"Made in the U.S.A." Is Not the Problem

I was watching the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing today on the oversight of the Department of Justice. The sole witness was Attorney General Eric Holder, who would be called upon to answer for "Operation Fast and Furious," a failed DOJ/ Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) program that was meant to snare cartels in gun trafficking. I tweeted the first part of the hearing, but I wanted to discuss an op-ed by two state attorneys general that Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) had put in the Congressional Record (courtesy of Emptywheel's @bmaz):

Congress and the media have understandably focused on the missteps of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the “Fast and Furious” sting operation that allowed suspected “straw buyers” to purchase weapons and transport them to Mexico in order to build cases against drug cartels.

However, the covert operation was terminated abruptly after its possible connection to the tragic death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was revealed. Unfortunately, most of the recent criticism about the operation seems to be serving as a means to attack Attorney General Eric Holder and destroy the ATF, rather than to hold those behind Fast and Furious accountable.

The focus should be on the real public safety problem underlying this controversy: keeping arms from the Mexican drug cartels and protecting the security of the United States. However, many of the roadblocks faced by ATF and the Department of Justice are not being built by international criminals, but by Congress. (Emphasis mine)

The piece goes on to explain the prolific violence in Mexico and that 95% of the guns recovered from Mexican drug violence 'can be traced to the United States.' This sounds troubling, but it's really smoke and mirrors.

As I've detailed in the past, drug violence in Mexico is indeed rampant and unspeakably brutal. People are kidnapped, murdered, often tortured, strung up from overpasses, disemboweled, and/or beheaded. Does it really matter whether the murderers bought their ropes and machetes from stores in Tuscon or Tijuana?

It's the murderers, stupid.

If we could magically keep American guns out of the hands of the cartels, people would start being gunned down with a greater percentage of AK-47s sold in other countries than AR-10s made and sold in America, but they would still be gunned down. The cartels have planes, boats, and more than enough money to get whatever they want through their expansive networks. Making it marginally more difficult to acquire weapons may be good policy insofar as we want better, more sensible gun laws in this country, but it's hardly the "real public safety problem" facing our law enforcement agencies and the public at large.

The cartels make astronomical profits from selling the drugs banned by the United States' global prohibition policy. That money gets them access to the entire planet and all its terrible weapons that make their line of work so bloody. Ramped up interdiction efforts just make drug dealing more dangerous, but also more lucrative, and thus more enticing. So, when you think about it, the real public safety problem is the one that enables and incentivizes the cartels to commit heinous crimes in the first place: the Drug War itself.

Arguing about where the cartels bought their guns is like arguing the make of the bus that just hit you: it's trivial, at best, and probably a sign you have brain damage.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

UPDATE: This isn't meant to be a dismissal of the ineptitude that plagued Operation Fast and Furious. This was a post about the underlying problems, not the highly questionable tactics employed in that operation.

Police Officers Respond to Incentives Too

Last week, former undercover police officer Stephen Anderson told the New York State Supreme Court that planting drugs on innocent people was so common that it didn't even register emotionally to him. The story is starting to get traction in the media as an egregious example of police corruption, but it's notable only because of the admission to the practice in open court. Each year, there are hundreds of cases in which police officers are caught stealing, using, selling, or planting drugs or pocketing the proceeds from drug busts. Despite the obligatory PR protestations that any given instance of corruption is an isolated case, the systemic, legal, social, and economic incentives in every law enforcement agency in America combine to make police corruption virtually inevitable. And with no other category of crimes are these incentives stronger than with drug crimes.

Anderson testified that drugs would be seized from suspects at a given bust, divided, and then used again as evidence against other people on site (or at a time later) who had nothing to do with the initial arrest. This was, in part, due to established drug arrest quotas the officers needed to meet. As public servants, police departments face the same budgetary pressures as any other government entity and thus their officers are required to meet certain benchmarks set by the powers that be. Added to the normal budgetary justification, however, many police officers are in the position to confiscate cash and property that can be sold at auction thanks to civil asset forfeiture laws. Many departments across the country keep a percentage or the entirety of forfeiture proceeds, so pressure to maintain a certain level of drug arrests is something straight out of Public Choice: 101.

So far, about 400 cases have been dismissed because of these most recent revelations from the NYPD. It's too early to say how many and to what extent the victims were “innocent,” but the city seems to think 400 people were victimized by lying police officers. The police were able to lie with impunity because they enjoy the advantage of assumption of innocence. Despite the “innocent until proven guilty” mantra that all defendants are pretended to enjoy, an arrestee's word against the testimony of a police officer (and perhaps his partner) is, absent independent damning evidence of police malfeasance, next to worthless. This reputation imbalance is amplified by the unintended consequence of plea bargains: if the potential penalty is large enough, accepting a plea bargain in the face of nearly certain conviction becomes a rational decision for an innocent person. It doesn’t help that the label of “drug dealer” carries a social stigma just below “murderer” and “rapist”—and the potential sentences for drug crimes reflect that.

While the present NYPD case primarily deals with officers trying to advance their own careers, police corruption takes many different forms and affects every type of jurisdiction.

Authorities in Tulsa, Oklahoma are digging out of the mess members of their police department put them in. Nearly a dozen present and former officers of Tulsa’s police department—as well as one BATFE agent and one former officer turned-Secret Service Agent—have been implicated, terminated, indicted and/or convicted of police corruption charges ranging from, inter alia, staging illegal drug busts to embezzlement to perjury to distribution charges. At last count, 41 different people have had their federal convictions thrown out or state charges dropped as a result of the investigation into the department. Attorneys are now poring over the cases of countless other convicts and defendants who may have been railroaded by the Tulsa PD. (It should be noted that the people getting the strongest consideration are those who were naïve enough to refuse plea bargains at some point in the judicial process.)

Despite federal stings catching officers red-handed, confessions of wrong-doing that resulted in termination from the police or federal agencies, only four officers have pleaded or been found guilty. Five remain on the police force. The investigations into the TPD are considered closed and so the only hope for measures of justice are the investigations into case files and those related to the numerous civil suits the city faces.

The point is, these are but two recent and galling cases of police corruption. For every Tulsa and New York City there are innumerable cases of unreported shakedowns, coercive threats, and brazen theft by individual officers all over the country. This isn't the work of a few "bad apples," it's a systemic failure of police departments that are asked to solve an intractable policy problem all the while maintaining the utmost integrity on individual and organizational levels. Officers are highly incentivized to break the rules—and the law—either to satisfy the demands placed on them or to pad their own pockets. There are layers of protection built into the system to keep officers safe from public scrutiny and prosecution, and it's nearly impossible for an ordinary American—let alone an accused drug dealer—to protect herself. Meanwhile, the consequences of the legal and extra-legal drug war continue to chip away at the freedom of criminals and law-abiding Americans alike...and we are all less safe because of it.

bellum medicamenti delenda est