FUTILE DRUG WAR IGNORES TARGET - SAFETY

If Kathryn Johnston's tragic death is to lead to systemic change at
the Atlanta Police Department, then Chief Richard Pennington should
reconsider the foolish and costly war on drugs. Forget raising the
numbers of narcotics officers -- a tactic reminiscent of President
Bush's misguided "surge" in Iraq. What Pennington ought to do is
decrease the number of officers who waste time and ruin lives going
after penny-ante drug dealers.

Atlanta police are still reeling from the plea deals of two narcotics
officers involved in the illegal Nov. 21 raid on Johnston's home,
during which she was fatally wounded. Gregg Junnier will serve 10
years, while Jason Smith will serve 12 years and seven months.
Prosecutors say that together with another officer, Arthur Tesler,
they piled lie upon lie to obtain a "no-knock" warrant to search
Johnston's home, where they may have believed they would find
cocaine. Their supporters claim they were under pressure to produce arrests.

While Pennington denies having an arrest quota, he, like many
big-city chiefs, makes judgments on an officer's proficiency based
partly on the number of suspects he or she apprehends. Given that
standard, many officers will go for the quick and dirty take-down --
handcuffing and booking any of the street-level dealers who frequent
down-at-the-heels neighborhoods. It takes time and resources to build
a case against crime kingpins, an effort that many police officers
and their superiors don't want to undertake.

Certainly, Atlanta's narcotics officers have few major drug arrests
under their belts, according to a recent analysis by The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution. Over a nearly three-year period, 6,121 drug
confiscations Atlanta sent to the GBI Crime Lab tested positive for
cocaine. But just six of those were more than a kilogram, a bit more
than 2 pounds. Sixty-four percent were less than a gram -- which
would barely move the needle on your kitchen-cabinet food scale.

Pennington is by no means the only police chief caught up in a futile
but ruinous strategy of rounding up and prosecuting men and women who
deal small amounts of illicit substances. That strategy has consumed
local police for decades now, though it has done absolutely nothing
to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the streets. Still, they keep
doing it. (Remember that colorful definition of insanity -- doing the
same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome?)

The result has been a war on black men and their neighborhoods -- an
invidious campaign that has placed black men disproportionately under
law enforcement jurisdiction, ruining their chances for decent
employment and virtually ensuring they have no legitimate means to
support wives and children. Men with prison records are unlikely to
be attractive job candidates.

In 1954, black inmates accounted for 30 percent of the nation's
prison population, according to Marc Mauer, assistant director of The
Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that advocates
alternative sentencing. Some 50 years later, Mauer wrote, blacks
account for almost half of all prison admissions. Much of that
increase, many criminologists say, has come from arrests for drug crimes.

The drug war punishes indiscriminately, locking up not only violent
thugs but also many nonviolent drug offenders. Former Georgia prison
guard John Bell, for example, was handed a 10-year sentence after his
March 2000 arrest for possession of 205 grams (7.2 ounces) of crack,
worth about $7,000 at the time. He had served in the Navy and had no
prior arrests, yet his sentence was as stiff as that meted out to
Junnier, whose illegal actions resulted in the death of an innocent
elderly woman in her own home. (Bell was paroled in 2004.)

If local police wanted to make poor neighborhoods safer, they could
concentrate on arresting dealers for more serious offenses, including
gun crimes. (Anyone caught with an illegal weapon ought to get a
stiff prison sentence.) If Pennington wants to hire more officers to
walk a beat and establish a visible presence in poor neighborhoods,
he deserves full support from City Hall.

But if he's just going to hire more officers to knock down the doors
of old ladies, he should join the White House as the new "war czar."
The Bush team, too, believes in doing the same thing over and over
and expecting a different result.