8/23/2008 6:31:00 PM My Turn: Unenforceable laws lead to police abuses
J.D. Tuccille
Law-enforcement excesses feature prominently in the news. Doors kicked in, people killed, dogs shot, phone lines tapped, curfews imposed -- they're all examples of official overreaching at that unpleasant intersection of private activity and state disapproval. For some people, the implication of such abuses is that more scrutiny and the right people in charge will make law enforcement an enterprise which people need not fear.
But what if that's not the case? It may be that we've assigned law-enforcers goals so frustratingly elusive that even angels couldn't resist the temptation to escalate tactics to insane extremes, trampling liberty and decency along the way.
Deranged escalation recently resulted in the misguided marijuana raid on the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo, during which his dogs were killed. Yes, worse raids have deprived people of their lives in the past. But when even a government official like Calvo can't protect his pets from police overstepping, you know we've gone over a cliff.
But that leap into the void was probably inevitable given the government's obsession with achieving the impossible: eliminating marijuana consumption. Seventy years after Reefer Madness, decades into the War on Drugs, a survey by the World Health Organization still says that 42.4 percent of Americans have smoked grass.
After several consecutive lifetimes of failure, entering the homes of low-level government officials with guns blazing because somebody tried to deliver a package of forbidden weed may suddenly take on a false patina of sanity to prohibitionists driven mad.
In fact, there have been a lot of laws that are essentially unenforceable because a large segment of the population is unwilling to obey them. They involve activities in which there's no victim -- nobody to file a complaint or cooperate with police.
The hidden secret of law enforcement is that it's largely dependent on public cooperation. When laws have less than near-universal support -- when they're a majority preference jammed down the throats of the minority - they beg for defiance. Cops then are forced to become arm-twisters, trying to intimidate the minority into submission through increasingly brutal tactics, or else they just give up.
Prohibition is infamous on this count. Thirteen years of illegal liquor brought us mass disobedience, corruption and organized crime. A paper prepared in 1972 for the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse concluded, "[t]he law could not quell the continuing demand for alcoholic products. Thus, where legal enterprises could no longer supply the demand, an illicit traffic developed, from the point of manufacture to consumption."
You'd think that history lesson would stick -- but it hasn't. Lawmakers still send the police to force people to stop doing things they want to do, even when there's nobody to complain and little interest in compliance.
So we see police breaking up friendly card games with headline-grabbing raids, like the infamous San Mateo incident in January that involved cops in riot gear. Of course, the games continue, only now a bit further underground.
People then turn to the Internet for their gambling fix. What's the government going to do about that?
Try something else crazy, it turns out -- like arresting executives of companies based in countries where online gambling is perfectly legal who merely change planes in the United States. That's like Saudi Arabia busting a Playboy employee because naughty pictures published on American Web sites are frowned on in Islamic countries.
That enthusiasm for enforcing the unenforceable at all costs should have all of us - even gun control advocates -- thanking the Supreme Court for taking outright gun bans off the table with the Heller decision.
Why?
Because gun owners have a history of defying gun control laws (compliance with assault weapons bans in Boston and Cleveland has hovered around 1 percent). Because the authorities would be inclined to escalate enforcement. And because resistance to such escalation would inherently involve, you know, guns.
In "Can Gun Control Work?" James B. Jacobs, director of the Center for Research in Crime and Justice at New York University, concluded, "If black market activity in connection with the drug laws is any indication, a decades-long 'war on handguns' might resemble a low-grade civil war more than a law-enforcement initiative."
And that takes us back to drug prohibition -- the eternally failed crusade to make much of the population change its ways, "or else."
It won't work. It can't work. It never has worked.
But the authorities try, and try and try to make people knuckle under to laws that they find offensive and intrusive. And as people refuse to comply, the authorities raise the stakes, adopting tactics that most of us recognize as violations of fundamental rights and of simple human decency.
J.D. Tuccille blogs about civil liberties issues for Examiner.com. He lives in Cornville.
Reader Comments
Posted: Saturday, August 30, 2008
Article comment by:
D.Walters
Mr. Tucille, you have done a great service to your country and your fellow citizens, Can you kindly folowup and report as to how the investigation is going? If we dont hold their feet to the fire, they will just cover this up, and it will happen again. Next time, they will shoot the people, so there are no witnesses.
Posted: Thursday, August 28, 2008
Article comment by:
Victor Romanos
Why they not knock on the door first/How anybody going to flush 32 pound of marihuana that fast?
Posted: Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Article comment by:
Charles Delano
It makes absolutely no sense to use a no knock entry and be willing to kill pets and even people over a small amount of pot that the cops already knew was planted there.
Posted: Monday, August 25, 2008
Article comment by:
james Huff
Why did the police have to shoot a harmless dog in the back, as it was running away from them?
Posted: Sunday, August 24, 2008
Article comment by:
Wade Harvick
The truth often hurts. Mr. Tucille will really catch it from our increasingly defensive and desperate prohibitionists. Personal attacks, name calling, and foul language are common when anyone has the guts to stand up against the forces of opression. Forget that cannabis prohibition has caused far more harm than cannabis use itself. 30,000 Americans are killed by the drug war each year. In two years that's more deaths than we had in the entire Vietnam war. Never mind that we are the biggest prison nation on Earth due to jailing non-violent cannabis users. Who cares that our combined governments waste $100 billion per year in taxpayers dollars on the unwinnable war on drugs. Ignore the fact that tobacco and alcohol are legal, and combined kill 550,000+ Americans per year. While cannabis has never been proven to have killed even one person in 5,000 years. Does this mean that we should have alcohol and tobacco prohibition. No! Even the prohibitionists know that it would never work. So, what leads them to believe that after 72 years of failure, some how cannabis prohibition is ever going to prevail? This is the magical thinking that Americans are forced to endure just because these people are currently in power. The Federal Government has a policy of not engaging the public in discussing cannabis legalization. They know that the vast majority would speak out against prohibition. There are too many people and organizations squandering our tax dollars on prohibition to ever allow that. Our elected officials do not want to know the will of the masses. A July 2008 CNN Poll showed that 72% of responders were for the legalization of cannabis. A 2008 Miami Herald Poll showed that 95% of responders were for the legalization of medical marijuana. But, the great majority of voters do not tell their elected officials that they want cannabis legalized. They feel that they are ignored anyway. Representatives like Barney Frank and Ron Paul simply read their emails and are up to date with the wishes of their electorate. Politicians who come forth for the end of cannabis prohibition will keep their jobs. While those who are oblivious to what their electorate want may find themselves out of work, and never know why. Perhaps every voter should contact their elected officials and demand an end to this nightmare via the legalization of cannabis. Perhaps our elected officials should read their email and follow the will of the people and end prohibition, now. As it is now, prohibition is killing a lot of Police Officers and innocent people and engorging organized crime. Istalling true controls over cannabis via legalization is the only way we're ever going to get a grip on the mess that prohibitionists have made. Now, it's my turn to be blasted for speaking out against injustice and for the only workable solution.
