Drug War Racism

Following is an excerpt from remarks by Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, at the May 2000 conference of the Drug Policy Foundation in Washington, D.C.:

A couple of months ago, on the streets of New York, a man named Patrick Dorismond, a Haitian, was approached by a se edy looking fellow who turned out to be an undercover cop.

He asked Mr. Dorismond, who was with a few friends waiting for a cab to go home at the end of the day in midtown Man hattan -- he asked him for some marijuana.  Dorismond told him to get lost.  He persisted.

There was a scuffle and in the end, Dorismond was shot and killed by the police.

This is where we are now.  Police who were supposed to protect us approach people waiting to go home at the end of the day asking for drugs and when they say no, they shoot them.

This would be horrible enough if it happened to anybody, but it was no accident that it happened to a Haitian.  It was no accident and it was not the product of a rogue cop.

It was the product of a rogue policy; it was the product of rogue politics; and it was the product of rogue leadersh ip.

What happened to Patrick Dorismond was the inevitable result of the pattern of drug prohibition enforcement in (the United States); a pattern which cannot be ignored and must be central to any strategy to end drug prohibition.

On the streets of New York, cops regularly stop people and frisk them, looking for drugs.

According to police records in a single period two years ago, 45,000 stops were made.  Eight out of nine of the m turned out to be fruitless.

Now, you cannot be stopping people on the basis of evidence or even reasonable suspicion or probable cause if eight out of nine of them are mistakes.  You can't.  But two-thirds of the people stopped were not white.

And the State Attorney General investigating this concluded on the basis of extensive interviews with police that th ere were hundreds of thousands of such stops that were not recorded.

Of course, by definition, the ones that were not recorded were also 100-per-cent fruitless.

So you basically have hundreds of thousands of stops and frisks in the street predominantly of people of color; oste nsibly looking for drugs; finding very, very few needles in a very, very large haystack.

This would be an outrageous conduct for police against citizens if it were race-neutral.  It is doubly outrageo us and it is one of the reasons why it is tolerated that it is only happening or predominantly happening to people of color.

The cops could have a better recovery rate of illegal drugs if they went into any random apartment building on the w est side of Manhattan and went into every apartment.  I guarantee it.

But they don't do that, and they don't do that because if they did it on Monday, it would be finished on Tuesday.&nb sp; They don't do it because who the victims are matters in this country.

And what is happening on the streets is also, of course, happening on the highways.  You have all heard about t he "driving while Black and Brown" problem, but on a stretch outside of Baltimore, 80 per cent of the drivers are white and 80 per c ent of the people pulled over are not.

On a stretch in Florida, people of color are 76 times more likely to be stopped and have their car searched and dism antled than people who are white.

Despite the fact that in the very few instances when they find drugs, whites are as often found in possession as bla cks.

And the rationale which leads to that does not stop there.  In the airports, 51,000 people were picked out last year and taken to a room and strip-searched and body-searched.

On 96 per cent of those people, they found nothing.

Two-thirds of them were black and Latino, most of them black women because somebody in the Customs bureau believes t hat black women are being used to carry drugs.

So a black woman coming home from Jamaica, no matter who she is and how accomplished she is and how she looks, is ta rgeted because of the color of her skin because somebody believes that she is more likely to be carrying drugs than I am [as a white male].

It leads beyond harassment and stopping innocent people.

According to the government's own statistics, 13 per cent of all monthly drug users are black, but 35 per cent are a rrested for nonviolent drug offenses, 54 per cent are convicted, and 74 per cent are incarcerated.  The incarcerated population , as you all know, has exploded in the last 20 years from a few hundred thousand to two million.

The single largest factor in that explosion is nonviolent drug offenses and the disproportionate number of people wh o are in prison for that are not white.

As a result, one out of three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 in this country is under the jurisdiction of t he criminal justice system now.

And here in the District of Columbia, it is one out of two.

Drug prohibition has become the successor system to Jim Crow in this country.  It separates blacks out, it subj ugates them, it incarcerates them.  I will tell you the degree to which that works.  All but four states in this country b ar from voting people who have been convicted of felonies.  All but four states.

As a result of that and primarily because of this trend of nonviolent drug offenses targeted at blacks ... 14 per ce nt of all African-American men in this country are disenfranchised, barred from voting, as a result of felony convictions but both o f which have been for nonviolent drug offenses.

In the states of the south, it is 30 per cent.

So it is fair to say and important to say that it is no longer possible -- if indeed it ever was -- to talk about dr ug prohibition without also talking about race.

And perhaps more importantly, it is no longer possible to talk about the persistent problem of race in this country without confronting the problem of drug prohibition.

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Latest Revision 13-Apr-01