Crime & Violence

After the Willingdon location was so soundly trashed by residents who threatened to make it the sole election issue,causing the government to dodge imminent defeat by scrubbing plans for the location,

I recently read an article on the Sotomeyer Hearings, which discussed how "Republicans Question Need for Empathy".

The Canadian House of Commons today passed the Conservative government of Prime Minister Steven Harper' C-15 crime bill, which will institute mandatory minimum sentencing for some marijuana and other drug offenses. The vote, in which after dilly-dallying for days, the opposition Liberals joined in, came despite hearings in which no witnesses favored such a tough on crime approach north of the border. It's not a done deal yet. The bill must still be approved by the Canadian Senate, which issued a report several years ago calling for the government to head in the opposite directoin. But the Senate, which is appointed, is not known for bucking the government and the House of Commons. That the Liberals buckled for fear of being "soft on crime" and supported the Conservatives in this giant step backward is disappointing but not surprising. Oh, Canada! Once we looked to you for a progressive example on drug policy. I will be writing about all this for the Chronicle later this week, as well as focusing on our other border with a feature article on the Obama administration's new initiative to thwart the Mexican so-called drug cartels.

...and nobody north of the Rio Grande seems to have noticed. Last week, I wrote that the Mexican decrim bill had passed the Senate, but on the afternoon before we published that report, the bill also passed the Chamber of Deputies. Now it awaits only the signature of President Calderon. While a Dallas Morning News blogger wrote that it is unclear whether Calderon will sign the bill, it seems likely to me that he will. The bill, after all, was pushed by his ruling PAN party, and unlike 2006, when a similar bill passed only to be vetoed by then President Fox in the face of US threats and bluster, there have been no threats and bluster from Washington this time. And, of course, the situation in Mexico is much worse than in 2006, thanks largely to Calderon's war on the cartels. The bill is not great: The personal use quantities are tiny, and it allows for the states to prosecute low-level trafficking offenses (currently, that is the province of the feds, with the result being that being low-level traffickers are never tried because the federal prosecutors and courts are overwhelmed with serious trafficking cases). But it is decriminalization, and right on our border, not an ocean away, like Portugal. I'll be talking to people on both sides of the border this week about this bill and what it means and I'll have a feature article on it Friday. In the meantime, here's the lone Reuters article on these momentous events:

Mexico passes bill on small-scale drugs possession Fri May 1, 2009 8:39pm EDT MEXICO CITY, May 1 (Reuters) - Mexico's Congress has passed a bill decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of drugs, from marijuana to methamphetamine, as President Felipe Calderon tries to focus on catching traffickers. The bill, proposed by Calderon after an attempt by the previous government at a similar bill came under fire in the United States, would make it legal to carry up to 5 grams (0.18 ounces) of marijuana, 500 milligrams (0.018 ounces) of cocaine and tiny quantities heroin and methamphetamines. The lower house of deputies passed the bill late on Thursday. It already has been approved by the Senate and is expected to be signed into law by Calderon in the days ahead. Mexico's Congress passed a similar proposal in 2006 but the bill was vetoed by Calderon's predecessor, Vicente Fox, after Washington said it would increase drug abuse. The United States recently pledged stronger backing for Calderon's army-led war on drug cartels, whose turf wars have killed some 2,000 people so far this year in Mexico, as the drug violence is starting to seep over the border. The new bill also allows Mexican states to convict small-time drug dealers, no longer making it a federal crime to peddle narcotics, a move that should speed up those cases. U.S. President Barack Obama praised Calderon's drug war efforts in a visit to Mexico last month and promised more agents and southbound border controls to curb the flow of guns and cash to the cartels. (Reporting Miguel Angel Gutierrez; Editing by Bill Trott)

In discussing strategies to reduce drug war violence in Mexico, Attorney General Eric Holder made this troubling remark:

In the interview, Mr. Holder said he was sending an additional 100 agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to the southern border to crack down on the so-called straw gun purchases — in which one person submits to the federal background checks to obtain guns for someone else — that fuel much of the southbound smuggling. And with marijuana sales central to the drug trade, Mr. Holder said he was exploring ways to lower the minimum amount required for the federal prosecution of possession cases. [New York Times]

It's a disturbing comment that provoked curiosity from Pete Guither and Eric Sterling, but the back-story helps to qualify exactly which type of marijuana offenders we're talking about. From a meeting with prosecutors in Baltimore:  

The officials who met with Holder today quizzed him on a variety of local concerns. For example, Barbara LaWall, the Pima County, Ariz., attorney, said that federal prosecutors in her state were refusing to take cases involving cross-border marijuana seizures of 500 pounds or less.

The result, she said, has been no convictions for hundreds of smugglers caught with about 490 pounds of marijuana. [Baltimore Sun]

So when Holder says he's "exploring ways to lower the minimum amount required for the federal prosecution of possession cases," he's responding to complaints that major traffickers are currently being allowed to walk. Obviously, he's dreaming if he thinks lowering the threshold will intimidate traffickers who've already made it clear that they fear nothing. Our failure to prosecute cases under 500 pounds just shows how ridiculously outmatched we are and any attempt to rectify the situation will only serve to further prove that point.

Regardless, Holder's comment shouldn’t be read as a declaration of war against American marijuana users. He's not saying there will be an effort to increase arrests. They are aiming to put more people in prison for pot, however, rather than continuing to systematically pass on cases involving hundreds of pounds.

If Holder wants to reduce Mexican drug war violence, he needs to reduce the drug war itself, not the thresholds for marijuana prosecutions. Believe me, Americans would be happy to grow their pot at home and defund the marijuana cartels entirely.

If the traffickers don’t surrender soon, drug czar John Walters will kill them with his bare hands:

U.S. drug czar John P. Walters, in Mexico City to reassure officials that aid to fight drug gangs is in the pipeline, said traffickers resort to "fear and horror" in their campaign to take over government institutions but will ultimately fail.
…
Ultimately, he said, the drug lords will face a stark choice: "They surrender, or they die." [LA Times]

Walters then pulled a hand grenade from his vest and destroyed a speeding SUV from 100 yards away.

Look how AFP frames the spike in drug trade violence plaguing Mexico:

MEXICO CITY (AFP) — Almost 400 people have died in the past two weeks in an intensifying drugs war in Mexico despite a government crackdown on cartels, trafficking and related violence.

Very obviously, none of this is happening despite Calderon’s crackdown. The violence is caused by the crackdown, directly and unambiguously, in every imaginable sense. When Calderon pledged to increase drug enforcement efforts, the violence increased dramatically. That’s not an opinion, it’s what’s happened right before our eyes.

AFP sees irony in the fact that the violence has increased during a drug war crackdown, as though the logical assumption is that an aggressive drug war would reduce violence. It won’t, it never has, and it never will no matter what. The drug war will not make peace. It won’t change the weather, either. And it won’t make you a sandwich. All it will ever do is cause violence. Just watch.

If our drug policy made sense, 6-year-old children wouldn’t be kidnapped in blackmarket business disputes:

Cole was snatched Wednesday in what police are calling a drug-related kidnapping. Three armed men tied up his mother and her fiance and ransacked the home, taking the boy when no money was found, police said.

A nationwide Amber Alert was canceled because police believed it had "run its course," Cannito said Saturday.

Police say Cole's grandfather, Clemons F. Tinnemeyer, 51, had been involved in "significant drug dealing" and may have taken millions of dollars from drug dealers. Authorities say the kidnapping may have been in retaliation for the theft. [CNN]

Cole is safe now, thankfully. But as long as the drug war continues, these kinds of things will never stop happening and they won’t always end peacefully. There’s a reason Anheuser-Busch and R.J. Reynolds don’t kidnap children when a retailer is late on a payment.

Any measure of the drug war’s costs and benefits is incomplete unless it accounts for the role of drug prohibition in motivating horrible crimes like this.

At a campaign appearance in Jacksonville, FL, Barack Obama proposed federal drug war funding as a solution to the city’s problems with violent crime:

I will ensure that we fund the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, which has been critical to creating the anti-gang and anti-drug task forces our communities need. And I will make sure our federal law enforcement agencies are equipped to fight terrorism and crime by ensuring that the FBI and DEA are appropriately staffed and that federal-local law enforcement task forces have the support they need. [Florida Times-Union]

He said the same thing in New Orleans, thus it’s becoming increasingly clear that Obama really does believe that aggressive drug enforcement can function as a crime control mechanism. For a quick tutorial on how absurd that is, I’d refer him to Mexico, where President Calderon’s attempted crackdown has escalated violence throughout the country with no end in sight.

Moreover, Obama’s praise for the Byrne Justice Assistance Grants ignores that program’s role in producing some of the most egregious civil rights catastrophes in modern drug war history. Byrne funding was responsible for the notorious fiascos in Tulia and Hearne, TX, in which large numbers of innocent African-Americans were rounded up and framed for drug crimes. Overwhelming abuse of the program led Texas to ban multi-jurisdictional drug task forces entirely.

Obama’s remarks yesterday are therefore simply impossible to reconcile with his calls for "shifting the paradigm" in the war on drugs. He has frequently called attention to the over-incarceration of non-violent drug offenders, yet now pledges to continue the exact tactics that have played such a prominent role in producing our alarming prison population. As Radley Balko explains:

Because most Byrne grants are also tied directly to drug arrests, they encourage local police departments to use their manpower and resources on nonviolent drug offenses instead of more serious crimes like rape, robbery, or murder.

It seems Obama is trying to have it both ways, scoring points for forward-thinking ideas on incarceration at the national level, while simultaneously promising more policing and drug enforcement to audiences that are concerned about crime. I’d still prefer to think he’s serious about working to reduce our prison population, but he won’t get far without looking at the way our drug laws are enforced. If he plans to dangle federal drug war dollars in front of bloodthirsty local narcotics task forces, you can bet those guys will do what they do best: fill our prisons as fast as they can with anyone they can get their hands on.

That’s just how the drug war works. Politicians fund prohibition. Prohibition funds violence. Politicians feel pressured and fund more prohibition. If Obama wants to change the outcome, he’ll have to change the process.

(This blog post was published by StoptheDrugWar.org's lobbying arm, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, which also shares the cost of maintaining this web site. DRCNet Foundation takes no positions on candidates for public office, in compliance with section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and does not pay for reporting that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as doing so.)

As we reported on Friday, Culiacan, the capital of the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, was the scene of a two-day forum last week, the International Forum on Illicit Drugs, where there was much criticism of the Mexican drug war and the planned escalation of it envisaged by Plan Merida, the $1.4 anti-drug aid package cooked up by the Bush and Calderon administrations. The so-called "narco-violence," which might more accurately be called "prohibition-related violence," was, unsurprisingly, a central concern of presenters at the forum. In the year and a half since President Calderon took office and unleashed the Mexican military on the narcos, some 4,000 people have been killed. As if to punctuate that concern, just as the conference was wrapping up Wednesday, a series of armed confrontations broke out in central Culiacan. Sparked by a joint military-federal police sweep that was attacked by AK-47-wielding narcos in a Chevy Tahoe, gun battles broke out across the city as narcos swooped in to lend aid to their colleagues being harassed and captured by the law and other, rival narcos intervened. In one shoot-out between rival narco factions, two men were killed. In another shoot-out, between narcos and state police, two cops were killed. The military and police arrested 13 presumed cartel gun-men and seized a huge arsenal of heavy weapons, cash, and drugs. Thursday morning, military pick-ups and Hummers were cruising the streets of Culiacan, soldiers at their posts in back with heavy machine guns. Military helicopters buzzed over the city, although it was unclear whether they were supporting urban ground operations or were on their way to search for marijuana and poppy fields in the nearby mountains. (I apologize for not having any photos of this stuff. My camera battery went dead Tuesday morning, and having brought with me the wrong bag of electronic stuff, I couldn't recharge it. I went to five different camera stores in Culiacan looking for either a new battery or a charger, to no avail. I finally found a store in Mexico City Friday that charged it for me, so I have lots of photos of Saturday's Global Marijuana March in Mexico City. They will show up in a blog post later today.) The heavy military and law enforcement presence didn’t do much good. Friday night, the narcos struck back, ambushing a federal police patrol in the heart of Culican, killing four officers and leaving three other seriously wounded. But it wasn't just narcos vs. cops and soldiers Friday night. As reported by the Mexican news agency Notimex, a little after 11 Friday night, at least 60 armed men broke into three houses in a city neighborhood and seized five men, then took off in a 15-vehicle convoy, which was in turn attacked, leaving one man dead at that scene. At the same time, two other shoot-outs erupted in different neighborhoods of the city, while simultaneously, on the outskirts of town, presumed narcos shot and killed two Culiacan city police. It's not always easy to figure out who is killing whom. There are local, state, and federal police, any one of whom could be working for the cartels. There's the army. Then there are the competing cartels themselves. In Culiacan, long controlled by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and his Sinaloa cartel, Guzman and his group are being challenged by the Arrellano Felix Juarez cartel, which wants to take over "la plaza," or the franchise, as the local drug connection is known. Just to complicate things further, the Juarez cartel is allegedly being aided by the Zetas, the former elite anti-drug soldiers turned cartel hit-men, who usually work for the Gulf cartel. And this is just in Culiacan. There are other prohibition-related killings every day, soldiers and police being assassinated every day. On Saturday, the Mexican secretary of public security held a ceremony to honor the nine federal police killed by the narcos in the last few days. Another was gunned down in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacan Friday night, too. All of this pathology, of course, is a direct result of prohibitionist drug polices aggressively pursued by Washington and Mexico City. And what is their response? Let's have more of the same, only more so.