EX-LAWMAN ATTACKS CRACKDOWN ON GANGS

Jack Cole spent 26 years with the New Jersey State Police, including many
years as a narcotics investigator. Cole, now retired, offered a blunt
reaction to this week's announcement of a police crackdown on street gangs
in Syracuse.

"I think it's totally useless," Cole said Wednesday from his home in
Massachusetts.

He is a founding member of LEAP - Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a
new organization that consists of active or retired cops who support
reforming U.S. drug laws. Cole, 63, is also the keynote speaker for
Saturday's annual meeting of ReconsiDer, a Syracuse-based forum on changing
national policy on illegal drugs.

Syracuse Police Chief Dennis DuVal and other local officials maintain that
a well-executed police sweep, done with sensitivity toward neighborhood
residents, can disrupt and eliminate violence gang behavior.

Cole is skeptical.

"Let's say, in the right spot, I can make up to $1,000 a day (selling
crack) on the corner," Cole said. "Now you decide you want that $1,000 a
day. I can't get rid of you by reaching into my pocket and pulling out a
contract. Instead, I reach into my pocket and I pull out a gun and I shoot
you, or maybe I shoot that little kid standing right behind you.

"It became clear to me as a police officer, a long time ago, that when I
arrested someone for rape or assault and put them into jail, then I was
taking care of crime, and I was putting someone in jail who might do that
crime again. But when I arrested a (corner) drug dealer, all I was doing
was creating a job opening for another 200 people. There is so much money
involved that will go on forever. The war on drugs is an abject failure."

Cole said urban despair only escalates the problem. If a child from a
dysfunctional home has a chance at making, say, $100 a day - a child with
limited academic skills, and nonexistent adult support, and a world view
limited to three or four city blocks - then fear of arrest will never
dissuade that child from "slinging" drugs on the corner, Cole contends.

The first step in reaching that child, he said, is eliminating easy drug
money as an option. And Cole said the only way to make that happen is by
"ending prohibition," making government-monitored narcotics legal in some
fashion.

His view represent one end of the ReconsiDer spectrum. Some members call
only for revising the extreme penalties mandated by the Rockefeller drug
laws. Others call only for legalizing marijuana, which they say would allow
investigators to focus on "harder" drugs.

Cole argues that any half-measures on reform will always fail. He began his
career, he said, as an enthusiastic true believer who thought he could
sweep sinister pushers from the streets. He found himself, instead,
arresting drug users and distributors whose morality was not always easy to
pigeonhole as being good or evil.

Sometimes, Cole said, he would arrest "dealers" who were actually
teen-agers buying street drugs in bulk, planning to hand them out to
friends who'd chipped in money. Cole wondered at the fairness of a world in
which many young people, whether rich or poor, used illegal drugs, and the
ones who got through that time without getting caught could rise up to be
the doctors, lawyers...

Even President.

Yet the ones who got caught and jailed, Cole said, were often scarred for life.

"Think of all the people you know who used drugs, who today are leading
productive lives," Cole said. "Now suppose that guy next to you (20 years
ago) had handed the joint to me. I would have knocked off the fire, put it
in my pocket and two months later the cops would have been knocking down
his door, because that guy was distributing a drug. I tell you, we're
destroying our young people."

Cole's critics argue that legalization would be a catastrophe, a way of
crating a new culture of addicts. But Cole responds that he's no apologist
for narcotics use.

"I'm completely against drug addiction," he said. "I would never try to get
anyone to use harmful drugs, especially tobacco and alcohol, which are the
most harmful drugs out there."

He described the "war on drugs" as a war against our neediest people.
Without a change in law and philosophy, Cole maintained, any police
crackdown in poor neighborhoods has no chance to succeed.

In the coming month, in Syracuse, we'll see if he's a fool or a prophet.