PUBLIC GETS IT, THAT MORE CRIME PREVENTION IS NEEDED

On this Memorial Day, I'd like to pause a moment to remember those who
have lost their lives - or much of what's left of them - in a
different sort of war.

It's a war that's fueled by a lust for a foreign product other than
oil; a product whose distribution has become one of the only sources
of commerce and power for people in poor, predominantly black
communities.

It's a war that has packed prisons and desolated neighborhoods. A war
which, after raging for three decades, has done little to curb
people's appetite for the product.

That product is cocaine. The war is the War on Drugs. This war costs
more than $40 billion a year. It's a war rooted in economics and
addiction, but one that is being fought by police and prisons.

And there's no exit strategy in sight.

Last November, Kathyrn Johnston, an elderly Atlanta woman, was gunned
down by police in her home. An informant told them drugs were being
sold out of her home, so they thought it was perfectly fine to kick in
her door to see. Their unorthodox way of announcing themselves scared
Johnson, who then fired at them. They fired back and killed her.

Turns out the informant lied.

In Jacksonville three months later, another elderly person was killed
in the drug war. Isaac Singletary was shot by Jacksonville police
officers as he tried to scare them off his property with a gun. But
they weren't wearing their police uniforms. They were dressed like
drug dealers so they could catch other drug dealers.

Singletary couldn't tell the difference - and he died for
it.

Then just last week, a panel of Sheriff's Office supervisors decided
that one of their own acted properly when he fatally shot Douglas
"D.J." Woods last January. The panel said the detective, Jay Taylor
Jr., followed the law and police procedure when he killed the 18-year-
old, who he said was trying to rob him.

Taylor was posing as a drug buyer.

If Woods - who had no criminal record - wasn't a casualty of the drug
war, then his mother, Machealle Woods, was a collateral victim. She
had disputed Taylor's account.

After the hearing was over, the teary-eyed mother had to listen as one
of the board members, Assistant Chief Rick Parker, told Taylor that he
should be "unapologetic" for saving his own life, and that they were
"very proud" of him, according to the Times-Union.

That kind of compliment works when a police officer saves someone
else's life, or when he acts out of selflessness and not fear. It
sounds callous and demeaning when uttered in front of the weeping
mother of a man a fellow officer killed - possibly for nothing. And it
also does zilch to build trust in the struggling communities that
police are being dispatched to in hopes of staving off murders.

But that's to be expected.

When police are made to feel that they are soldiers in a war, they're
going to rally to each other. That's what warriors do - commend each
other for staying alive. The problem, however, is that when police are
made to feel like warriors, entire communities are liable to become
battlegrounds.

That means that instead of making those communities safer, they make
them scarier. People like Johnston and Singletary wind up getting hurt
or killed because they happened to get in the way of pursuits of
penny- ante dealers; dealers whose presence will surely be replenished
by others once they're sent away.

That's no victory. That's just running in place.

Unfortunately, too many people have been willing to settle for that.
Whenever the talk turns to poor communities, or black communities, or
crime-ridden communities, it's more convenient to talk containment
instead of revitalization. So it's left to the police to stop people
from killing each other, especially in places where the rules of the
game for survival and respect often involve a measure of lethality.

But more people may be willing to put resources into counteracting the
socio-economic conditions that have spawned that predicament.

Sixty-one percent of people polled by the University of North Florida
recently agreed that the crime rate should be tackled by more
attention to social problems instead of devising more
punishments.

More than half said Duval County wasn't spending enough money on crime
prevention and intervention programs for juveniles. That's
encouraging, because it means that people want the criminality to stop
without people like Johnston and Singletary paying with their lives.

They want the War on Drugs to be fought with the right
weapons.

And to finally end.