DRUG WAR FAILS, JUDGE BELIEVES A federal judge said Sunday that the war on drugs discriminates against minorities, results in illegal searches and seizures and compromises police officials who benefit from money they seize. "It is absolutely destroying our inner-city communities," District Judge Scott O. Wright said. Wright was keynote speaker Sunday night at the Kansas City Jewish Community Relations Bureau/American Jewish Committee's human-relations awards banquet. Drugs are a "real cancer" in America, Wright acknowledged. But the war on drugs has failed, he said. Statistics show the number of Americans in prison for drug offenses this year was 458,000, up from 41,000 in 1980. He said that just 13 percent of drug users are black but 62.7 percent of convicted drug offenders are black. "We have more young black men in jail than we have in college," he said. Since 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court has "authorized cascading exceptions" to the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures. Those exceptions now allow "police helicopters to peer into windows, police to search the passengers in cars whose drivers seem suspicious, and most notoriously, state agents to smash down doors without warning or without evidence of crime," Wright said. Wright also raised concerns about racial profiling. Kansas City police searching for drugs regularly look for suspicious passengers getting on and off trains and buses, he said. All the suspects who have come before him in such cases, Wright said, "are persons who police officers said were suspicious because they were either black or Mexican or Latino." In one case, Wright said, he asked a Drug Enforcement Administration agent who has worked at Kansas City International Airport how many of the people he had stopped were carrying drugs. More than 80 percent did not have drugs, the agent testified. Wright said police agencies face a corrupting influence because they have found a way to keep money that should go to other funds. "I think that many of you here in this room read in The Kansas City Star in recent months about the revelations of the forfeiture laws for people suspected of carrying drugs," Wright said. He said the stories detailed how police stop cars or invade a home to seize property or money. Local and state police then hand off the case to a federal agency because generally state law has tighter requirements for forfeiture than federal law. Federal authorities return "most of the loot" to the local or state law-enforcement agencies, he said. Under Missouri law, forfeited property and money goes to a school fund, he said. Wright offered several solutions: Do away with mandatory sentence guidelines that require severe penalties, because compassion should be shown in some cases. Redirect some money used to confine defendants toward effective drug treatment. Implement drug education programs in early elementary grades.
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