Towards a Smarter Policing Strategy?
Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced changes to the Federal policy in prosecuting drug crimes, basically getting Federal prosecutors to charge low-level offenders with less harsh crimes. This action would essentially bypass the mandatory minimum sentencing rules whose primary accomplishment is to increase the already unsustainable numbers of Americans in prison. This is a baby step in admitting that we’ve been losing the War on Drugs for a long time:
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Monday that low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with no ties to gangs or large-scale drug organizations will no longer be charged with offenses that impose severe mandatory sentences.
The new Justice Department policy is part of a comprehensive prison reform package that Holder unveiled in a speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco. He also introduced a policy to reduce sentences for elderly, nonviolent inmates and find alternatives to prison for nonviolent criminals.
Baby steps, but a good one. Congress should step up and bolster this effort with legislation that gets at resetting the justice scales — judges won’t have their hands tied and prosecutors have to work for their convictions.
“We must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is, in too many ways, broken,” Holder said. “And with an outsized, unnecessarily large prison population, we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, to deter and to rehabilitate — not merely to warehouse and to forget.”
The Justice Reinvestment Initiative (or portions of this effort) are being implemented in 17 or 18 states in an effort to reduce incarceration density but also to reduce costs. States have been looking at the large line item that is their prison budget and are looking for ways to reduce that number — including implementing drug courts and increasing treatment opportunities which seem to have some success. The Feds themselves have a $7B budget item for prisons, and that number is only going to increase. The DOJ doesn’t want to become a department that can only afford to manage those they incarcerate. But at bottom, the Justice Reinvestment Initiative wants to be a data driven approach to dealing with crime — understand the contours of the problem, what has historically worked, what has not and start investing in what works.
Any shift in charging offenders would change the incentives of the police departments whose very life blood for the past few decades has been the War on Drugs. But to get there, the politicians who keep selling Tough on Crime rhetoric need to start telling constituents that the old policies cost too much and deliver too little. Which is to say that you trust what Holder had to say yesterday. He and President Obama waved their hands at the medical marijuana initiatives, saying that they had other things to worry about. Unfortunately, they misled a bunch of folks — and Federal officials are raiding and trying to shut down medical marijuana shops all over the West.
Th nation’s Chief Law Enforcement Officer picking up some of what some states are beginning to come to grips with — that the War On Drugs failed to stop any drugs, has been hugely disruptive of communities and costs too much — is a step in the right direction. And it is incredibly important to start taking more steps to rein in the War on Drugs.
Tags: Eric Holder, War on Drugs
Let’s see? War on Drugs. War on Terror. War for the sake of dumping tons and tons of gov’t money into something that doesn’t work. Our tax dollars have lined the pockets of a lot of Republican donors. Cripes.
Not really a policing strategy, is it? People with drugs are still going to be arrested and cuffed. It’s just that the Feds won’t charge them after an investigation if they meet certain criteria. More a prosecution strategy.
The question mark is there for a reason — prosecution strategies can drive policing strategy. There’s a reason why few policemen pay much attention to littering. It isn’t very *valuable* in terms of police stats and the penalty isn’t especially hefty. If low-quantity arrests result in those individuals shuttled off to drug courts or treatment (making this more of a public health problem than a law enforcement one), I would guess (but don’t know) that they wouldn’t rack up these arrests like skeeball points anymore and focus other crime. Maybe not — but I do think that pushing the low-level drug problem over to folks who will treat it like a public health problem changes the incentives for police.
Except that when a cop arrests someone for carrying drugs, they don’t always know that person’s connections to gangs, etc. – the criteria Holder is using. That comes out later. And note that such a person may still be charged – just not with a crime carrying a mandatory minimum sentence. Cops on the street are still going to be hauling druggies and dealers in, but the change occurs when they get to court. I don’t see how that’s going to alter cops’ work in the least.
Belonging to a gang isn’t illegal (yet), but engaging in criminal activity on behalf of a gang can invoke additional charges or sanctions. Cops are going to bring charges where they think they can hand it off to a prosecutor for disposition. Right now, mandatory minimums mean that someone on a corner with a couple of dime bags can get the same sentence as someone with a truckload of whatever it is. If prosecutors either won’t charge the low-level guy with the crime that gets him the mandatory minimum, unless the guy was caught in some violent or property crime issue, there’s not much to charge him for. If aren’t going to get a charge that results in a prosecution, why bother? There’s other fish in the sea.
It is also worth it to remember that Holder is talking about crimes that can invoke a Federal mandatory minimum. Fed prosecutors withdrawing from charging those crimes means that more law enforcement (including prosecution) decisions are left to the locals. Prosecution shopping gets minimized — which also reduces police incentives to maximally charge the low level arrests in hopes of getting a Fed mandatory minimum.
Cassandra,
Maybe I haven’t expressed my point clearly enough. There will be no change in *policing* from this. Cops are still going to arrest mopes with a small amount of weed. That’s not going to change even if charges are dropped or lessened. Weed Guy might be a link to Big Bad Drug Gang Guy, so of course they’re going to bring him in. And Dime Bag Guy might actually turn out to be Dealer Guy once they search his home. The change will come on the back end, prosecutions and prisons. But the average police chief isn’t going to change strategies for arresting druggies.
SW, I don’t think you get how policing works. If it was just about racking up arrests, they would grab up the easy stuff — littering, people on the phone while driving, jaywalking. The goal of an arrest is to be able to present a good clean case for prosecutors. If the prosecutor is no longer especially interested in charging some crimes, the cops will work at making cases that do get the interest of prosecutors.
OK, let’s go take a walk together through the shittiest Wilmington neighborhood you got and take a gander at the people there doing drugs. Tell me, at a glance, which guys and gals are low-level users, dealers, gang members or traffickers. Because that’s what you’re saying the cops are able to do – instantly tell who the Big Bad Guys are BEFORE arresting them and sort them from the small fry. That’s some real cool precrime mojo you’ve got there.
Unless a cop has an informer up close, they don’t necessarily know who’s who or what’s what until they haul everyone in, check records and do interrogations. That comes after an arrest based on probable cause. Do you think cops are possessed of some magic power that allows Sgt. Smith to know at a glance whether Joe Blow standing on the corner who just did a handover with another guy is a small-time scumbag or a major player? Unless you’re dealing with known players, those details don’t come out until later. Are cops going to miss a chance on rolling up a dealer because they think a prosecutor will just send the guy to a public health program? Get real.
That’s why this is all about prosecution and prison strategy, not policing. As long as drugs are still a crime, low-level punks are going to get caught in the net. Get it?
If this were a situation where possession was being decriminalized bur trafficking kept on the books, your argument might make a bit of sense. But that’s not the case.
You wrote earlier: “If low-quantity arrests result in those individuals shuttled off to drug courts or treatment (making this more of a public health problem than a law enforcement one), I would guess (but don’t know) that they wouldn’t rack up these arrests like skeeball points anymore and focus other crime.”
So you admit that you really don’t know what the impact on policing will be, and simultaneously imply that cops get graded based on whether someone gets diversion, treatment, prison time or drug court. What are *you* smoking?
Repealing all drug laws and only prosecuting real crimes makes sense to me. For too long we have been treating a health problem like a criminal justice problem.
Because that’s what you’re saying the cops are able to do
That’s not what I’m saying. Police either round up people because there is a complaint that they can act on, or because they see something they can act on or they do investigative work to get something they can act on. If prosecutors aren’t especially interested in charging the kid holding the mandatory minimum in marijuana, then the cops will stop hauling in the people just on possession and focus on other crimes. And AGAIN this only makes sense for the crimes where there might be a FEDERAL prosecution, it doesn’t change what happens at the state level unless the state ramps up its punishment regime.
So you admit that you really don’t know what the impact on policing will be, and simultaneously imply that cops get graded based on whether someone gets diversion, treatment, prison time or drug court.
The idea of this thread was to talk about what might change about policing if prosecutorial strategies change. If you aren’t interested in that, you didn’t need to comment, right? And if you didn’t know how the cops work, you REALLY needed to step away from the keyboard. Grab yourself this book and educate yourself on how police departments incentivize their officers based on the numbers (and sometimes) quality of their arrests.
I’m the one who doesn’t know how policing works? Coming from someone who thinks that cops don’t try to flip a low-level guy to get his dealer and on up the line? That’s rich. Policing is half about intelligence gathering and sorting these days.
But apparently I’m only allowed to discuss the idiotic question you posed in the headline and not the idiotic statements you made in your own comments, so I’ll shut up now.
“educate yourself on how police departments incentivize their officers based on the numbers (and sometimes) quality of their arrests.”
Arrests, sometimes. Prosecutions and convictions and sentences, no. That’s the whole point of what I am saying here, and about which you are determined to be willfully ignorant because it doesn’t fit your anti-War On Drugs shite.
Go take a ridealong with some cops sometime. It’ll be very educational.
I’ve been on a fair number of ridealongs — including one here in Wilmington. But apparently I need to see how it works on the mosquito patrol down there in BFE. Next time you don’t want to engage on a question, don’t just puff up and pretend you’re contributing something.
I’m glad that everyone can finally see how you hold downstate in such contempt. I’d just like to take a moment to point out your sheer and blatant hypocrisy by tagging everyone who calls Wilmington a crime-infested run-down shithole as racists, when you clearly hold similar thoughts about where I’m from. Classy.
Maybe y’all could learn something from our “mosquito patrol.” Your city cops sure don’t seem worth a tinker’s damn. But hey, your thugs have racked up an impressive kill rate and are now branching out into knife attacks! That shows some innovation and creativity, doesn’t it?
C,
It is both amusing and gross that your hypocrisy and lack of logic so cloud your perspective that you cannot see the dysfunction your opinion carries. Holder is attempting to “pick and choose” what laws he enforces. THE LAW is what above all else must be consistent. Smarter Policing is by definition the action of using more intelligence to effectively enforce the law. Policing is LAW enforcement, not selective, judgmental or filled with relativism. It is the corruption, politicization and manipulation of our court systems that leave police officers without the necessary backup for their efforts. Lawyers, plea bargaining away and negotiating away the penalties of the rule of law is the trouble and here is our AG in a full frontal exposure of his lack of credibility and consistency. Here’s an incentive; don’t break the law and you won’t have to worry which laws affect different demographics. Prosecute to the fullest extent and then the Police won’t have to guess which law is important on a given week.
In addition you besmirch a contributor here just because of the locale reference and throw stones from a glass house where the city in question is rife with a criminal element. It is sad your perception holds yourself in such high regard when surrounded by the likes that have given us bankrupt cities across the country, begging for state and federal aid. Perhaps if more cities used mosquito patrols and less racial & political pandering, our cities might become the business centers they have the potential to be.