Pubdate: Sun,12 Nov 2000
Source: Kansas City Star (MO)
Copyright: 2000 The Kansas City Star
Contact:  1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108
Feedback: http://www.kansascity.com/Discussion/
Website: http://www.kcstar.com/
Author: Karen Dillon, The Kansas City Star

DRUG WAR FAILS, JUDGE BELIEVES

A federal judge said Sunday that the war on drugs discriminates against 
minorities, results in illegal searches and seizures and compromises police 
officials who benefit from money they seize.

"It is absolutely destroying our inner-city communities," District Judge 
Scott O. Wright said.

Wright was keynote speaker Sunday night at the Kansas City Jewish Community 
Relations Bureau/American Jewish Committee's human-relations awards banquet.

Drugs are a "real cancer" in America, Wright acknowledged. But the war on 
drugs has failed, he said.

Statistics show the number of Americans in prison for drug offenses this 
year was 458,000, up from 41,000 in 1980. He said that just 13 percent of 
drug users are black but 62.7 percent of convicted drug offenders are black.

"We have more young black men in jail than we have in college," he said.

Since 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court has "authorized cascading exceptions" to 
the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans from unreasonable searches 
and seizures.

Those exceptions now allow "police helicopters to peer into windows, police 
to search the passengers in cars whose drivers seem suspicious, and most 
notoriously, state agents to smash down doors without warning or without 
evidence of crime," Wright said.

Wright also raised concerns about racial profiling.

Kansas City police searching for drugs regularly look for suspicious 
passengers getting on and off trains and buses, he said. All the suspects 
who have come before him in such cases, Wright said, "are persons who 
police officers said were suspicious because they were either black or 
Mexican or Latino."

In one case, Wright said, he asked a Drug Enforcement Administration agent 
who has worked at Kansas City International Airport how many of the people 
he had stopped were carrying drugs. More than 80 percent did not have 
drugs, the agent testified.

Wright said police agencies face a corrupting influence because they have 
found a way to keep money that should go to other funds.

"I think that many of you here in this room read in The Kansas City Star in 
recent months about the revelations of the forfeiture laws for people 
suspected of carrying drugs," Wright said.

He said the stories detailed how police stop cars or invade a home to seize 
property or money. Local and state police then hand off the case to a 
federal agency because generally state law has tighter requirements for 
forfeiture than federal law.

Federal authorities return "most of the loot" to the local or state 
law-enforcement agencies, he said.

Under Missouri law, forfeited property and money goes to a school fund, he 
said.

Wright offered several solutions:

Do away with mandatory sentence guidelines that require severe penalties, 
because compassion should be shown in some cases.

Redirect some money used to confine defendants toward effective drug treatment.

Implement drug education programs in early elementary grades. 
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