Police seem to only want to manage the war on drugs not defeat it, as was explained to me by a friend who's a cop and became totally disillusioned, just counting out his days until retirement. This means working with one criminal group to help arrest the other groups. Of course by interfering in the drug dealing free market by propping up various mid level street gangs and arresting the others they create an extremely dangerous powder keg where these targeted groups go to great insane lengths to survive, and the propped up group is often dismantled and arrested by police whenever they become too confident and do something stupid like their untouchable gang members terrorizing too many innocent people. The demise of the dominant group once propped up by police means a power vacuum forms and streets become a warzone as all fight to take over the dominant position of police protected status.
I'm pretty sure that without police 'managing' these mid level street gangs, they would just exist as smaller decentralized crews that would be much less violent as we would stop creating Tony Montanas and instead just have disorganized criminal activity on a smaller income scale since honest police would be able to easily disrupt these networks into bankruptcy. Instead we get police helping to form supergangs, with multi millions to spend on weapons and corrupt all aspects of a city with criminals getting into mafia-like construction industries to influence city tenders, bribe city employees or unchecked extortion of local business. Either legalize it all or end the strategy of selective enforcement, which means we likely need to double police budgets as cost is a major factor in this strategy of enforcement that relies on criminal cooperation.
>Police seem to only want to manage the war on drugs not defeat it
Because they cannot defeat it. You will never win a war on vice. We didn't learn our lesson when prohibition was enacted. When you target vice and addiction a violent black market is created.
>they would just exist as smaller decentralized crews that would be much less violent
Being sure is pretty different from knowing. It's just as likely the street gangs would congregate power because there is a whole lot of money in illegal drug sales anyway you look at it. This is no different than non drug gangs, and even businesses themselves.
Decriminalization of most drugs, and clinics where drugs are given in free, metered doses is probably the best way to remove massive amounts of money from the drug black markets.
By the by, because it's really interesting, prohibition wasn't intended / wasn't understood to apply to beer and wine by the vast majority of supporters of the amendment. Some people leveraged white nationalism / anti-german racism, including the fact that many brewers were German, to pass the Volstead act which banned all alcohol. And by all alcohol I mean nothing like all alcohol -- there were many widely used loopholes, including getting a prescription from your doctor, buying grape juice with a warning to drink it within X days or it would ferment and become alcoholic, or even becoming jewish (10 gallons per person per year!). It really was a ban on some persons some of the time.
If you're interested, read Daniel Okrent _Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition_
This portion of the speech reveals the main requirement for this to be successful:
> Death penalty for traffickers, in our experience, has been an effective deterrent, as part of a framework of laws, coupled with effective enforcement based on rule of law. Drug traffickers stay out of Singapore now, largely, because of the knowledge: first, that there is a highly professional and incorruptible police force and there is a high probability that they will get caught; and second, there is rule of law, an independent judiciary and a high probability that, based on the laws, they will face the death penalty. So we do not have slums, ghettoes, no-go zones for the police, or syringes in our playgrounds.
I don't think you can have the latter without the former.
Japan has very low rates of drug crime, and the punishment is far more lenient than the death penalty.
Both Singapore and Japan have low rates of crime in general, especially drug crime and gun crime -- two kinds of crimes that depend on criminals having access to items that are highly regulated or completely banned.
I think the conclusion to draw from this is that islands are able to control their borders pretty well, and they can prevent a lot of contraband from coming in. That alone is sufficient to explain the low rate of drug crime in Japan, where drug trafficking is not a capital crime. It's probably also sufficient for Singapore, which means that the death penalty explanation is probably overdetermined.
Japan has low crime, by and large, because they have only a single criminal organization: the Yakuza.
They are not nice people, but as criminal organizations go, having one that views itself as the protector of the people isn't so bad.
After the massive earthquake a few years ago, the Yakuza were among the first to offer aid and assistance to the region -- ahead of the national government, even.
And, if you are going to engage in criminal enterprise in Japan, you need their blessing. If you attempt to sell drugs here without their permission, you will quickly find yourself suffering from an acute case of death.
Obviously the list goes on and on. If by "transcend" you really mean "ignore" or perhaps "aid those in trouble, leave the others alone" then, okay. But to eliminate the demand: I think the evidence, over many decades, many cultures, and despite billions (possibly trillions) of dollars of direct and indirect cost, the evidence speaks for itself.
>smaller decentralized crews that would be much less violent
Maybe, maybe not. The problem is that those businesses are still illegal and so have no recourse to the law for dispute settlement. When fraud, theft, delinquent payments, etc cannot be addressed with the force of the law they can only be addressed with the force of, well, force. Which likely escalates recursively until the biggest bad ass is holding all the marbles, taking us back to where we started out. It's that lack of recourse to legit dispute settlement that fundamentally guarantees that illegal markets for high demand, high value goods will attract and/or create violent actors, IMO.
Even in the USA eradicating corruption is difficult. Can you imagine how difficult it would be in a country with a culture of corruption and much weaker rule of law?
It still boggles my mind that police misconduct is supposed to be investigated and prosecuted by the accused person's peers. How is this not an obvious conflict of interests?
Mandate body-cams for every single cop nationwide. Have all misconducts investigated by a completely separate department. Convict a few cops for perjury if they lie on the stand to help their peers. These three steps should go a long way towards mitigating gross misconduct.
It's not that it isn't an obvious conflict of interest. I believe it stems from the same realm as the military courts. Namely, civilians and noncombatants are not the peers of soldiers (or cops) because of the vast difference in experiences and mission.
That's not a statement of support. Personally, I reject all military-esque ideas within a police force and consider them terribly dangerous.
> It's not that it isn't an obvious conflict of interest. I believe it stems from the same realm as the military courts. Namely, civilians and noncombatants are not the peers of soldiers (or cops) because of the vast difference in experiences and mission.
I don't think that's right, which is why we don't have police courts with a separate system of law and judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys that are also police officers, the way the military is.
Instead, the theory is the opposite, overlooking the inherent conflict of interest and just holding that police are just like everyone else, so that, just as it would be the police department that handled the investigation, arrest, etc. if any random person was accused of a crime, so to, if a police officer is accused of a crime, its the police department that performs those functions.
To have someone else do that when police are the subject of the accusation would be an acknowledgement that there is a difference between the police and everyone else when it comes to criminal investigations.
Worth reading about the Invisible Institute (http://invisible.institute/) which is the journalistic company Jamie Kalven, the author of this article, started. They've been the driving force behind most of the public oversight of the Chicago Police Department in recent years. In addition to calling for the release of the Laquan McDonald shooting video, they've published a database of over 56,000 misconduct complaint records against Chicago police officers.
In general, being in a position to at least monitor (and maybe even guide) the investigation into your crimes will always be advantageous.
This goes even further, in a somewhat bizarre direction. Suffice it to say "fraternal order of police" may be a more accurate descriptor than "protect and serve" in these cases (and, I imagine, much more generally).
This is severely anecdotal: I know a few people who basically did this. They admitted one of their prime motivations for becoming a cop was being able to do things like speed, control others, take authority in situations where they wouldn't normally need it, etc.
you have to know the system before you can beat it.
Similar idea-> I think the only reason Ed. Snowden was able to get away / stay out of US prison was he had worked so long with CIA/NSA etc that he was very familiar with the tactics they would use to go after him, and he was able to take appropriate action to evade them.
Invisible Institute is an incredible group. They are one of the few journalist groups who are interested in solving complex problems rather than simply reporting on them.
If anyone is interested in doing similar work, it's surprisingly easy to get into by using FOIA. Just submit a request for something that interests you and pursue it when (not if) you get resistance. My contribution to the ongoing lack of police oversight was a request for police complaints that was never responded to. Since I received no response and Illinois FOIA has actions based on unresponsiveness, my lawyer - who I think the invisible Institute shares - had something extra to build a case for the release of police complaints. It didn't lead to anything being released, but it was still helpful. Every bit counts!
If you like this story and/or are a glutton for punishing tales of bad cops hammering good cops, check out the "This American Life" episode about a guy who recorded corruption in the NYPD:
Profit-seeking collaboration with drug dealers. Targeting of rogue cops trying to expose the dysfunction. What else aren't we hearing about?
How much more evidence do we need that a lot of these malfunctioning police departments need to be liquidated and the perpetrators put into prison? Federal law enforcement exist specifically for times like these when the local law enforcement agencies have been co-opted by criminals and cronyism...
>I recall talking to an American who worked for the
Aftosa Commission in Mexico. Six hundred a month plus expense account:
"How long will the epidemic last ?" I enquired.
"As long as we can keep it going.... And yes... maybe the aftosa will break in South America,"
he said dreamily.
One of the problems with modern police politics is that there is basically no way for occupied populations to actually purge their corrupt police.
Time was, theoretically, you could at least mobilize to throw the bastards out (see the Battle of Athens) within reason and let the community heal itself.
Nowadays, though, the militarization of police and the desire of the .gov to crackdown on that sort of thing helps create this sorts of festering pockets of corruption that cannot be replaced because to do so is highly illegal.
(On a related note, this is part of the reason a great many people are reluctant to disarm or to accept legislation that would put them further at the mercy of police.)
Same here. Looks like a JavaScript error is triggering something causing the 404 to Intercept (look what I did there!). The actual text is there if you View Source.
Just for an opposing view, I think what The Intercept has been doing lately with editorial design is fantastic. They've become one of the publications pushing the boundaries of the digital magazine experience, and the integration of rich graphics and video give an important story an appropriately compelling presentation.
One thing I will agree with you on, though: The "read more" link adds no perceptible value and seems to have become an editorial design cargo cult.
Scroll tracking can be disabled with adblockers. Read more can always be tracked since that's the primary purpose of the link - when you want to read more.
> Scroll tracking can be disabled with adblockers.
That's not strictly correct. Adblockers disable third-party services for it, you can just implement it yourself just like read-more, which again as I mentioned doesn't tell you whether they actually read or not.
Adblockers can block any requests. It doesn't matter if they're from the same site or third party. If your page is know enough, requests like reading progress are likely to be blocked at least by ghostery.
> the integration of rich graphics and video give an important story an appropriately compelling presentation.
Or from the other perspective, rather than simply presenting the facts and letting the reader judge the story's import, the "digital magazine experience" and "rich graphics and video" manipulate the reader's emotional state and seed his response. In other words, not journalism, but activism.
"But this is The Intercept," you might say, "the guys who exposed the NSA's malfeasance!"--or in other words, the ends justify the means. And we all know where that leads, even if some of us won't admit it.
There is something to say for progressive disclosure in longreads like this. In my case, I'm reading at work and don't have 15 minutes to spare to read the whole article. Skimming over content is a much better experience when you can easily discern different sections.
I'm pretty sure that without police 'managing' these mid level street gangs, they would just exist as smaller decentralized crews that would be much less violent as we would stop creating Tony Montanas and instead just have disorganized criminal activity on a smaller income scale since honest police would be able to easily disrupt these networks into bankruptcy. Instead we get police helping to form supergangs, with multi millions to spend on weapons and corrupt all aspects of a city with criminals getting into mafia-like construction industries to influence city tenders, bribe city employees or unchecked extortion of local business. Either legalize it all or end the strategy of selective enforcement, which means we likely need to double police budgets as cost is a major factor in this strategy of enforcement that relies on criminal cooperation.