involved, or end in the death of a person who isn't even guilty of a crime. That was the case when St. Anthony, Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez shot Philando Castille. Due to poor training, Yanez said he was “triggered” by the smell of marijuana in an already tense situation. He had his gun drawn on Castille, who had indicated that he had a legal firearm and that he had a permit for it. Yanez claims he was nervous and told Castille not to go for the gun. In his official statement, Yanez said his justification for shooting Philando was that he feared for his own life because of Castille's abusive behavior towards the 5 year old girl in the car. He said, "I thought, I was gonna die, and I thought if he's, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five-year-old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing, then what, what care does he give about me?" A small amount of weed was found in the car and his previous marijuana use was used in court to vilify him and pave the way for Yanez's acquittal and severance package from St. Anthony PD. 

This story has been repeated hundreds if not thousands of times. The problem is, we will  probably never really know the extent of the abuses that law enforcement have committed to citizens in the name of the War on Drugs. And now that there is a Right Wing government in place, the focus on the War on Drugs is back to the rigid methodology of the 80s “Tough on Crime” mantra.

Heavier Penalties, More Law Enforcement, Less Rehabilitation, and State-Run Mental Health Rehabilitation complete with FDA Approved Drugs (Synthetic Opioids) to help ease addiction, suppression of Cannabis and Kratom - all capped off with an anti-drug marketing campaign. We have seen this all before. This is nothing new. In fact, this is what brought us from the Peace and Love days of Psychedelics to the hard fought street drug war ushered in by Richard Nixon. When the country became weary from year after year of that, a more sensible approach was tried through Carter. As soon as Reagan settled into the White House, the hard line approach was immediately implemented. George HW Bush and Bill Clinton continued increasing sentencing while the Private Prison industry grew exponentially and cities were left decimated by mass incarceration, deindustrialization, and the crack economy. Obama tried very little to “End the War on Drugs” - something that might even have been a campaign promise of his had he not been so successful with platitudes like “Hope and Change” and “Yes We Can.” The measures that his administration did take to reform sentencing guidelines and protect states that were experimenting with changing their own marijuana laws were just memos which the new Right Wing administration, under a Sessions DOJ, basically bull dozered over. 

Which leads us back to today, where police misconduct and all out corruption are at appalling levels. There seems to be no limit on how much protection the Thin Blue Line offers to a police officer. Hell, George Zimmerman seemed to be extended that protection even though he wasn't even a cop. He was merely a neighborhood watch patrol person. It seems like as long as you have a shooter who is some kind of authority person and a victim who is black and you can say they had something to do with weed, a murder charge is off the table. 

But it doesn't even stop at murder. Sexual assault seems to be another thing police are doing a lot of in the name of the War on Drugs. In New York City, Former detectives Eddie Martins and Richard Hall raped an 18 year old woman after finding marijuana and anxiety medication near her. Although their court cases are still under way, they were treated like they were the victims through most of the proceedings. The officers' defense strategy again hinged on victim blaming by mentioning her drug history and accusing her of lying about the incident. As a final underscore, they brought up that she had received misdemeanor marijuana charges a few weeks after the incident. To a jury, these smears might be enough to show leniency to a couple of New York City's finest.

These incidences don't always end with the cops getting arrested for their crimes, in fact, that is the exception. In the case of Charnesia Corley, justice will only come from suing Harris County Texas.

It was the Harris County Sheriff's Department that pulled her over for running a red light. When they found .2 of a gram of weed in her car, they decided to do a strip search on the side of the road. For 11 grueling and horrifying minutes, they preformed a body cavity search on Corley. Although they were charged with Official Oppression following the incident, the charges were subsequently dropped. In the end, even if she wins the lawsuit, the officers that violated her that night were indicted by a grand jury, but the charges were later dropped. 

Abuses of this nature are common for women in the War on Drugs. So much so for Women of Color, that there is a book about it called  Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color  by Andrea J. Ritchie. She describes a culture of systemic abuse and indoctrination into what can only be described as a living Hell where black girls are viewed by law enforcement as drug mules who will hide contraband inside themselves. Cops are seldom if ever disciplined for sexual abuses, and even have laws to protect them against rape charges and allegations. So when marijuana comes into play, these abuses are almost assumed to be normal. To a grand jury, as long as the sexual misconduct can be considered a reasonable search by whatever corrupted standards they have to go by because of the War on Drugs, then it was necessary and therefor no charges or suspensions are ever levied. 

And if that isn't creepy enough or crazy enough, there was the incident that occurred in Worth County, Georgia. This is an incident that should have caused a lot more outrage than it did. The fact that so many people act as this incident is not that big of a deal – is why it is such a big deal. In the name of the War on Drugs and Zero Tolerance, this whole country has collectively forgot to care about the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. Perhaps in this instance, people feel like school children don't get the same Constitutional Protections under the Fourth Amendment as adults.  

But that is dangerous, and this is why. For four hours, Worth County Sheriff's Deputies searched some 900 students' pockets, waistbands, and underwear, causing a lot of students to say that they felt violated. This lead to 9 students' parents filing lawsuits claiming  the  search violated the students' Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights and that the searches  were "intrusive, performed in an aggressive manner, and done in full view of other students."  Besides the $3 million settlement, there wasn't really any charges or punishment to the sheriff or any deputies. Instigator Worth County Sheriff Jeff Hobby has been busted recently for listening to inmates talking to their lawyers in jail. There is way more to this story than I have room for in this short look into the insane abuses we as citizens are enduring – all in the name of regulating what a person puts into their body to alter their consciousness less than a couple of drinks of legal liquor would.  

What power do we as citizens have to prevent any of this from happening in the future? There doesn't seem to be any talk about this from pundits no matter how much they repeat the same refrains about reforming the criminal justice system. There definitely doesn't seem to be any sign that law enforcement agencies want to reform themselves in any meaningful way. It seems like time and time again, the statements from the officers reveal a lack of understanding or training in certain cultural areas surrounding drugs in general, but it seems especially disturbing when violent reactions from officers are triggered by marijuana. In the simplest of terms, no one with a badge and a gun who swore an oath to protect the public should be operating under some assumption that marijuana odor or possession should cause alarm. Escalation due to the existence of marijuana seems to be a pattern that always ends bad for the person the police are dealing with. 

Meanwhile, We DO have a REAL Drug Problem, and again, Heavy Enforcement is NOT the Solution.

Politicians are scrambling to try to do anything that will slow down the deaths from Opioids. On the local level, where they see the deaths and runs on emergency rooms, there is a real desire to try things that have been shown to have good results. Harm reduction strategies like safe injection sites, medical marijuana access, and Kratom that are showing progress are being marginalized and snubbed at every corner by an increasingly corrupt FDA and local law enforcement. A Sheriff in one of the hardest hit counties in America said that his deputies will not carry Narcan, the drug that can save someone's life who has overdosed from Opioids. Dubbed “Ohio's Mini Trump,” Sheriff Richard Jones of Butler County has never allowed his deputies to carry the life saving drug since he first was elected in 2004, making statements like, “I'm not the one that decides if people live or die. They decide that when they stick that needle in their arm.” 

When you go further up the pyramid to the federal government, the ideas of the past that failed and lead to the current crisis are being fluffed up again by an administration that is completely overrun with former lobbyists and big players in the Pharma, Law Enforcement, Private Prison, and Military Industrialist sectors. All of which are sworn enemies to the drugs that the FDA deems “illicit” while steering the federal policies relating to the Opioid crisis towards more laws, more penalties, more Opioids, and less compassion. To what ends? President Trump recently championed Former President Bill Clinton's policy that allows the Death Penalty for certain drug dealers.  

Clearly, Clinton's 1994 Death Penalty Statute didn't stop the crack epidemic or the flow of heroin into the country. Just like the 1988 law passed by Congress that allowed for the death penalty for drug dealers who commit murder probably hasn't stopped drug related murders. And, by the way, no one on record has been charged, convicted, or executed by the Federal Government for any drug related crime. 

The Tough on Drugs approach combined with the mere utterance of the possibility of the Federal Government executing a Drug Dealer is more designed to send a message. The message is not to drug dealers, but rather, to the Law Enforcement apparatus that exists to support the War on Drugs. It is for the judges to let them know that they are to use the maximum penalties for drug offenders, including Sessions encouraging Federal Prosecutors to push the Death Penalty. It goes out to the prisons to let them know it is okay to house non-violent drug offenders. It goes out to detectives who are on drug cases instead of trying to solve real crimes, assuring them that their work has value again. It goes out to the Police Unions and Sheriff's Associations who see the reformation of Drug laws as a threat to their very existence. It goes out to the DOJ, letting them know to ignore State's Rights and go after marijuana in states that have legalized it. It resonates with the local police and narcotics task forces in cities all over the country, where the rubber meets the road. This is where the messages from the Trump Administration hurts the most. 

Before Trump even got sworn into office, these abuses by police were already happening on an epidemic level. From coast to coast, stories like these were so common as to not even elicit media attention, so no one ever knows that they ever happened. Police have been caught on camera assaulting individuals, murdering unarmed people, abusing their powers, talking to citizens as if they are criminals, escalating situations into violence with no cause, beating women, using unauthorized tactics which have been fatal many times, using flash bang grenades on and shooting children and elderly people during drug raids and warrant sweeps, tasing people to death for misdemeanors or less, turning off their body cams to do something off the books, and not to mention, they are killing dogs rampantly. And all of these things are things we have seen go viral because they were caught on camera. And this list was made very short compared to the list that could be made, in the interest of time and word count. The tragedy is that none of the officers in these incidences I just listed were charged and if they were charged they were acquitted. 

In city after city, all over the country, there is never a break in the stream of stories about police planting drugs as evidence on a citizen to arrest them or justify something even worse. Thousands of cases were just dropped in New Jersey when Kamalkant Shah was busted for “dry labbing” (the process in which a lab technician doesn't actually conduct the test but still certifies that the sample is positive for illegal drugs). Thousands more were already processed through the system. Those individuals lives, some 14,000 or more, were forever ruined or at least scarred because of the drug charge on their record. LAPD, Baltimore Police, and many other smaller agencies have also come under fire for actually filming themselves planting drugs on suspects and citizens. The investigation into these cases has uncovered even more misconduct. The Baltimore PD has been under a microscope since the Freddie Gray incident in 2015 unveiled a thick presence of corruption, systemic racism, and normalized police brutality within the department. Just recently it was revealed that at least eight members of the elite Baltimore PD Gun Trace Task Force were involved in a laundry list of felonious crimes, including robbery, extortion, racketeering, and distribution of Heroin. 

The Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force was responsible for several overdose deaths due to real lab results that connected the heroin to their evidence lab. These guys were so thugged out, they even carried toy guns on them – at the instruction of their supervisor, in case they got themselves “into a jam.” One of the arrested task force members Marcus Tayor, actually baffled detectives when they found a toy gun in the glovebox of his cruiser.

These are just the stories we know about. Often the ones we know about are due to the fact that they were caught on camera and they did go viral or the main stream media did cover it. A lot of these videos don't even go public until the court trial – if there even is one. If there isn't a trial, but there was body cam footage and other footage, the public may never get to weigh in on the justification. 

Because these incidences are so common as to barely even get covered anymore, there is a great lack of dialogue surrounding the issues. No one talks about the killing of unarmed black men, unarmed mentally ill patients, and people in general. No one talks enough about the way police escalate rather than deescalate situations. There is no desire to demilitarize police departments. There is no desire from police departments themselves to get rid of these so called “bad apples” that are always scapegoated when their behavior is revealed. Most of all, when there is people talking about this, especially the main stream media, there isn't any repudiation of the police or the systemic nature of these activities. No path to a better way is ever talked about. When anything is recommended, the ideas are batted away with straw mans and hypotheticals. Police Unions are just as Hyper Protective of policing and the status quo as the NRA is at opposing gun regulations. 

When asked what I would recommend, I have ideas, but I really don't think the solution is something we can even envision in this current climate. The number one thing I hope happens is that we as a society demand that police training is more of a reflection of what the job of being a Police Officer actually involves and less of the training of foot soldiers ready to fight in some imagined war. We have to stop creating small militarized factions and start making policing look more like a community endeavor that mutually benefits the social order rather than throwing a wrench into it. Police Unions and Sheriff's Associations often project rhetoric that the police are hated and that they are targets. Nothing could be further from the truth, yet, we constantly hear them say they feared for their life as a reason to justify killing someone. Police are not hated, and almost every person on the planet is happy to have law and order. The idea that there should be an automatic level of respect given towards a police officer will only be real if the respect wasn't diminished by the results of the policing. People do not want to live under the gun. When Police Agencies feel like occupying armies working against a community, the sense of peace is no longer felt. When the trust is broken between the Police and the Community it is supposed to serve, corruption and lawlessness stains the badge with the blood of the People. When the Police are the Drug Counselors, Mental Health Professionals, Peace Officers, Part Time Fire and Rescue Team Members, and whatever other jobs society is demanding they do, we need to make sure they are trained in those areas and compensated properly. When asked, the lawyer for Baltimore PD Gun Trace Task Force Momodu Gondo, AKA "G Money," Warren Brown said, "They are paid like crap, quite frankly. We put them in positions where they are out there chasing bad guys -- bad guys have all the money -- yeah, sometimes they are going to snatch a stack or two.” Too often, Police are the ones to come to a 9-1-1 call for a mentally ill person and they end up doing harm or killing the individuals. I would pose a solution that we have special people to go out on those calls to help, if training police officers to handle that dual role is too much to ask. Our jails have become the new Asylums as State-Run facilities have long been abandoned. 

The same can be said of the overdose victims in the Opioid epidemic. The police are all too often the first respondents to any number of situations that involve drug addicts, including overdoses and deaths. Is it possible to get someone else that can respond to these calls? Again, we invest on top grade technology, hardware, equipment, offices, jails, labs, court houses, probation/parole offices, and prisons; but we don't have any money to have professional drug counselors and mental health professionals in play when trouble arises. A lot of the problem here is they want law enforcement to treat Drugs that are not FDA approved as if they are live package bombs. We are giving Law Enforcement Carte Blanche in every and any situation where drugs are involved and letting them get away with the most heinous abuses no matter how innocent the drug “offense” is. All of this, at the behest of the Pharmaceutical Industry, which stands to lose tens of billions of dollars if cannabis is legalized, but more importantly normalized in America alone. They have proven the level of dedication they have by sicking their FDA Puppet Scott Gottlieb (who was on the board of directors for eight different Pharmaceutical Companies) on Kratom, a benign natural herb that can aid in addiction recovery, especially for Opioids. 

They favor saving an addict after an overdose with Narcan, then induct that person into a rehab where they are put on Methadone or Suboxone indefinitely; rather than letting people use natural whole plant herbs of their own choosing. Between the lawsuits they are swimming in and the potential loses they will feel from the Intractable Pain sector alone, most of these companies will be hanging on by a thread before cannabis is legalized worldwide. On their way out, they are tightening the screws on everything that is not Patent Friendly. 

The police are on the front lines. They see the “Opioid Epidemic” statistics in the flesh, and not all police officers are sympathetic to addicts. 

They are looked at as “junkies” who have dirty needles in every pocket and will bite you if given a chance, so as to give you their Hepatitis C or HIV. Because of this stigma, and the legitimate fear they might have of marginalized addicts who are more afraid of cops than anything, pitting these two personality types against each other seldom yields positive results. For every learning moment for police, there are hundreds of  untold abuses by them. The same is true of all encounters between police and the citizens of this country who were using a non-FDA Approved chemical or drug or natural substance to slightly alter their consciousness. There isn't always a camera on every police encounter. There is an untold army of people who have had their lives ruined by police assaulting them, planting drugs on them, sexually assaulting them, and those who have had their lives taken by police over drugs. I only hope that we can find a better way. Perhaps as we embark on this final leg of the Tough-on-Drugs Law-and-Order approach, we will witness the darkest hour of the War on Drugs. Once the tragedy of it sets in and the evidence is again clear that this is the wrong approach, perhaps we as a society will stop treating drugs like some sort of criminal scourge that can be solved with brutal force once and for all. In the meantime, be careful out there.

Brand Strong
4.15.18

Subscribe to my YouTube channel The Daily Dope Show for Daily and Weekly clips where I give in-depth analysis of Drug War stories with the bias YOU deserve!

follow me on twitter: @thedailydopeshw