This increased the budgets of police departments and over 80 percent of forfeitures went uncontested. State and local law enforcement agencies were also granted the right to keep most of the cash and assets seized during the drug war.
SWAT teams became common in the 1980s as a way to conduct drug raids, but they could be terrifying, dangerous, and actually result in the deaths of innocent people. The militarization of police became ubiquitous. However, a great deal of money was given to police departments along with special training and technical support. Overall, the average person seems to think that when drug arrest rates are up, it is due to an increase in crime rather than an increase in funding and other incentives for police enforcement. When the War on Drugs was first announced, law enforcement was resistant, but once cash became an incentive, they embraced the program with abandon. Drug-courier profiles are also notoriously haphazard and contradictory. One of the biggest programs, Operation Pipeline, proved useless 95 percent of the stops yielded no drugs. However, law enforcement officers do not actually receive any training that would help them spot drug criminals and leave everyone else driving alone. Therefore, judges typically only see the actually guilty and it is easy for them to conclude the police know what they are doing. They fear harassment and retaliation and thus do nothing. Unfortunately, only the guilty people are seen and heard innocent people of color rarely push back against the injustices they are subjected to.
This did not convince the Court, and they continued to indicate there were and are no limitations on the War on Drugs. Lawyers in a case regarding pretext stops said “because of the multitude of applicable traffic and equipment regulations, and the difficulty of obeying all traffic rules perfectly at all times, the police will nearly always have an excuse to stop someone and go fishing for drugs” (67). In regard to pretext stops, the police can stop anyone driving for almost anything and then search for illegal drugs. The Court upheld this, and argued that people can refuse to be searched however, most people would be too afraid or nervous to deny a police officer’s request. In a case about random searches, Terence Bostick was randomly searched on a bus and convicted of having cocaine on him. The stop-and-frisk rule allows police to stop and frisk anybody if they have a “reasonable” suspicion of dangerous and criminal activity. The Supreme Court has helped the drug war through rulings that give law enforcement almost complete carte blanche in searches and seizures. There are a few myths to be aware of: the War on Drugs is aimed at big drug kingpins (no, it’s mostly regular people with no history or violence) and it is aimed at dangerous drugs (no, it’s mostly getting marijuana users).Īlexander discusses how the rules work. The explosion of incarceration rates is due to convictions for drug crimes: two-thirds of the federal inmates entering between 1985-2000 were incarcerated for drugs and there have been 31 million since the drug war began. The way television portrays the criminal justice system is misleading.
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