AMERICAN WAR ON DRUGS PITS GOVERNMENT AGAINST PEOPLE

I've read and reread the account of the shooting death of Tarika
Wilson with great sadness.

Some of the folks in Lima have sent letters saying all the typical
things Americans have been led to believe: Wilson should not have
allowed drugs in her home, the police were only doing their jobs, we
need to eradicate drugs from our community.

I would like to offer another perspective.

I joined the Los Angeles Police Department in 1973, just eight years
after Chief Darryl Gates, spurred by the LA riots and the SLA
shootout, established the nation's first SWAT team. It was designed
to respond to increasingly dangerous situations involving
armed/barricaded suspects or wanton disregard for the law. After
spending six years on the street and another 10 as a detective, I
transferred to South Bureau narcotics in 1990. At first it was an
adventure -- undercover surveillance, writing warrants, smashing
doors, hauling folks off to jail and picture taking behind tables of
drugs and guns.

SWAT did not serve our warrants.

We narcotics officers did. We knew dope, the neighborhood, and the
people involved.

More often than not when we served warrants, the family was there
complete with hysterical mothers and crying children.

The situation was often chaotic.

We tried to settle things down and get to the dope quick before it
could be flushed. This is a situation alien to SWAT teams.

They are taught to escalate until control is achieved.

They don't have time to de-escalate a situation by reason or compassion.

In 1991, Washington suddenly began offering lots of protective armor
and equipment.

We gladly took it, now looking more like military than police, and
little realized that we were becoming addicted to our own kind of
dope -- image and prestige.

In their mad dash to prosecute the war on drugs, Washington was
sponsoring SWAT teams all across the land with the stipulation that,
the more dope you seize, the more M-16s and armored personnel carriers you get.

Now there are more than 1,700 SWAT teams across America. With little
to do, they are now unleashed on American citizens in situations
foreign in years past. When I was a young cop in the 1970s and 80s,
SWAT callouts were few. In contrast, last year there were more than
40,000 -- more than half for warrant service.

Innocents get caught up in the war on drugs, too. My squad served
some 40 to 50 door-smashing warrants when I was there.

Of those, I distinctly remember two that went to the wrong house.

That's 4 percent.

Multiply that with 40,000 and we get 1,600 wrong addresses.

Things are bound to go wrong.

Accidental or questionable shootings aren't limited to Tarika Wilson
and her child. They involve 37-year-old optometrists in New York,
92-year-old grandmothers in Atlanta and too many others.

SWAT teams simply should not be used to serve drug warrants on
citizens, especially citizens with children at home. The official
report is not out, but indications are that there was no trafficking
at the Wilson house and Anthony Terry was often out of the home,
making a street arrest feasible.

In Lima, as elsewhere, drugs are a problem.

But drugs aren't the problem. The problem is the War on Drugs. When
you have a war, someone must be the enemy.

Police are often pitted against nonviolent citizens. Tragedies occur.

Families are broken up and lives are ruined more often by the justice
system than by the drugs themselves. Seven percent of black children
have at least one parent in the prison system instead of at home. The
federal government is building a new prison every month to house the influx.

With 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the
world's prison population, something is going terribly wrong. Some
$60 billion to $100 billion are wasted on this failure every year.

The War on Drugs is a leviathan, pitting government against its
people, corrupting citizens and officials alike.

Prohibition increases crime and offers obscene profits to drug
dealers, builders of prisons, winners of drug wars, and government
agencies ostensibly set up to fight the "war."

The answer is obvious.

Re-legalize and regulate drugs.

Make it the medical and social problem that it is, and put our police
back to working for the people.

After putting hundreds in jail myself and watching no effect on the
amount of drugs on the street, I came to the conclusion that we must
take the profit motive away from the dealers. Maybe when enough folks
wake up, we can save future Tarika Wilsons.