War on Drugs and Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides, "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Alexander provides the examples of Erma Faye Stewart and Clifford Runoalds. Stewart, an African American mother of two, was arrested as a part of a drug sweep. She spent time in jail for a week, with no one to care for her two children. Although innocent, her appointed attorney advised her to plead guilty and accept probation as punishment. After refusing and wasting a month's time in jail, she ultimately pleaded guilty to avoid a risky trial and years of imprisonment. Now she is under ten years of probation and is branded as a drug felon; with that, she is no longer able to vote, loses eligibility for food stamps, discriminated against employers, and is evicted from public housing. Her children are then taken away and are put into foster homes. The worst part is that the judge dismissed all the cases against the defendants who did not plead guilty as the entire drug sweep was based on a single informant who lied. However, Stewart would still be considered as a drug felon.
Runoalds, who was also a part of the drug sweep with Stewart, returns back home to attend his eighteen month old daughter. Before the funeral service even begins, the police showed up and handcuffed Runoalds. Runoalds was not even given a chance to have his last look of his daughter. He was forced to testify in another drug bust, however he did not cooperate. After a month's time in jail, his charges were dropped. The time wasted in jail resulted in Runoalds losing his apartment, furniture, car, and job.
"The Court's blind eye to race discrimination in the criminal justice system has been especially problematic in policing. Racial bias is most acute at the point of entry into the system for two reasons: discretion and authorization (Alexander, 123)." Although the police likes to deny the fact that they utilize racial profiling, the police has all the discretion when it comes to selecting a Drug War victim. Victimizing those in gated white communities would be newsworthy and therefore, political suicide for the police. However, roaming in the 'hood to track down drugs would be seen as ridding the streets for good. The poor blacks were easy targets and brought in federal revenue to combat the continuing rise of drugs on the streets. Sociologist and other scholars believe that Blacks and Latinos are more likely to distribute drugs in open space because they lack privacy, making it easier for the police to target them. Regarding the study of Seattle's police department, officers mainly hunted down crack which is mainly sold by Blacks. White people are just not perceived to be drug offenders.

The war on drugs heavily undermined the Fourth Amendment in many ways. As my classmate Alex mentioned earlier, the Fourth Amendment ensures protection from unreasonable searches and seizure and this applies heavily to law enforcement individuals due to the nature of their work. As the war on drugs was waged in American, the Supreme Court had a powerful opportunity to dictate how this war would play out legally. Alexander mentions that the Supreme Court is the one branch of government charged with the responsibility of protecting "discrete and insular minorities", yet when it came to adopting governing laws, they leaned in favor for the war on drugs.

One effective tool used in law enforcement to dance around the Fourth Amendment are pretext stops. According to Alexander, a classic pretext stop is a traffic stop motivated not by any desire to enforce traffic laws, but instead motivated by a desire to hunt for drugs in the absence of any evidence of illegal drug activity. Although this may seem inherently unconstitutional, the Supreme Court felt otherwise. In Whren v. United States, the Court held that such police conduct does not violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. This undermining is even played out in cases such as Terry v. Ohio, where the court deemed a stop and frisk admissible on the grounds that it was conducted for the safety and wellbeing of the officer and public.

The legal rules granted to law enforcement by the Supreme Court has given them a substantial interest in the drug war. With these, the Court has paved the way and set a standard for law enforcement, making it clear and easy for police to seize people virtually anywhere for anything. Personally, this seems very troubling to me. In a time where the Court had the opportunity to mitigate the war, they almost did more to help it than to control it. I've always seen the Supreme Court as being generally unbiased, but the sheer negligence to negate the discrimination from the war is truly shocking.

Hello All,
Please allow me to congratulate all of you on your concise, and to the point synapses of the readings. In this threat I will focus on the War on Drug’s impact on American Policing. I do believe that the political pressure to control drugs increased the demands of using military tactics and specialized police forces such as SWAT teams in daily police operations. This process of militarization is understood as the implementation of the ideology that believes, and values the use of force and threat of violence as the most appropriate mean to solve problems (Kraska, 2007). As Alexander notes, the transformation from "community policing to "military policing" began in 1981, when President Reagan persuaded Congress to pass the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act (p. 77). One of such efforts was 1033 program of the Federal government that distributed weaponry, equipment and advanced technology to local police departments.

The empirical studies undertaken by Kraska (2001) suggest that there is a 1400% increase in the total number of police paramilitary deployments from 1980 and 2000 –a period that coincides with the War on Drug. He observes that the majority of these interventions are deployed for proactive drug raids, and routine patrol work in ‘hot spots’ zones. One might rightfully ask that what is wrong with such practices? Well in doing so, police departments may run the risk of decreasing their legitimacy in the eyes of public. For example, deploying extra police forces in 'hot spots' zones might prove to be effective in reducing crimes, but people living in such areas might feel as been treated unfairly, disrespected, and racial profiled by the police. Most likely, such citizens will be unwilling to obey the laws and police orders, and as a result, police force and threat of violence becomes a justified means to restore order. This in turn, creates more need for using force and the threat of violence by the police officers to enforce laws in areas where community members do not trust the local police. The events in Ferguson Missouri, and later in Baltimore best illustrate this point.

References:
Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press, New York.
Kraska. B., P (2007). Militarization and policing—Its relevance to 21st century police. Oxford University Press.

How does Alexander argue the war on drugs undermined the Fourth Amendment?

Alexander argued that the war on drugs undermined the Fourth Amendment as most Americans do not know what the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution actually says or what it requires of the police.
The Constitution states, in its entirety: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or things to be seized.”

Within a few years after the drug war was declared, it had become clear that a major shift in the relationship between the citizens of this country and the police was underway. The Fourth Amendment is but one of the amendments that have been undermined by the war on drugs. Virtually all constitutionally protected civil liberties have been undermined by the drug war. The Court has been busy in recent years approving mandatory drug testing of employees and students, upholding random searches and sweeps of public schools and students, permitting police to obtain search warrants based on an anonymous informant’s tip, expanding the government’s wiretapping authority, legitimating the use of paid, unidentified informants by police and prosecutors are just a few of the ways in which the war on drugs undermined the Civil Liberties of the people.


What are examples and how does it relate to policing procedures?

The first major sign that the war on drugs would undermine the Fourth Amendment is found in the classical case of Florida v. Bostick. In that case, Terrance Bostick, a twenty-eight-year-old African American, had been sleeping in the back seat of a Greyhound bus on his way from Miami to Atlanta. Two police officers, wearing bright green “raid” jackets and displaying their badges and a gun, woke him with a start. The bus was stopped for a brief layover in Fort Lauderdale, and the officers were “working the bus,” looking for persons who might be carrying drugs. Bostick provided them with his identification and ticket, as requested. The officers then asked to search his bag. Bostick complied, even though he knew his bag contained a pound of cocaine. The officers had no basis for suspecting Bostick of any criminal activity, but they got lucky. They arrested Bostick, and he was charged and convicted of trafficking cocaine.

Bostick’s search and seizure reflected what had become an increasingly common tactic in the War on Drugs: suspicionless police sweeps of buses in interstate or intrastate travel. The resulting “interviews” of passengers in these dragnet operations usually culminate in a request for “consent” to search the passenger’s luggage. Never did the officers inform passengers that they are free to remain silent or to refuse to answer questions. By proceeding systematically in this manner, the police are able to engage in an extremely high volume of searches. One officer was able to search over three thousand bags in a nine-month period employing these techniques. In one case, a sweep of one hundred buses resulted in only seven arrests.

On appeal, the Florida Supreme Court ruled in Bostick’s case that the police officer’s conduct violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. The Fourth Amendment, the court reasoned, forbids the police from seizing people and searching them without some individualized suspicion that they have committed or are committing a crime. The court thus overturned Bostick’s conviction, ruling that the cocaine, having been obtained illegally, was inadmissible. It also broadly condemned “bus sweeps” in the drug war, comparing them to methods employed by totalitarian regimes.
Other examples of how the war on drugs and police operations which undermine the Fourth Amendment are seen in the brutal stories Erma Faye Stewart and Clifford Runoalds wherein African Americans –particularly the poorest neighborhoods- are subjected to the tactics and practices of the police violating their Constitutional Rights which would create an uproar if it had been committed in the middle-class white neighborhood as posited by Alexander.

The fourth amendment of the United States reads as follows: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Michelle Alexander argues that the fourth amendment has been violated in many ways, with particular focus on the evolution of a judicial racial caste system. Alexander combines the arguments of this racial caste system and contemporary drug laws as serving in lieu of Jim Crow Laws. The text alludes to the notion that what has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify severe inequality.
The drug war and consequent police behavior has materialized a new form of racially biased laws that greatly undermines the U.S Constitution. Alexander explains the statistics behind the rise of drug related incarceration and the disproportionate number of African Americans that are convicted. The reasons for this disproportionality, she says, “have far more to do with politics -- racial politics -- that the realities of drug crime.” Alexander also shows how this effects the constitution by increasing stop and frisk operations in poor communities of color; the very sorts of arbitrary and discriminatory police practices aimed to be prevented by the constitution are now commonplace. Lastly, Alexander notes how racial bias has not and cannot be addressed in the court system, she writes in a commentary following the book: “The Supreme Court has closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the criminal justice process, from stops and searches, to plea bargaining and sentencing.” Valid hindrances to the Fourth Amendment are outlined by Alexander, proving the need for a serious look deep into the legal system.