By Mark David Blum, Esq.
In the past four years, there have been several mass drug / street gang RICO arrest sweeps here in Syracuse and environs. Dozens are arrested and charged. Then, immediately following, there is always a rash of shootings, murders, and other attacks. One of my own clients was hit in the crossfire.
I don’t even know where to start. There is a range of emotions that overwhelm me ... from anger and frustration to sadness and despair. I know police officers know that I am right. I am not an idiot and have done my homework on this. The current policy of prohibition is causing this violence and is killing our kids. Every time you arrest a drug dealer, you do not stop the flow of drugs or stop the crime that goes along with prohibitionist policies. All you do is create a job opening. When the shooting stops, police know a new network is in place.
A couple of years ago, a client stumbled into my life who is one of those rare individuals that I come across where I know in my heart that I can do something to make a difference in his life. I did my professional duty and cleaned up his mess and set him free to where he can walk the streets and begin to live a normal life. He is 24 and African American. His growing up was harsh and poor. Small mistakes were made along the way ... both in his personal life and his dealings with authorities. But that is all behind him now.
I have worked hard with him since then. But, being 24 and black and poor, few are willing to help him out. He is at that stage in life where I was once and I know that he is at one of them crossroads in life where your next decisions will last a lifetime. I have worked hard to show him he can trust the system and work within it. He has had a chance to see that there really is a world out there available to him. His skills, intelligence, and ability to learn are what I consider a vast untapped resource. If given a chance and the space to grow, there is nothing this man cannot achieve.
But there is a war on in the streets. The cause is simple: By removing one gang, the vacuum forces the creation of job openings and everybody wants a piece of that very lucrative drug market. Everybody it seems, including our government and police. Criminals and cops benefit financially from this war. Yet, they also know that the current policy is a failure. Despite MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS spent on this war over the past 35 years, you have not prevented the shootings, the neighborhood methlabs and drug houses, the overdoses, the imprisonments, and most importantly you failed to educate our children to say "No". Criminals and cops need this fight to justify their own existence and to build their respective retirement plans.
This war against Americans has got to stop. People tell me on one hand they are doing this violence to make all of us safer while at the same time, they stand helpless while more and more of our kids are dying. These cops tell the public to be very afraid of the junkie who is jonesing. They tell us the gangs will be worse. Yet, have they stopped the junkies and their jonesing from killing? How much worse can the gangs get when they are already spraying automatic weapons randomly at YOUR NEIGHBORS. Since business conflicts cannot be stopped with high powered lawyers in court rooms, they must resort to using high powered weapons on street corners.
I don’t know what I will do or how I will react if I lose this kid. I will hold those of you who continue to advocate for strong drug war prohibitionist policies personally responsible should anything happen to him that is drug war related. This man is a life worth saving.
If only the police would admit publicly what they all know is true. That nothing they do; no amount of arrests or street corner justice is having any impact on drug use or availability. They know from experience that every dealer they arrest creates two more in his place, for every drug house they shut down, another is going to open. Not one of them will deny that they feel like the little Dutch boy with their fingers in the dyke. To them, they feel the frustration of trying to empty the ocean one teaspoon at a time. But, they will never admit it. It would be an act of "surrender"; in their minds, a demonstration of cowardice. They are so wrong. Bravery means doing the right thing; not what your testosterone dictates but what your mind and heart know is true.
They know they have blood on their hands. Every night when they hang up their uniforms and return to normal life, they have flashbacks of the drug war experience and they suffer from the depression of feeling like they are failures. We need cops to be cops; to fight crime, to help those who ask, and to stand that wall and keep us from each other.
It is unfair to ask police officers to involve themselves in a situation that nobody wants them in, that is private and personal between consenting adults, and causes no harm to anyone or anything but arguably those who exercise their free will.
I am really sad; mostly because so many are so entrenched in the way things have been done for so long, that they cannot possibly consider an alternative. I bet nobody can even remember why we implemented these prohibitions in the first place. What I do know is that we are fighting a war now just because we have been fighting it for the past 35 years and we don’t know any other way other than to just keep fighting the war. To have to admit to ourselves that perhaps we made a bad decision, that we were wrong, that we wasted so much of our money and precious citizens' lives, ... to admit this was all in error requires an acknowledgement that we were wrong. Nothing is harder to do. Trust me on this.
We were wrong. For every day we continue this policy, we are wrong. Each and every person now sitting in prison under this policy has wrongfully lost their lives. When a dollar is spent in this war, that same dollar is lost to your school and that is wrong. This whole thing needs a change.
Change, however, is going to come from you and me. It needs to start in your heart. It needs to become part of the public discussion. Our politicians need to put the subject on the table.
If you refuse, the next blood that is spilled in this war will forever stain your hands. How will you explain that to your children?
