A mobile phone video recorded Buffalo, N.Y., police officers beating a handcuffed man on April 28. John Willet, 22, was pulled up alongside by an unmarked police car while driving. Unsure of the situation and without the police identifying themselves or giving him an order to pull over, Willet attempted to pull away, leading to a chase. Eventually, Willet bailed out of his car and started to run before eventually giving up and stopping.
“I put my hands up and that’s when I got the first swing to my face. I surrendered. I stopped. I put my hands up. It was no more point to run,” Willet told WIVB.
He admitted to having drugs in his possession. “The only thing I can think was just to keep telling them or asking them, or begging them to stop hitting me. My face obviously started hurting. I felt my face starting to swell up. I didn’t want to have a shut eye.”
The video shows police officers hitting and kicking a handcuffed Willet while he was face-down and pleading for the cops to stop attacking him.
Willet’s situation reflects an underlying problem with the law enforcement community nationwide. Incidents of police aggression, unreported or dismissed cases of police misconduct and abuse, and a racially-disproportionate spurt of minority arrests and convictions have filled the media in recent years, with the situation seemingly receiving little more than lip service.
Police as a threat
The Buffalo situation is far from unique. On April 25 in Nassau County, N.Y., two police officers were videotaped punching and kneeing a driver over the driver’s attempt to retrieve his paycheck, which fell out of the car door. The driver, Kyle Howell, 20, suffered a broken nose, nerve damage and trauma to his eye over a traffic stop that initially concerned a cracked windshield. The police allege that Howell was trying to destroy drug evidence, which Howell vigorously denies.
Also in April, five police officers — three from the Chicago Police Department and two from the Glenview Police Department in Illinois — were found to have perjured themselves during a drug possession trial. In sworn testimony, Glenview Off. Jim Horn and Sgt. Theresa Urbanowski and Chicago Sgt. James Padar and Offs. Vince Morgan and William Pruente attested — with nearly identical testimony — that Joseph Sperling, 23, was pulled over for failing to signal at a turn and was arrested when the ticketing officer smelled marijuana in the car. However, a subpoenaed dashboard camera video shows that Sperling signalled properly, he was arrested immediately, and marijuana was found only after his car was searched post-arrest.
“Obviously, this is very outrageous conduct,” a transcript of the March 31 hearing quoted Cook County Circuit Judge Catherine Haberkorn as saying. “All officers lied on the stand today. … All their testimony was a lie. So there’s strong evidence it was conspiracy to lie in this case, for everyone to come up with the same lie. … Many, many, many, many times they all lied.”
Federal funding and aggressive policing
This trend, which includes the expanding use of “stop & frisk” and investigatory traffic stops, may be linked to the metrics the Justice Department uses to determine the effectiveness of grant programs it administers for local and state law enforcement agencies.
In an analysis of public records received from the Durham Police Department in North Carolina, the Southern Coalition of Social Justice found that the city’s police department used federal funding to underwrite the most targeted drug enforcement operations in the department.
This funding — the largest funding program being the Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant — uses a formulation that takes into consideration a region’s populations and crime statistics — with special consideration for the number of arrests made by law enforcement in the region — in determining how much money will be allocated. The state receives 60 percent of the federal funding, while 40 percent goes to a local law enforcement agency.
As a larger arrest rate supports the argument that more funding is needed, police departments are actively and implicitly encouraged to make more police arrests and to secure more convictions. Over the past decade in Durham, for example, it has been revealed that the police department has offered extra money to undercover informants who were willing to testify in court and cooperate in drug cases on behalf of the prosecution. These incentives were made without the district attorneys or the defendants being aware, which is a clear violation of the U.S. Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland, which rules that defendants have the right to discovery to all evidence — including financial evidence showing fiscal considerations to state witnesses.
The federal government’s funding has contributed to a situation in which underlying racial bias or suspicion has been magnified and intensified.
“[The Edward Byrne Memorial Local and State Law Enforcement Assistance Program] was created in 1988, and it was established at the height of the beginning of the ‘drug war’ in this country, when this country was in a hysteria about drug use and abuse, particularly about crack cocaine,” Ezekiel Edwards, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Criminal Law Reform Project, told MintPress News, “and was starting to pour millions of dollars into this punitive approach to drugs in this country.”
“I think Byrne JAG wouldn’t be such a problem if the philosophy of police departments and the federal government were different. If it was realized that you can’t arrest your way out of a problem, that drug use should be dealt with in the public health arena and not the criminal justice arena and that many drug problems are born out of economic problems and lack of opportunity, then these JAG funds can be used for other purposes, such as drug treatment, community outreach and going after serious crimes.”
Casualties of the “war on drugs”
In the early 2000s, Byrne JAG fell out of favor when a JAG-funded program in Tulia, Texas, allowed an undercover police officer to fabricate testimony in a series of racially-targeted drug stings that ultimately led to the arrest and imprisonment of one-fifth of the town’s black population.
As the number of drug arrests is a determining factor in the size of the JAG grant, police departments encourage more arrests. And as many police departments already have minority communities under higher scrutiny, a larger share of the encouraged arrests would come from these communities. The increase in arrests would encourage these police departments to increase the patrol in these areas — using the heightened statistics as an indication that the patrols are not motivated by race, but by public safety consideration. At the same time, state authorities — who are the “safety valve” to prevent police misconduct in their state — are encouraged to “look the other way” or dismiss cases of police overstep, as questioning the arrest records would help undermine federal funding to both the state and to non-involved local police departments.
This cycle has led to blacks being arrested and incarcerated at rates inconsistent to both the percentage of blacks in the general population and the proliferation of drug use among blacks. With blacks and whites using marijuana and other drugs at roughly the same rate, the notion that blacks are arrested 3.73 times more than whites for marijuana possession reflects a warped system.
“An atmosphere of fear”
According to the ACLU, 88 percent of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests from 2001 to 2010 were for marijuana possession of small quantities alone. The arrests were not for selling, cultivating or trafficking — activities these laws were originally meant to address. This is resulting in a $3.6 billion-a-year racially-motivated drug control policy that has vastly exasperated the prison population’s racial disparency, threatened the civil liberties and livelihoods of entire classes of Americans, and empowered bigotry to flourish unchallenged while doing little to nothing to actually stop the flow of drugs onto American streets.
However, the “atmosphere of fear” this policy has inadvertently created may not have been accidental. “To prevent people from using drugs, drug enforcement activities must make it increasingly difficult to engage in any drug activity with impunity,” wrote the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the late 1980s, as cited in the ACLU’s “The War On Marijuana in Black and White.” “That deterrent, however, will only remain credible so long as pressure is brought to bear on the entire drug market, dealers and users alike. That’s why we need a national drug law enforcement strategy that casts a wide net and seeks to ensure that all drug use — whatever its scale — faces the risk of criminal sanction …
“[W]hen neighborhood police increase the number of drug arrests in an area … the drug markets that menace neighborhoods cease to flourish … . Effective street-level enforcement means dramatically increasing the number of drug offenders arrested. But unless there is a system ready to absorb them, drug control will end at the police station.”
The “war on drugs” represents a demonization of entire socioeconomic groups in an attempt to control the drug epidemic through fear of the police. With the JAG program restored following the banking crisis, the move to treat drug use as a criminal issue instead of a public health concern has led to an explosion of the prison population and one of the most blatant representations of government-sponsored racism in recent memory.
“The idea is not that the federal government shouldn’t be funding these initiatives,” continued the ACLU’s Edwards. “It should be that they are funding them in an intelligent way and supporting departments that are taking a 21st century public health approach, and not a 20th century draconian incarceration approach.”