How did the Drug Ware operate in a discriminatory manner?

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.

Alexander notes many ways in which the Drug War discriminated against minorities, specifically young black men. As she states, the Drug War allowed Conservatives to “finally justify an all-out war on an ‘enemy’ that had been racially defined years before” (p. 52).

For instance, she notes that the Drug War highly focused on crack cocaine and emphasized its use in “inner-city neighborhoods” which were devastated by unemployment and deindustrialization, but the media campaign painted it as the fault of minorities (p. 50). She goes on to note that funding moved from drug addiction treatment and rehab facilities to crime-prevention units. This made it so young black men who could not get a job and were being forced to turn to drug dealing or shooting drugs were then placed in prison rather than rehab facilities where they could have received rehabilitation rather than being caught up in the prison system. Furthermore, terms such as “crack-whore”, “crack-babies”, “welfare queens”, and “gangabangers” became prevalent in the media with a racial subtext aimed at poor black citizens. Crack cocaine, cheaper and more affordable, became the drug of inner-city blacks while powder cocaine, which was more expensive, was the drug of the sophisticated and upper-class elite.

Furthermore, as a result of the Drug War, civil penalties were enacted in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1988 which allowed for the eviction of any tenants who “allow any form of drug-related activity to occur on or near public housing premises.” This was of course discriminatory because public housing was rampant in inner-city neighborhoods which had been struck by joblessness, as mentioned above. The Act went on to eliminate student loans and other federal benefits for anyone convicted of a drug offense. This made it so anyone convicted of a drug offense, which was often young black youths trying to make a living, were not able to rehabilitate their lives after prison by attending college.

Finally, the Drug War would continue on into the Bush and Clinton administrations. Both administrations campaigned on being “tough on crime”, which only exacerbated the already declining attitude towards minorities. Bush even campaigned by representing a black man who had escaped while on furlough during his opponent's tenure and raped and murdered a white woman. The Ku Klux Klan would even go on to announce in 1990 that they would be the “eyes and the ears of the police” (p. 50) to help combat the War on Drugs. Politicians such as Bush and Clinton battled it out to gain the vote of the working-class white voter who felt disenfranchised and somehow harmed by the Civil Rights Movement gains and racial reforms.

The War on Drugs would lead to numerous acts that continue to discriminate and help to create a racial undercaste. For instance, Clinton would go on to pass acts that “ended welfare as we know it” (Personal Responsbility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) which imposed 5-year lifetime limits on welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a drug offense (p. 57). Public housing was slashed by 61% and corrections increased by 171%, all aimed at minorities- specifically young black men who were being swept into an endless system that did not allow for rehabilitation. He also created the “One Strike and You’re Out” policy, which as Alexander states, that for “racial minorities targeted by the drug war, public housing was no longer available, leave many of them homeless” and locked out of mainstream society (p. 57).

As Alexander states, “The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward black and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism” (p. 54).

How did the Drug War operate in a discriminatory manner?

Well to begin with, the War on Drugs was in reality a race war. It was politicians, politics, and the criminal justice system, against African Americans. The Drug war was discriminatory because it was launched as a way to socially control African Americans. The War on Drugs initiated a war on the African American way of life. On the outside the war was to curb the distribution and use of crack cocaine. It was set in to motion to attempt to control the moral panic that this drug was creating, and to control its damaging effects. Now the problem with this was on drugs, is that it was racially charged and systematically used against Blacks. White men thought African Americans were bad men, raping their wives, committing crimes, and things of the like. But in reality whites were just as badly if not worse using illicit drugs. The War on Drugs caused African Americans to be convicted and imprisoned at a much greater rate than whites, and to this day it is still doing to the same thing.

First off, the initiation of the Drug War was a political maneuver with an underlying discriminatory purpose aimed towards young African American men. Specifically, areas with a large African American population were targeted for drug raids and police presence. African Americans were arrested for drug possession at an extremely high rate in comparison to Whites due to police specifically targeting the race as one that is more likely to use drugs. Propaganda in support of the Drug War portrayed African Americans using drugs and the effects that it had. When crack cocaine emerged almost four years after the War on Drugs began, constant propaganda of 'crack babies' and 'crack whores', who were always African American, were spread across the country. Also, when crack cocaine emerged, the sentence for possession was nearly 100 times that of the sentence for possessing cocaine because crack cocaine was thought of as a drug used by African Americans. This sentence discrepancy was clearly discriminatory against African Americans, yet nobody did anything about it. According to Alexander, the Courts never did anything about the discriminatory nature of the Drug War because they agreed with the discriminatory agenda.

One thing, above all else, that shows the Drug War was administered in a discriminatory manner was the fact that African Americans were still overwhelmingly targeted despite several studies showing that White individuals were more likely to use drugs or to be caught with drugs. Government pushed these studies aside and explained away the results by saying that it was easier to catch African Americans because they were more likely to complete drug transactions out in the open. However, more studies showed this was not in fact the case and that Whites were just as likely to complete transactions out in the open as African Americans were. Alexander brings up the point that the reason police didn't police typically White neighborhoods was because police presence in those areas would garner more attention and more people would likely complain or be upset by their presence. The discriminatory nature of the War on Drugs can be seen in all aspects of the criminal justice system from arrest to sentencing and it is clear that this was no accident.

In addition to what everyone above has mentioned, we can see that the drug war has only become more discriminatory over time. Now that we have multiple decades worth of data to analyze in an attempt to understand the effects of the drug war, nothing has been done to alter its focus. We are aware that this is, and has always been a failing endeavor, and yet even with all of the evidence to demonstrate this fact, there is no end in sight for the War on Drugs. Alexander mentions that "tactics that would be political suicide in an upscale white suburb are not even newsworthy in poor black and brown communities...so long as mass drug arrests are concentrated in impoverished urban areas, police chiefs have little reason to fear a political backlash..." This is not some secretive policy. The targeting of these neighborhoods and these groups of people is something that everyone is aware of, but many turn a blind eye to. Alexander quotes a prosecutor who had this to say about focusing on these types of neighborhoods: "it's a lot easier to go out to the 'hood, so to speak, and pick somebody than to put your resources in an undercover [operation in a] community where there are potentially politically powerful people." The ghetto poor are simply the easiest targets to pursue, as they are least likely to be able to complicate matters by involving anyone with any type of political power. This means that their rights are easier to violate, and thus are violated more frequently.

Like Courtney said, many have claimed that African Americans are more likely to engage in criminal activity outdoors and as a result are more convenient targets. A study conducted in 2002 debunked the notion that white drug dealers were more likely to deal indoors, thereby concealing their criminal activity. The study also showed how much the operations of the Seattle Police Department were affected by the stereotypes created by the drug war. The police focused their efforts on specific open air drug markets, despite the fact that residents in the city were far more likely to report suspected drug activity inside of a residence. Many drug transactions were recorded in predominantly white areas, and yet the police targeted a specific downtown drug market even though the frequency of drug transactions was dramatically lower. Where the drug markets were racially mixed, African American dealers, who were no more visible than their white counterparts, were considerably more likely to be arrested. At this time, Seattle had a larger problem with heroin than it did crack, and yet the police focused their efforts on crack, the drug more likely to be sold by African American dealers. The study ultimately indicated that despite all of the evidence that would imply that there were larger drug problems in the city, the Seattle Police Department ignored these indicators and kept their focus on crack and non-white dealers.

My peers offer valid points so I'll just build off what they have said. In short, the first thing I thought about when reading the professors question was that the administration at the time was racially biased. Although not explicit, the rhetoric that they used, such as "Welfare queen" translated to lazy, greedy, black ghetto mother.

Moreover, statistics show that African Americans weren't committed drug related offenses at a significantly higher rate than whites yet the composition of prisons were highly disparate. Just back track to the Rockerfeller drug laws. Both crack and cocaine were the same chemical substance yet the sentence ratio was 1:100 grams; in other words, one would have to have 100 grams of cocaine to equal the same as the sentence for one gram of crack. Although the ratio has decreased under the Obama administration, it has yet to become equal. The Anti drug laws targeted a racial and socio economical minority and was a discriminatory practice because Africans and Hispanics depended on public housing, educational aid, and welfare. In a way it further victimized the victim; those who we jobless, victims of economic collapse, and divorced from the national economy, subjected to penal sanctions for their means of income.

The war on drugs was discriminatory because it only targeted minorities, mainly African Americans. On the drug war police had the discretion as to who to target, as well as where to find them. As noted by Alexander, the drug war could have been waged in the white suburbs or on college campuses. Fraternies could have been seized and suburban homemakers could have bee under surveillance but where did police focus attention? They focused on the hood. Why ? Cause, "tactics that would be political suicide in an upscale white suburban are not even newsworthy in poor black or brown communities", (Alexander, 124). Try arresting a frat boy whose parents have a top notch lawyer on speed dial. Try raiding a white suburban neighborhood without getting a public uproar from those residents who have only to fight whatever case is being built against them. Even though it was noted that people of all races engage in illegal drug activity at similar rates, it was easier to extract the drugs and send people away when they were from poor communities.