Party Like The Summer Of ’67

Most of you probably don’t remember the summer of ’67. Hell I barely remember it myself. It was 47 years ago. Light My Fire by the Doors was the theme song. And most of America was burning. We had heavy race riots. This one in Detroit was typical of what was going on relative to underlying causes if not in intensity. There was a LOT of racism in policing.

The 1967 Detroit riot, also known as the 12th Street riot, was a violent public disorder that turned into a civil disturbance in Detroit, Michigan. It began on a Saturday night in the early morning hours of July 23, 1967. The precipitating event was a police raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar then known as a blind pig, on the corner of 12th (today Rosa Parks Boulevard) and Clairmount streets on the city’s Near West Side. Police confrontations with patrons and observers on the street evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in United States history, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit’s 1943 race riot.

To help end the disturbance, Governor George W. Romney ordered the Michigan National Guard into Detroit, and President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in Army troops. The result was 43 dead, 1,189 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed.

Which brings us to today and policing in America these days. Official racism is gone. But it is not gone from policing. It is my opinion that policing in New York City is typical of what has been going on.

Before Officer Pedro Serrano joined the NYPD he says he was unfairly targeted by its officers. “As a Hispanic walking in the Bronx, I’ve been stopped many times, and it’s not a good feeling,” he told CNN last year. “As an officer, I said I would respect everyone to the best of my abilities. I just want to do the right thing.” After 9 years in uniform, he cited his youthful experience as a motivating factor in his decision to report a superior for ordering him to target “male blacks 14 to 21” for stop-and-frisks. “So what am I supposed to do: Stop every black and Hispanic?” Serrano said in a conversation that he simultaneously recorded on a hidden audio tape. “I have no problem telling you this,” his superior replied. “Male blacks. And I told you at roll call, and I have no problem to tell you this, male blacks 14 to 21.”

It’s on tape.

What about policing actual crimes, instead of this “roud up the usual suspects” mind set?

…Adil Palonco, born in the Dominican Republic, was secretly recording his superior officers in the Bronx to document that “supervisors constantly harangued cops to hit quotas for arrests, summonses, and stop-and-frisks, even when it meant harassing innocent civilians who were doing nothing wrong.” A policy of harassing innocents in a disproportionately minority neighborhood inevitably led to a disproportionate impact on innocent blacks. (It should be said that harassing innocents would be wrong even if done equally to all races.) Stop-and-Frisk* also produced an ugly recording of an NYPD cop calling a mixed-race teen who committed no crime “a fucking mutt” and threatening to break his arm:

Policing quotas is not the same as policing crime. And that does not even get into things like asset forfeiture on suspicion. Those assets are actually line items in some police budgets.

The New York Times recently obtained recording of asset forfeiture conferences which showed prosecutors advising cops on how to best exploit these programs to obtain additional funds and goods for their respective law enforcement agencies. In short, it appears that many agencies use asset forfeiture to fill departmental shopping lists, rather than as the criminal syndicate-crippling action it was intended to be.

The Washington Post has been digging into the oft-abused programs for the last six weeks. The latest article in this series comes to similar conclusions about how the programs are viewed by law enforcement agencies.

And the number one tool to make all this “work”? Drug Prohibition. Everyone is a potential suspect. So why not use the drugs excuse to do random searches? A violation of the 4th Amendment you say? There is a Drug War exception to the 4th Amendment.

In the book After Prohibition, edited by my Cato colleague Tim Lynch, Yale University’s Steven Duke offers an entire chapter on the way the drug war has eviscerated constitutional protections. David Kopel adds another chapter on the way it has inspired a frightening culture of militarism among our domestic police departments. Jim Bovard, in his book Lost Rights, also documents the way the “drug war exception” to the Bill of Rights has inspired police excesses. And Eastern Kentucky University’s Peter Kraska has extensively documented the way military culture has created a battlefield mindset among today’s police forces that puts winning the “war” well ahead of protecting constitutional rights. Joel Miller also documents numerous examples of the drug war’s corrupting influence on police officers in his book Bad Trip.

If Scalia wants to consult an ex-cop, he might try recently retired Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, who talks about the same issues in his recent book Breaking Rank. Or he might speak with the ex-law enforcement officials who’ve turned on the drug war and formed LEAP — Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

Police are certainly more highly trained than they once were, but they aren’t better trained at observing civil liberties. They’re better trained at paramilitary tactics. They’re now trained by former Navy SEALs and Army Rangers. They’re better trained at treating civilians like enemy combatants, at taking over and “clearing” rooms in private homes, not at treating the people inside as citizens with rights.

Retired Police Detective Howard Wooldridge had this to say about Drug Prohibition:

Modern Prohibition/The War on Drugs is the most destructive, dysfunctional & immoral domestic policy since slavery & Jim Crow.

Expect a long hot summer.