by
James Craig
Where have we seen this before?
TV cameras rolling. Cops amassing outside of a targeted home. Police chief preening for the bright lights.
Just over three years ago, a little girl died amid just such made-for-TV showboating. And here we were again, just a couple of days ago, cops and cameras all swarming around together as Detroit Police Chief James Craig added yet another installment to his ongoing high-profile crackdowns on the city’s petty criminal class.
Whatever lessons we learned from the death of 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley Jones — shot to death in 2010 by Detroit Police Officer Joseph Weekley as cops raided her home while cameras for a TV show filmed — apparently didn’t seem to apply here.
The Hunger for Publicity
Instead, it seemed that it was more important for the chief to get his shine on. So there was our tough new chief, decked out cooly in his black leather ensemble and sharp dark shades, teasing handcuffed dope peddlers who failed to heed the warnings he issued during the previous raids. And coyly teasing the peddler’s alarmed friends on the dealer’s confiscated cell phone. And lamenting aloud about how the city had never seen such a show of force until he rode into town.
Where have we seen this before?
In every poor neighborhood in this city. For decades. And from almost every police chief who’s ever ridden into town with a mandate to prove that “this time things will be different.” We’ve seen crackdowns before. In the late 1980s, cops here averaged 12 raids a day. We’ve seen news choppers and ghetto birds swooping through the skies. We’ve seen over-militarized platoons of of police officers drag half-formed man-children out of trap houses, lining them neatly along street corners in assorted arrays of shock and dishevelment.
And we’ve seen the dope on the table.
But we’ve also watched even more dope come right back to the neighborhoods no sooner than folks like Craig cart some of it away. We’ve witnessed the petty criminals carted off to jail for non-violent drug crimes come back, too, sometimes repentant, but sometimes more hardened than ever and suddenly not so non-violent. We’ve watched (and often cheered) the tasks forces and heard police chiefs from Bill Hart to Warren Evans rattle their sabers at “the bad guys.”
Not that Bountiful
So “Mistletoe” wasn’t much new and, judging by the take, not even particularly bountiful as “crackdowns” go. A few packets of heroin and blow will go to an evidence locker, and some parole and probation violations get to face the music for skipping off. But what of those 27 shootings that had scarred this neighborhood? How many of those were solved? And if they were drug-related, then exactly how do crackdowns like “Operation Mistletoe” square with what we know about the effectiveness of militarized law-enforcement in stopping the dope trade?
For more than 30 years now, we’ve been waging war on young men like the ones Craig is dragging out of these drug houses. Thanks in very large part to that war, to tours de force like Operation Mistletoe, the United States boasts the largest prison population of any developed nation on this planet. And still, the drugs continue to flow and, sadly, the bullets continue to fly.
There’s got to be a better way. (Personally, I think we take a long hard look at what countries like Portugal have done.)
For more than 30 years, we’ve waged war on young men like the ones being dragged out of Detroit drug houses.
Critics will scream I’m against good policing. I’m not. Detroiters need it. Detroiters deserve it. There should be no haven for rapists or robbers or murderers in our neighborhoods. And even before Craig arrived, good men and women were doing their best to safeguard Detroit. And to the degree that his efforts legitimately continue and improve on that, he should be supported.
But lauding yet another skirmish in an already-failed drug war? I can’t do that. We’ve seen this before.
And neither can I pretend as if the drug trade that has hummed along steadily in Detroit, and in cities and suburbs all across this nation, is merely the by-product of malfunctioning moral compasses among poor people. Drug dealing is an economic choice for poor folks, the consequence of a nation where resource inequity was the yeast in the original recipe and has thus only expanded.
We Cut Funding for the Needy
Still, the folly has continued to trickle down. We slash funding for early childhood education, special-needs students and nutritional efforts. We cut tax programs designed to help poor working mothers. We degrade poor people and threaten their basic needs, like housing and food, by demanding that they pee in a cup just to live in housing projects or get a bridge card. We see executive bonuses explodes, watch big businesses rake in record profits and then argue against raising the minimum wage. We underfund schools that serve the neediest children and when they predictably fail, we soothe ourselves by handing our damaged students over to for-profit hustlers, be they in education or the prison industry.
For as many drug dealers as we want to praise Chief Craig for arresting, we create that many — and more — every day we continue to embrace mean-spirited, unworkable policies that concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands and that leave those without scrambling to feed themselves and stay warm by any means necessary.
David Simon, the creator of "The Wire" and one of the greatest commentators on the futility of “Operation Mistletoe”-type assaults (see video below), recently explained how the immorality of extreme economic stratification shreds America's social contract:
Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have “some”, it doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to get the same amount. It doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It’s not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don’t get left behind. And there isn’t a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.
And so in my country you’re seeing a horror show. You’re seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you’re seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You’re seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we’ve put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.
We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse.
This transformation is playing out all in any number of ways for Detroit.
In our courts, where a D.C. bankruptcy lawyer appointed by a billionaire governor threatens to decimate pensions while handing over hundreds of millions of dollars to bankers and “consultants.”
In our state’s capitol, where neo-conmen slash tax credits for poor families and hand billions in tax breaks to corporate buddies.
In the city’s neighborhoods, where taxpayer bailed-out banks continue to foreclose on homes while neglecting many of the ones they’ve already wrongly taken back.
Dearth of Opportunities
And in our streets, where the dearth of opportunities for a neglected class of young men and (increasingly) women has made them ready targets for a society that doesn’t know—or care—to do anything other than incarcerate them.
Raids and crackdowns have a place. If Craig and other big city police honchos want to devote more time and resources to solving murders, apprehending rapists, hunting down child molesters and bagging home invaders, more power to them.
But Aiyana’s tragedy should have taught us the folly of these over-produced media spectacles gussied up as aggressive policing. And nearly four decades of unremitting violence, revolving-door court systems and arrests of generation after generation poor, desperate dope hustlers should have taught us that sporadic crackdowns make for great TV but do nothing to solve our drug problem.
As a police chief, Craig is the proverbial hammer looking for a nail, so I don’t doubt that he’s doing the best of what he knows how to do. But he should know that the drug raids and the heavy-handed approach, not unlike his showboating for cameras, aren’t new to this city. We’ve seen them before. We’ve seen what they ultimately amount to also.
That’s why, if we want fuller answers to the drug problems that afflict us, it’s time we started looking elsewhere.
Related column by Darrell Dawsey:
Are Roundup Raids Part of 'Saving' Detroit? And Whose Detroit, Exactly?, Dec. 8
