I want to share with you an essay I tried to submit to The Ledger a few weeks back. It was my way of answering its editorial page editor’s rather nasty and personalized attack on me for writing critically about some aspects of policing.
The Ledger wouldn’t run my response. I don’t know why. None of the people in power there would talk to me about it — even though they devoted almost an entire editorial to portraying me as an anti-police activist of some sort. But outside of several really heroic reporters doing their best, I don’t care about The Ledger — even though it’s fun to poke at it sometimes. It’s not powerful. It’s very poorly led. And as an institution, it’s descending into parody.
By contrast, Mr. and Mrs. Barnett, you are powerful. I’d much rather talk directly to you. I don’t know either one of you. I do think I spoke to Mr. Barnett once about Hazel Haley. But we have some friendly acquaintances in common. I hope they’ll show you this.
Quite simply, I think you made a mistake in listening to Grady Judd and opposing progress toward ending marijuana prohibition. I want to convince you to change your mind. I want to convince you to play the same incredibly constructive role that activist capitalists in the 1920s played in ending alcohol prohibition.
Today’s Drug War, which dwarfs its much smaller ancestor with alcohol, is the greatest imposer of negative capital that the world has ever seen. It is the greatest criminal incentive engine America has ever created. It keeps the undercapitalized undercapitalized. And it puts everyone at risk, especially police and the young people of color who are currently in a state of mutual, understandable antipathy.
History shows us there is a way out of this type of bad blood and violence. Unfortunately, right now, you and Grady Judd are on the wrong side of it.
The essay I wrote, which The Ledger refused to run, briefly explains why. Here it is. When it’s finished, I have a couple of books to recommend. Thanks.
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The greatest sustained drop in the history of American homicide records began in exactly 1933. That year states repealed federal alcohol prohibition and mostly ended the failed war on alcohol. It had produced a massive illegal alcohol market that drove violent businessmen of all races to kill each other — among many other socially destructive byproducts. It functioned exactly like our modern failed drug prohibition policies. Crippling this massive illegal business correlated with an immediate sustained plunge in homicide rate across American society. It lasted until the early 1960s.
Yet, the tiny American prison population barely moved before or after. Rather than waste massive resources on bending American “vice” to our will, we simply decided to stop fighting. It is one of the greatest moments in American history. A moment of grace.
Let me repeat. And emphasize. The greatest crime drop in American history came without any increase in a tiny prison population. It came with a sudden, steep reduction in police deaths. Let me repeat and emphasize. Ending prohibition saved police officers’ lives. Hundreds of them over time.
Repealing alcohol prohibition also helped beat the powerful 1920s Ku Klux Klan, which functioned in large part as the first drug enforcement agency, with particular attention to racially targeted enforcement.
Looking backward from 2015, I consider the prohibition crime drop the single most important, undiscussed, and yet achingly relevant historical fact to modern America. That’s because today, American police chiefs and sheriffs face three very different public mandates.
1. Reduce murder rates: They must sustain the long, geographically uneven, national reduction in murder rate — which has existed since roughly 1992. And they must reverse the very recent uptick in murder rate in some heavily segregated, largely African-American neighborhoods within some cities. (Baltimore, Milwaukee, etc.) Murder rate is the only reliable crime measurement. Other crime statistics are far too easily gamed.
2. Protect their officers: Thankfully, police leaders are doing this more successfully than any other part of their job. Violent police deaths – both in terms of rate and raw numbers — peaked during alcohol prohibition. The number topped 300 in 1930. In 2015, despite high profile media coverage and the irresponsible rhetoric of some politicized police officers, we’re on pace to have roughly 35 total police killings. That’s very near the all-time low set two years ago. Even one is too many. But there is no “war on police.”
3. Reduce state violence, especially incarceration: The first two mandates are, of course, longstanding. The third is much newer, but a long time coming. Today, intense and confrontational public movements are demanding that police accomplish the first two mandates while reducing the police violence deployed against the American public. By many measures, American state violence against its citizens is the fiercest in the world. These measures include incarceration, which is a form of state violence. Mass incarceration is the core product of our failed Drug War. This new mandate comes largely from people with very little political power, many of whom live on the sharp end of the American mass incarceration state. It may be overwhelmed by backlash in the short-term. But not in the long-term. America’s Drug War prison state is unsustainable — morally, socially, and perhaps economically. So this third mandate is not going away, not in the era of cell-phone cameras and social media and near universal recreational marijuana use.
If I were in charge of a police agency, I would be looking for government actions shown to correlate with reduced crime and increased officer safety and low prison populations.
There is only one such government action: legalizing and regulating intoxicating substances.
It breaks my heart multiple times a day that no one in power, no aspiring politician, will simply cite the 1933 crime drop statistics publicly and repeatedly. It breaks my heart that no criminal justice program studies the 1933 crime drop.
So I’m grateful to The Ledger for complaining about my “snark” in its recent editorial. It’s given me the chance to make this case for its readership — and hopefully for police officers. It’s a point far more important to our daily lives than any “blogger’s” tone.
I want to be an ally in helping serious, principled police officers simultaneously reduce crime; reduce police deaths; and reduce state violence. I feel much sympathy for the men and women in uniform trying in good faith to reconcile these three mandates in a culture where every anecdote can become instantly viral and mistaken for a trend.
I’m very pleased with the good faith of Lakeland Police Chief Larry Giddens and Winter Haven Chief Charlie Bird, with whom I’ve had very productive and useful discussions. They certainly don’t agree with all of my perceptions; but they’re taking their complex mandates seriously. They’ve been willing to look at data and listen to someone who has publicly criticized their agencies at times. That shows maturity and perspective, much more maturity and perspective than the The Ledger’s editorial writer seems to think they have.
I much prefer the quiet professionalism of Giddens and Bird to the endless grandstanding of Polk Sheriff Grady Judd, a politician who enjoys whipping up public sentiment and fear. I don’t think Judd cares at all about the third public mandate. And I think he finds people who do care about reducing state violence to be useful public political foils. That’s quite sad for a person of his considerable administrative and PR talents.
In its editorial,The Ledger quoted disapprovingly a sentence I wrote about an unfolding crime scene on my street. There was unacceptable “snark” in my tone when I wrote that I didn’t want to get “shot in front of my kid because I bypassed a pointless police road block and went to my house by driving the wrong way.” And the editorial writer said flatly that I am the same as people who supposedly chanted “pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” recently.
First, perhaps “snark” does not mean what The Ledger thinks it means. I was deadly serious. I did not want to get shot or thrown to the ground. As James Blake showed yet again recently, police violence can occur without warning or justification. To stay safe around police, one must always imagine oneself through their eyes. Police say this themselves all the time. Listen to them.
More importantly, when The Ledger encourages police to think that criticism equals war — that the public is either for them or against them — it makes police violence against the public much more likely. Police have killed more than 800 people in the United State this year already. How many were unnecessary? Or illegal? In at least three of those killings, police are being prosecuted. That simply would not have happened without cameras and scrutiny.
I wish that scrutiny was unnecessary. I wish that rank and file police officers were more willing to hold their brothers and sisters to the high standard that most of them set. But we’ve seen in the very recent past here in Lakeland the consequences of blind support of state power.
I have written thousands and thousands and thousands of words — including an award-winning book — about the contemporary and historical context of prohibition, state power, and the relationship of police to the public. In the days before The Ledger editorial, I praised Chief Giddens quite effusively both on my website and on social media. The Ledger couldn’t be bothered to quote any of that.
Instead, the editorial writer chose to cherry pick a few lines to make a point, which is fine. I stand by those lines. I meant them when I wrote them. But circumstances and context are fluid; and the new media world is not static. I encourage you to come read more at LakelandLocal.com or talk to me directly at bitown1@gmail.com.
And look at the point The Ledger chose to make with my words: watch your mouth when you critique the most fundamental and violent power of the state.
Rest assured, that’s a point I will never make. And there was a time when an institutional newspaper would have considered that an odd message to send to readers. But we all know those days are long gone.
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If you’ve read this far, Mr. and Mrs. Barnett, thank you. I’d like to recommend some additional reading. Start with these two books: “Chasing the Scream,” by reporter Johann Hari; and “Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition,” by Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economics professor.
Miron’s book, which I came across some years ago, was the first place I saw the historical crime trends I mapped here.
Together, these books provide overwhelming behavioral economic and journalistic insight into the needless carnage inflicted by Grady Judd’s drug enforcement approach. And there are many, many others. I do not believe Grady Judd has the intellectual or moral courage to read either. I don’t believe he has the intellectual or moral courage to admit to you that he is wrong.
So I’m going to try to pick away at his political pandering with data and historical expertise. I can afford to be patient about this because I have no choice.
I’m also not asking you to approve of marijuana or any other kind of drug use. Understand, legalization does not equal approval. Let me repeat. Legalization does not equal approval. One more time. With emphasis. Legalization does not equal approval.
I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life. I approve of every public and private expenditure ever made to stigmatize smoking. And yet I would fight with everything I have not to prohibit tobacco. That’s because prohibition does not actually prohibit anything. It just creates crime and disorder and misery. I will happily join you stigmatizing legal drug use if that helps convince you to join the battle against prohibition.
Finally, I’d ask you to keep this in mind. Virtually everyone who asks something of you in the context of social or economic policy is really asking for your money. I’m not. I’m asking the opposite. I’m asking you not to spend your money. I’m asking you not to spend your money in the service of giant coercive government — either through political contributions or your taxes. I’m asking you to help capitalize people and neighborhoods by spending less money waging war on them.
Thanks very much.
Sincerely,
Billy Townsend