Pubdate: Sun, 21 Feb 2016
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2016 The Baltimore Sun Company
Contact:  http://www.baltimoresun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37
Author: Kevin Rector

NEW LINES IN WAR ON DRUGS

Changing Views on Enforcement Meet With Praise and Alarm

As the nation debates the war on drugs, Baltimore has already begun 
to redraw the battle lines.

Baltimore police have shifted the department's strategy to focus more 
on largescale, violent players in the drug trade and less on addicts 
committing lesser offenses.

The result on the street: Drug arrests dropped by nearly 50 percent 
last year, according to a data analysis by The Baltimore Sun. Police 
didn't just arrest fewer people for marijuana - small amounts of 
which were decriminalized in 2014 - but for other illicit drugs, 
including heroin and cocaine, and for crimes ranging from possession 
to distribution.

"We're reinventing a process," said Deputy Police Commissioner Dean 
Palmere. "Times change, policing strategies change, cultures change 
within major cities, and you have to continually alter the fluid 
processes of dealing with crime."

A national cadre of law enforcement officials, including Baltimore 
Police Commissioner Kevin Davis, are espousing a new approach to 
community policing that's less involved in the lives of individuals 
in the throes of drug addiction. Davis has said he wants to use 
limited police resources to go after those who intimidate 
neighborhoods and commit violent crimes, not people who need medical care.

Palmere said the department has been focusing more on gunmen than 
heroin users, for instance. He noted that gun arrests have increased 
significantly in recent months, jumping more than 65 percent so far 
this year over the same period last year.

The drug strategy shift follows a long-term trend of fewer arrests in 
Baltimore after law enforcement abandoned zero-tolerance policing 
that resulted in mass arrests for minor offenses and strained 
police-community relations.

Police officials have also acknowledged that arrests dropped off 
after six officers were charged in connection with Freddie Gray's 
death a week after his April arrest. Gray had suffered spinal 
injuries while in a police transport van. Prosecutors have questioned 
whether the officers patrolling in a high drug-trafficking area had 
reasonable cause to stop Gray, which many say led to uneasiness among 
many officers about doing their jobs.

But while the total number of arrests in Baltimore dropped by nearly 
30 percent to 24,130 in 2015, the number of arrests for "controlled 
dangerous substances" dropped even more precipitously - by nearly 50 
percent to about 6,400. That was almost twice the decline in illicit 
drug arrests in the previous year.

Dissenting voices

Critics say the department's new approach is wrong-headed.

Anthony Barksdale, the city's former acting commissioner who helped 
lead drug enforcement initiatives in the department under past 
administrations, said drug arrests not only take people involved in 
violence off the streets but can put people with valuable street 
intelligence across the table from detectives working homicides and shootings.

A decline in drug arrests means less information - the lifeblood of 
good police investigations - and could be a contributing factor to 
the department clearing just 30 percent of homicide cases last year, 
the deadliest on record, Barksdale said.

"How many opportunities of gathering intelligence are lost now 
because cops are saying, 'Oh, a joint? That's bull--'?" Barksdale 
said. "If you don't have the basic intelligence of the drug game 
coming into the detectives or coming into your specialized units, 
you're lost in Baltimore. You're done."

The department is reimagining the war on drugs as grass-roots 
activists, mayoral candidates and state lawmakers continue to debate 
drug policies and as law enforcement officials and politicians push 
for change on the national level.

Policymakers are grappling with "the whole notion that our 
incarceration rate is a national disgrace" and that "drug 
incarcerations are particularly hard to justify," said Peter Reuter, 
a University of Maryland public policy and criminology professor who 
founded the RAND Drug Policy Research Center.

Many feel "there is a better way to solve these problems," he said.

Spreading scourge

A sharp rise in heroin overdoses statewide and in suburban 
communities far removed from the traditional heroin corners of 
Baltimore's urban core has further sharpened the debate about how to 
combat drugs. Gov. Larry Hogan created a task force that recommended 
expanded access to treatment. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake also 
convened a task force, and some leading mayoral candidates are 
calling for an end to the war on drugs.

"There's strong recognition that we aren't going to arrest our way 
out of the problem," said Kurt Schmoke, former mayor and now 
president of the University of Baltimore. "It's no longer a problem 
of 'those people.' It's everybody's problem."

Schmoke said the nation's drug war has been a "cancer on the body 
politic" for years, with a focus on more policing that has done 
little to stem violence. Instead, he said, it has led to mass 
incarceration, thousands of young Baltimore residents with criminal 
records and few job prospects, and drug addicts being treated as 
pariahs rather than as patients capable of rehabilitation.

Some lawmakers, medical professionals and community leaders like 
Schmoke want to further decriminalize illicit drugs, though the idea 
is not expected to gain traction in Annapolis this year.

Opponents say such proposals push drug policy in Maryland in the 
wrong direction.

In a city made famous as a hotbed of heroin abuse by pop-culture 
depictions of inner-city street life - think HBO's "The Wire" - the 
idea that police should soften their approach to drug crime is 
fraught with controversy.

Residents who say police disproportionately target young black men in 
their neighborhoods also lament the domination of local drug gangs. 
And last year's spike in violent crime has stoked concerns that 
failure to take a hard-line approach on all drug crime can lead to 
violence. Baltimore recorded 344 homicides in 2015, the most ever on 
a per-capita basis.

In some ways, what's being debated politically is already happening 
on Baltimore's streets.

As the state decriminalized the possession of less than 10 grams of 
marijuana, starting in October 2014, the number of arrests for such 
small amounts dropped from 3,387 in 2013 to 1,884 in 2014, and then 
to just six in 2015.

But arrests for possession of more than 10 grams of marijuana in 
Baltimore also declined sharply, from 1,368 in 2014 to 493 arrests in 
2015, data show. And police made fewer arrests last year across 
nearly every other category of drug offense - from simple possession 
to distribution, misdemeanors to felonies.

That has affected the courts. David Walsh-Little, chief attorney in 
the felony trial division of the Office of the Public Defender in 
Baltimore, said the percentage of his attorneys' cases that are 
drug-related dropped by 10 percent in January, compared to January 
2015. In 2011, drug cases represented about 35 percent of all felony 
cases in the division, he said. So far in 2016, that number is closer 
to 23 percent, he said.

Support, not arrest

Baltimore police are working on an experimental program that they 
hope to launch this year to divert low-level drug offenders to 
treatment and support services while allowing them to avoid arrest.

Steve Cook, president of the National Association of Assistant United 
States Attorneys, said a crackdown on drugs in the mid-1980s 
dramatically reduced violent crime, and that those efforts shouldn't 
be dismantled now.

Cook said that "common sense would tell you" that Baltimore's decline 
in drug arrests and increase in homicides last year "are inextricably 
intertwined," because the drug trade is violent. "Not only is it 
inherently violent itself, but it perpetuates violence because people 
go out and commit robberies to get the money to support their drug 
habits," he said.

"Fundamentally, how do you think most of our gangs are funding their 
activity? It's largely through drug trafficking, and much of it is 
territorial, and then that breeds more violent crime," he said. "The 
notion that the two are unconnected would be a hard sell."

Barksdale said the department should consider reconstituting its 
Violent Crime Impact Division, a specialized unit that he helped lead 
and that gained a reputation for taking violent criminals off 
Baltimore's streets.

While the unit was later dismantled amid allegations of 
heavy-handedness - it was at the center of many city settlements in 
police brutality cases - Barksdale said those problems could be fixed 
and that it worked, pointing to the number of homicides dropping 
below 200 in 2011.

"Baltimore knows the drug issue fuels violence here, so how can you 
not get that a decline in drug arrests increases the violence? How 
can you not get that?" Barksdale asked.

Palmere said the Police Department is combining the best of older 
drug policing models and the violent crime division, which he used to 
lead, with new strategies from across the country. He said 
community-minded approaches are replacing past models, and that this 
chance actually increases the amount of intelligence coming into the 
department.

"We've never stopped debriefing or interviewing people to gain 
information," he said. "In fact, we've actually built a better 
rapport in the communities to seek information."

The department has not "steered away from the street-level dealers," 
Palmere said, but rather officers are more strategic about whom they 
target. The department is using analytics from partnerships with 
federal law enforcement agencies - enhanced last summer by the 
department's "War Room" - to prioritize cases against drug 
organizations with links to violence.

"We're basically able to rank these organizations," he said, pointing 
out that felony narcotics arrests are up 1 percent compared to this 
time last year.

Palmere said police are well aware that drugs and violence are deeply 
intertwined in Baltimore, but neither he nor Davis is worried that 
the decline in drug arrests drove the increased violence last year.

"We're not going to arrest our way out of a crime crisis," he said. 
"It's not a numbers game. We've been in a numbers game in the past 
and, frankly, it didn't get us to where we want to be."

Tessa Hill-Aston, president of the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP, 
said drugs cannot be ignored, and that police should be going after 
drug traffickers. But she agreed that focusing solely on "the guys on 
the corner" and locking up addicts does not help the city move 
forward, she said.

"Yes it's a nuisance to society, but everybody does not need to go to 
jail," she said. "Jail is just a holding tank where they aren't 
getting any help."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom