Rise of the Warrior Cop (26 page)
Read Rise of the Warrior Cop Online
Authors: Radley Balko
Number of SWAT teams in the United States in 1975: approximately 500
90
It now appears that . . . victory over the Fourth Amendment is complete.
—WILLIAM BRENNAN
W
illiam French set the tone for the Reagan administration early on. In one of the first cabinet meetings, the new attorney general declared, “The Justice Department is not a domestic agency. It is the internal arm of the national defense.”
This would be a rough decade for the Symbolic Third Amendment. Reagan’s drug warriors were about to take aim at
posse comitatus
, utterly dehumanize drug users, cast the drug fight as a biblical struggle between good and evil, and in the process turn the country’s drug cops into holy soldiers.
French surrounded himself with a crew of prosecutors who called themselves the “hard chargers.” One was Rudy Giuliani, a rising star brought to Washington by French after he had racked up some impressive federal drug prosecutions in New York. In an interview with the journalist Dan Baum, Lowell Jensen, another of French’s advisers, said that the first task French assigned Giuliani
was to survey US attorneys, cops, and prosecutors across the country about how the federal government could get more involved in fighting local crime. The overwhelming answer French got back was the same answer John Mitchell got when he posed the same question to his aides in the early days of the Nixon administration: launch a war on drugs.
So they did, with some sweeping new policies. One of the most significant new policies came thanks to a fortuitous bit of timing. Shortly after Reagan took office, the General Accounting Office (GAO) released a report, commissioned by Democratic senator Joe Biden of Delaware a year earlier, on the use of civil asset forfeiture. Civil forfeiture was a concept that had a long tradition in English common law. Under the law of
deodands
—Latin for “given to God”—anytime a piece of property caused a death, the property itself could be deemed guilty of the crime, at which point it or its value had to be forfeited over to the Crown. In colonial times, the concept was extended to allow the state to seize and confiscate ships that had been used to smuggle contraband. The Crown’s abuse of the practice is often credited with inspiring the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on the taking of property without due process.
1
But until the 1970s, the government couldn’t take property that wasn’t
directly
used in a crime. The government could shut down an illegal brothel, but it couldn’t touch a house or car or boat the owner had bought with revenue generated by the brothel. That all changed when a young policy wonk named Robert Blakey, formerly of Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department, conceived of a way to extend the government’s reach. Under Blakey’s idea, once the government convicted someone on charges related to organized crime, prosecutors could go after everything the guilty party had bought and earned with the proceeds of the criminal enterprise.
Blakey called the law RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations), after Rico Bandello, the fictional gangster in the 1931 movie
Little Caesar
. Originally conceived to target organized crime, by the time the law passed in 1970 it had become so broad that even Nixon’s hard-liners were concerned. In opposing
the law, Nixon’s Justice Department told Congress that its broad reach “would result in a large number of unintended consequences.”
2
Reagan’s Justice Department had no such reservations. The 1981 GAO report concluded that the government wasn’t using forfeiture nearly enough, and that an excellent opportunity to collect revenue was going to waste. Reagan’s people would take care of that.
Reagan also brought in the FBI to help enforce the drug laws. The agency had long resisted joining the drug war, particularly under J. Edgar Hoover. The legendary PR-savvy director knew the issue was a loser and tended to lure law enforcement into corruption. But by 1980 Hoover had been gone for seven years. It was time to bring the FBI into the fold.
The new administration also wanted to do away with the Exclusionary Rule, override
Miranda
, abolish bail and parole, douse pot farms with herbicides, put far more focus on enforcement and far less on treatment, and, perhaps most radically of all, enlist the military in the war on drugs.
The administration would focus most of these efforts on marijuana, on the theory that (1) marijuana is a “gateway” to harder drugs, and (2) people using cocaine and heroin are already too far gone to bother saving. There was also a strategic advantage to going after pot: successfully targeting and demonizing the least harmful illegal drug would push any talk of decriminalizing the others outside the realm of acceptable debate.
But if this was going to be a real war, Reagan would need to secure his role as commander in chief. He couldn’t have Congress or rogue bureaucrats going off-message or questioning or holding up his initiatives. Here again, he took a play from Nixon’s playbook. Reagan created a new office—a more czar-ish sort of drug czar. The position would report directly to him and would coordinate and oversee all antidrug efforts throughout the executive branch.
At the suggestion of billionaire data-processing mogul and future presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, Reagan chose Carlton Turner to be his new, even czar-ier drug czar. Turner was a native Alabaman
who, oddly enough, had spent years running the country’s only legal marijuana plot, at the University of Mississippi. That experience with pot gave Turner a convincing air of authority that would become particularly important when he started making patently absurd statements about the drug. Turner had no specialized knowledge of other illicit drugs, but that didn’t matter much at the time. Pot was really all that was important.
By the time Reagan publicly announced the appointment in June 1982, Turner was already a favorite among the increasingly dogmatic anti-pot parent organizations proliferating in the suburbs. His appointment was also an early indication that the federal government’s new drug war would no longer pay much attention to treating addicts. In previous administrations, the “drug czar” had been a treatment-oriented position. Under Turner, it became an enforcement office.
Underlying all of this focus on pot was a surge of cultural conservatism into positions of power in the new administration. The late 1960s and early 1970s had seen the emergence of a movement of conservative intellectuals. Periodicals like
Commentary, The Public Interest
, and occasionally
National Review
were featuring think pieces from people like Robert Bork, Ernest van den Haag, James Q. Wilson, and James Burnham. Where someone like George Wallace openly appealed to base prejudices, and the Moral Majority might openly cite the Bible as an authority when discussing public policy, the right’s emerging tweed caucus intellectualized the culture wars. They made essentially the same points that Nixon political strategists had made among themselves in memos and behind closed doors, only with more erudition, and more for public consumption. Their general message was that some people are simply “born bad” and there’s just no helping them. Talk about root causes, social intervention, or curing or rehabilitating deviancy was a futile attempt to debate away evil. Rioters, drug pushers, drug addicts, career criminals—these people were beyond redemption. The only proper response to evil was force—and then only to keep the evil from harming the good. These ideas found a home in the Reagan administration,
where many of the people who had been advancing them found high-ranking appointments.