{news} What is Connecticut getting for its deadly prohibitions?

[clifford thornton]

http://www.journalinquirer.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17596282&BRD=985&PAG=461&dept_id=565860&rfi=6<http://www.journalinquirer.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17596282&BRD=985&PAG=461&dept_id=565860&rfi=6>

Chris Powell

What is Connecticut getting for its deadly prohibitions? 
By Chris Powell 
12/16/2006


Much investigation still has to be done to get to the bottom of the latest police shooting of unarmed and unoffending people, the incident at a bar in Queens last month in which five New York City police officers fired 50 rounds at three men, killing one of them, without managing to bring any criminal charges. 


But one thing seems settled: The police were working under cover, in plain clothes, to investigate suspicion of prostitution and illegal drugs at the bar.


        
Quite apart from the questions of exactly what prompted the shootings and whether the police thought they saw a weapon -- and how anyone at a bar is supposed to react when someone in plain clothes suddenly turns on him -- there may be a more important question.

That is: Is the possibility of drug use and prostitution, at worst victimless crimes, really worth SWAT team treatment?

New York City is not the only jurisdiction dispatching police with hair triggers to look for trouble where there really isn't any. It happened in Hartford last year, as a city police officer and an agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms were patrolling the north end, supposedly to combat gun crime. They confronted two young men parked in a car at a small grocery store. After some conversation the young men drove away, disregarding an order to stop. The city officer then shot at the car five times, killing one of the young men and wounding the other. The officer claimed to have seen a gun and to have thought that one of the young men was reaching for it. But there was no gun and no crime under way, at least until the young men drove off, and even then they posed no threat to anyone.

In the Queens and Hartford cases and innumerable others across the country, police sent out to look for victimless crime ended up creating more trouble than they found.

For just as drugs and prostitution are at best victimless crimes, so is gun possession. Despite the hysteria over it in the cities, with their amnesty programs and offers to swap guns for supermarket gift certificates, the urban gun problem is really only a manifestation of drug prohibition. Having been pushed outside the law, people in the drug trade obtain guns mainly to protect themselves against others in the drug trade. Guns are just as legally (or illegally) possessed in the suburbs but the suburbs escape the gun hysteria because the drug trade is concentrated among the urban poor.

Drug addiction is bad but for every life lost to it there are several lost to the violence created by drug prohibition, and thousands lost to the abuse of the drugs that have been brought inside the law and taxed and regulated, alcohol and tobacco. As for prostitution, its only public aspect -- street prostitution -- is also largely a matter of drug prohibition, its inflating the price of drugs so much that addicts become desperate.

Dispatching police with hair triggers to snoop on drugs, prostitution, and gun possession where there is no complaint of harm is the mark of a government that thinks it doesn't have enough to do. And while the war on these things has been undertaken for decades, it has had no detectable effect on them. Like so much else in government, the war's only provable effect has been as an employment program with early retirement and excellent pension benefits. This war is as Orwell wrote about another war: not meant to be won but rather to be continuous, to keep the hierarchy of society intact. But it is piling up a lot of bodies, including those of an increasing number of mere bystanders, innocent people -- caught in shootouts, drive-by shootings, car chases, robberies by desperate addicts, and mistakes by police.

Sometimes the innocent victims of these prohibitions are not the usual members of expendable racial minorities in the cities but white suburbanites. So it would be nice if Connecticut's elected officials could even just talk about the carnage all around them. It would be nirvana if they could commission an audit of criminal-justice policy and establish some criteria for judging its performance, if they could ask: What are we really getting for these deadly prohibitions besides what we got for the last one, the prohibition of alcohol, which everyone now acknowledges with a laugh to have been a big mistake?

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Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer. 



©Journal Inquirer 2006 



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