Pubdate: Sun, 23 Jul 2017
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2017 The New York Times Company
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Andrea J. Ritchie

THE FEMALE VICTIMS OF THE WAR ON DRUGS

As debate raged around health care and Russia-gate last month,
Attorney General Jeff Sessions quietly held a "national summit" of law
enforcement representatives to discuss the future of policing.

Vice President Mike Pence predicted that the summit, which was largely
held behind closed doors, would "impact this country for years to
come." Its purpose was to influence the recommendations - due out next
week - of the Department of Justice Task Force on Crime Reduction and
Public Safety, created in response to one of President Trump's
executive orders. Drugs featured prominently on the agenda.

This should come as no surprise. This spring Mr. Sessions instructed
federal prosecutors to seek the highest possible sentences in drug
cases, and the administration's proposed budget increased spending on
the Drug Enforcement Administration by $150 million while cutting
funds for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration by $109 million. Mr. Sessions has also signaled his
intent to step up enforcement of laws targeting marijuana. All these
are in contrast to recent policy shifts reflecting the growing
consensus that the aggressive policing of the war on drugs has failed.

Doubling down on the drug war is likely to result in increased
violence, not increased public safety. The damage these policies have
done to black communities has been well documented. But less attention
has been paid to the ways that women of color specifically are
targeted in drug cases and are subject to abuse or assault by police
officers.

 From 1980 to 2014, the rate of growth in the number of women in prison
outpaced that of men by more than 50 percent (and black women continue
to be incarcerated at twice the rate of white women). Women are
particularly vulnerable to the drug enforcement tactics acclaimed by
Steven H. Cook, the former prosecutor who leads Mr. Sessions's task
force: "We made buys from individuals who were lower in the
organization. We used the mandatory minimums to pressure them to cooperate."

As is true in most industries, women are largely relegated to the
lower echelons of the drug trade. They have been aggressively
prosecuted on the theory that they would lead law enforcement to
elusive "drug kingpins." Yet because they had little information to
trade, they were often saddled with sentences much longer than those
of men higher up in the industry.

Then there are the police encounters that lead to these sentences,
which are often characterized by physical, sexual and sometimes deadly
violence.

The infamous former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw -
convicted in 2015 of 18 counts, including the rape and sexual battery
of black women - often ordered women to lift their shirts or open
their pants to show him they were not carrying any drugs. In another
notorious case, four women arrested on drug-related charges came
forward to accuse two Los Angeles police officers of coercing sex from
them. Research suggests that drug law enforcement is too often
accompanied by such sexual shakedowns, in which women - who may or may
not be using, carrying or dealing drugs - are given the choice between
performing sexual acts or facing what could be decades in prison.

A Government Accountability Office report on contraband searches at
airports, released in 2000, reflected another form of violation.
Black, Asian-American and Hispanic women, it found, were almost three
times as likely as men of the same race to be subject to humiliating
strip-searches. Black women in particular were more likely than any
other group to be X-rayed in addition to being frisked, though they
were less likely to be actually carrying drugs. The report also
mentioned instances in which travelers were subjected to body cavity
searches and monitored bowel movements.

Such intrusive procedures are not limited to airports. In 2015
Charneshia Corley was pulled out of her car at a gas station after a
police officer claimed he smelled marijuana during a traffic stop. Two
female officers then forced her legs apart and probed her vagina in
full view of passers-by.

Three years earlier, two other black women, Brandy Hamilton and
Alexandria Randle, were also subjected to a roadside cavity search by
officers who claimed to have smelled marijuana. These incidents
eventually prompted the Texas Legislature to pass a bill banning
cavity searches during traffic stops absent a warrant.

You may now be asking yourself: Can police officers actually get a
warrant to search someone's vagina? The answer is yes.

One night in 1986 Massachusetts police officers showed up at Shirley
Rodriques's house, forced open her door and, finding her sleeping in
bed with her husband, told her that they had a warrant to search her
vagina for drugs. When she refused their order to reach inside herself
and take out the "stuff," police took her to a hospital where, Ms.
Rodriques said, a physician forcefully searched her vagina while a
nurse held her down on the table.

No drugs were found. But when Ms. Rodriques filed a lawsuit claiming
her rights had been violated, courts found no wrongdoing, citing the
existence of a valid judicial warrant. It is still possible to get
such a warrant today.

Finally, there are the fatalities. While there are no official
statistics on the number of women killed or injured in drug raids and
arrests, the cases that have come to light give plenty of cause for
concern. Some victims were mothers, like Tarika Wilson, shot to death
by a SWAT team in 2008 in Ohio, as she stood, unarmed in a bedroom
with her six children, holding her 1-year-old baby. Some were
pregnant, like Danette Daniels, shot to death by a New Jersey police
officer following a drug arrest. Some, like Frankie Perkins and
Theresa Henderson, were choked to death by officers who believed -
erroneously, it turned out - that they had swallowed drugs. In one
case, a transgender teenager named Shelly Hilliard was brutally
murdered after being set up by police as an informant.

In addition to the drug war, women have also suffered from the "broken
windows" policing practices - the aggressive enforcement of minor
offenses on the unproven theory that it will prevent more serious
crime - that Mr. Sessions promotes. For instance, soon after Eric
Garner suffocated in a police chokehold, Rosann Miller, a black woman
who was seven months pregnant, said she was also placed in a chokehold
by a New York City police officer during an encounter that started
over the use of a barbecue outside her home.

Officers have also used the threat of arrests for minor "broken
windows" offenses to extort sex. In one case, a New York City officer
was convicted in 2010 of official misconduct for offering to rip up a
summons for being in a park after dark in exchange for oral sex.

These encounters do not reduce violence; they contribute to it.
Critics of police violence and mass incarceration have rightfully shed
light on the pain of families separated by long prison terms, of women
torn from partners and children. But women's suffering isn't
restricted to heartbreak: They have been raped, choked and killed, all
in the service of public safety. Sadly, the recommendations of
D.O.J.'s task force are likely to be a recipe for more of the same.

Andrea J. Ritchie is a lawyer, a researcher in residence at the Barnard 
Center for Research on Women and the author of the forthcoming 
"Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color."