RI-969i Jutta: "See me Great, or I kill you" - The main evil
L.Ron Hubbard
Koos Nolst Trenite wrote:
> from Ambassador for Mankind
Koos, Koos, Koos,
How many times have I advised you from beyond the grave not to give
yourself unearned titles? Please, you're an embarrassment!
> Jutta caught the above, very contagious, 'disease' in 1975
> from L. Ron Hubbard,
> who enforces this 'disease' on others
> "to make them feel Great and admire L. Ron Hubbard
> for making them feel Great
> - by causing them to
> NOT look at what they are ACTUALLY doing,
> but by causing them "to just feel being Great".
> Jutta was of course predisposed - already inclined -
> to getting infected. She "LOVED" to get infected.
Golly, Koos, even *I* write better than that!
> So, do not underestimate this 'disease',
> and don't become infected by L. Ron Hubbard,
> if you aren't already.
I'm here to help people, and since I'm dead, am not even capable of
infecting anyone from six feet under!
With posts like these, you're even making ALAN YU look good!
-LRH
Michael Rippie
Address of Dr. Joseph McNamara
9th International Conference on Drug Policy Reform, Santa
Monica, 10/19/95
(Joe McNamara is a veteran of the New York City Police Department and is
former Chief of Police of Kansas City and San Jose; he is currently a
Research
Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.)
As David [Condliffe] mentioned, Barney Frank sort of gave us a wake up
call last
year in Washington, when he warned us that it's not enough to be angry
at
politicians and to denounce them. We'll have other politicians; we'll
have the
same process. What he said is, give us some cover, so that we can vote
for at
least a study, an analysis, an examination of the possibility of new
drug control
policies.
I think it's not an overstatement to say that both political parties in
America are
playing dead when it comes to drug reform. Why is that? Because it's too
easy to
be tougher on drugs than your opponent. And we have to face the
political reality
of that. How do we change that?
Well, one thought that we had was, suppose we could get the law
enforcement
community to say to the politicians, as we finally got them to say on
the issue of
gun control, look, help us, we need help. How, what would we do? Would
that
be cover?
Out of that came the Hoover Law Enforcement Summit, which was held last
May 9th and 10th. We invited the top leaders in American law enforcement
--
and indeed our steering committee was composed of some of the most well
known people in law enforcement -- and we had more than 50 agencies
participate. We had a wonderful two day conference. Ethan [Nadelmann]
started
it with an overview of where we were in drug policy in the United
States, and
what's happening internationally. We had criminologists Jerry Skolnick
from
Berkeley, and Al Blumstein from Carnegie Mellon University.
Blumstein has done very important work, detailing the enormous increase
in
juvenile violence, the doubling of the homicide rate by firearms among
teenagers,
and related that directly to drug commerce and the easy availability of
guns in
inner cities. He has characterized the Drug War as an assault upon the
African
American community, where police tactics are used routinely that would
not be
tolerated in a white middle class neighborhood for a week. And I was a
police
chief for 18 years in two of America's largest cities. Al Blumstein is
right. We
could never use the tactics that are used routinely. And that's why DPF
(Drug
Policy Foundation) deserves such enormous credit for making possible the
Sentencing Project report, which I think is a bombshell that we all have
to pick
up and run with.
We had two federal judges, DPF board member [U.S. District Judge] Bob
Sweet, and Vaughn Walker, from the San Francisco Federal Circuit, talk
about
the destruction that these drug cases and mandatory sentencing are
causing in the
court system. George Shultz, former Secretary of State, spoke and gave
very
eloquent evidence of his speaking out years ago, denouncing the Drug War
as
wrongheaded and not making sense economically. He introduced our keynote
speaker, [Baltimore Mayor] Kurt Schmoke. And Kurt Schmoke got a standing
ovation from this audience of police chiefs.
And they're a tough group, and one of the tough questions to Mayor
Schmoke
was, how does this medicalization approach that you favor go over
politically in
your city? Because that's, after all, what's on their minds, as police
chiefs. And
he said, I go to meet with people in the community, and I ask them three
questions: Do you think we've won the Drug War? And people just laugh.
Do
you think we're winning the Drug War? And people just shake their heads.
And
the third question is, if you think we keep doing what we're doing now,
in 10
years, we will have won the Drug War?
Well, that's one of the reasons he got a standing ovation. Because he's
not a
professor some place, he's right in the front lines of a predominantly
African-American city where drugs and crime and violence are problems.
And
he's a leader who has taken a position and survived reelection. And that
earned
him enormous respect, as well as the way in which he dealt so honestly
with this
subject.
In any event, after two days, we gave the people remaining an evaluation
form,
and it was outstanding. I had done some previous work, and knew that
there was
a great deal of disillusionment with the Drug War among law enforcement
people.
But in the evaluation that we did after this two day conference, we
found 90
percent of the police leaders present repudiated, did not support the
federal War
on Drugs -- 90 percent. The other 10 percent didn't support the war.
Those 90
percent were clearly against the war. The group was unanimous in saying
that
this was not a matter of criminal law. It was more of a social and
medical
problem. The group was unanimous in saying more treatment and more
education would be more effective than more arrests and prisons. The
group was
unanimous in calling for a blue-ribbon panel to study the harm done by
the Drug
War and alternative methods of dealing with drugs. All of these things
repudiated
our national policy, and so I think that's very striking.
Now why was it that these law enforcement leaders, who after all rely on
arrests
in their job as a normal way of doing business, why was it they were so
strongly
opposed to this when they got the chance? Well their comments were very
revealing: they never had the chance before. They never got an
opportunity to
think for two days and to hear different opinions. Why not? Because the
federal
government controls the game. All of the conferences they go to are
funded by
the federal government. All of the speakers are either federal
officials, who speak
with one voice, or they are other people, recruited from different
fields, who say
what the government wants them to say, what they're getting paid to say.
The other reason is there's something very, very wrong going on in
American
policing. I'm going to just close by taking one minute to say that I
think as sad as
what we're seeing in American policing is, that it does hold some hope
for reform
for us. We have experienced a wave of police scandals over the past 5 to
10
years that are quite different than anything we've seen historically.
One reason
that this is not so apparent is the very nature of American law
enforcement is
decentralized, because each city has its own law enforcement agency. The
federal government, the DEA and the FBI, get a lot of publicity, but
there are
only a few thousand of them, believe it or not. And many of you are
saying
"Thank God," probably, at the moment. [Laughter.]
But we have from four to five hundred thousand local law enforcement,
state and
local law enforcement officials. Those are the guys filling the prisons
that Mr.
Bushnell mentioned. And 70 percent of their arrests are for possession
of drugs.
Now that doesn't mean 30 percent are big deal distributors. The Drug
War's a
dirty war, and it's a racist war. The dealers, the people arrested for
sale are like
Joycelyn Elders' son. They're not bigshots. They're often people who got
caught
in the wrong place, and some agent of law enforcement is wired to get
them, bid
them up to higher and higher levels. And then they're ending up doing 10
and 15
years of a mandatory sentence.
The Drug War cannot stand the light of day. And that's my hope, that we
can at
least get some objective study of it. It will collapse as quickly as the
Vietnam
War, as soon as people find out what's really going on. And I think we
can get
that study, if we can mobilize the police, as we did in the first Hoover
conference. We're aiming at another Hoover conference.
I want to take a moment to talk about what you are sort of subtly aware
of, but
because it's one story at a time, and because it's spread so far
geographically,
we're unaware of the massive police scandals that have been going on for
a
decade. In Boston, two white detectives frame an African-American
suspect for
murdering a white woman, after her husband complained that they were
accosted
and robbed in an intersection. It turns out the husband did the murder,
but it's
only exposed after his suicide. In New York, the police, once again, are
exposed,
in uniform, of conducting armed robberies, of beating people, of framing
drug
dealers, of selling drugs to the community. Similar cases in
Philadelphia, Denver,
Atlanta. In New Orleans, a new shock, a new level -- a police officer
murders her
partner and store owners, and then responds in uniform on patrol to the
crime
scene. She's convicted now. Her boyfriend was a drug dealer, by the way.
What we find in these police cases that's different, is the seriousness
of the police
misconduct. It's not some cops taking a bribe from some madam or bookie
or
something like that. It's cops doing armed robberies, beating people,
even
murders. It's falsification of evidence on a wholesale nature, in city
after city.
And it's easier to name cities that have not had scandals, than to name
all the
ones that have.
Not only that, it's not just the lower ranking narcs -- it goes up to
the top. The
police chief of Detroit, former chief, is in prison for stealing drug
funds. Police
chiefs in little New England towns stole drugs from their lockers. All
kinds of
sheriffs throughout the country have been convicted of actually dealing
in drugs.
The formerly untouchables, the feds, now have their people in jail. The
DEA
agent that arrested General Noriega -- remember, the narco drug gangster
that
President Bush named as justification for invading Panama? Well the DEA
agent
that arrested him is himself in prison, for stealing laundered drug
money. An FBI
agent had a very ingenious idea: he stole drugs from the evidence room,
and
mailed samples to the regional drug dealers, whose names he got from the
FBI
files, so they could determine the purity of the product, and what price
would be
appropriate. It's the market free enterprise system. [Laugher.]
So when we look at what's going on there, there's another couple of
patterns that
are important. Very often, the misconduct, the police crimes, are
uncovered by
outside agencies, not by the agency itself. And the standard defense
that we get,
whenever these crimes occur, is of course, we've always had a few rotten
apples,
and we have to do a better job at getting them. We're not all Mark
Fuhrman`s
and so on. The point is lost, that of course the majority of cops, thank
god, are
honest and not racist. But, the code of silence in those agencies is
allowing those
officers to do what they do. And so we have to appeal to the rank and
file. The
police leadership has to move beyond the tradition, and this is a
wake-up call
that's occurring.
The verdict in the Simpson case has angered the police all over the
country,
saying how could the jury just disregard the evidence so quickly and not
pay any
attention. The march on Washington will also anger some people. But what
that
jury did should not surprise us. It didn't surprise me. And it wasn't
just a reaction
to the Rodney King case, or to Mark Fuhrman. It's a decade long reaction
in
every large city across the country, and it can be traced back to the
Drug War
treatment that people are getting in the inner city, and their anger at
the racism
and the unfairness of the enforcement that's going on on a daily basis.
Almost
always, the victims of the police crimes are minorities, are African
Americans or
other minorities. So the public opinion polls, that for 10 years have
been showing
eroding credibility of law enforcement, don't show it as serious a
problem among
whites, for very good reason. The whites aren't as sensitive to it,
because they're
not the victims of this kind of police misconduct. And it's
inconceivable for white
people to think that a black Mark Fuhrman would be allowed to exist in a
police
agency. But we know, in all the large agencies in the country, there are
plenty of
Mark Furhman`s, who go on and on, and are not purged out of those
organizations. Well, the inner city communities know that too, and the
juries
know that as well.
I think all of these things, the violence, the tremendous corruption,
are one of the
reasons that are leading more and more people in law enforcement, who
are
responsible for these agencies, to begin a healthy self scrutiny. When
you're
telling cops that they're soldiers in a Drug War, you're destroying the
whole
concept of the citizen peace officer, a peace officer whose fundamental
duty is to
protect life and be a community servant. General Colin Powell told us
during the
Persian Gulf War what a soldier's duty is. It's to kill the enemy. And
when we
allowed our politicians to push cops into a war that they'll never win,
they can't
win, and let them begin to think of themselves as soldiers, the
mentality comes
that anything goes. We look at the rationalization of the crooked cops
in New
York, who robbed the drug dealers -- guess what? The Los Angeles
sheriff's
deputies who robbed the drug dealers here had the same rationalization.
They
said, why should these guys keep all the money? They're animals. They're
enemy. And they told the drug dealers, you're nothing, you have no
rights, we
can do whatever we want. It's a war, after all. When former police chief
Daryl
Gates made his famous statement in Congress, that casual drug users
should be
taken out and shot -- it was before the United States Senate, by the
way, not in
some cop beer hall [laughter] -- he assured the Senators he wasn't being
facetious. Well, when he came back home, the LA Times said, did you
really say
that? And Chief Gates said look, we're in a war.
And all kinds of police misconduct has occurred, the most serious which
is the
cops who think of themselves as being innocent good guys, are routinely
violating
the Fourth Amendment, routinely committing perjury. I'm going to end
now, but
I think, you know, it boggles the mind, how many defendants do give
consent
and get searched when they have drugs on them, and say "Sure, officer,
open my
trunk." [Laughter.] How many times are they cooperative enough to have
the
drugs in plain view, so that it's admissible evidence. There's a certain
healthy
skepticism that the court has not yet taken judicial notice of. But I
think these
things are a wake-up call for law enforcement. We can trace back this
changing
police behavior to a kind of malaise, in which good cops and bad cops
alike have
been conditioned to think they can do whatever they want, because after
all, this
is a problem that can only be solved by a War.
--
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