Drug War

I read this article in the HuffPost, which features a girl that had been brutally attacked yet the police refused to investigate even as she dogged them for a year, investigated the crime on her own, interviewed witnesses, and identified her attackers. Still the police didn't do anything until a story was published in a local paper. Topping off the irony is that about a year later, a full SWAT team broke down her door on a drug tip. So the fight against marijuana gets lots of agents, time and money, the fight against people that would bash your head in doesn't even get a police report filed. Another Chicago PD member offers great insight as a response to the article.

The problem isn't the Chicago PD. It's the perverse incentives of our drug war that rewards police departments nationwide for drug busts but provides few incentives for capturing murders. It's the same incentives that caused officers in New York to admit to planting marijuana on innocent people as well as tricking others into a committing crimes (PDF) that they would not otherwise have committed.

We all understand how things such as our current drug war as well as it's perverse incentives occur. They come from good places. The problem is that laws are necessarily course instruments and therefore always have unintended consequences. But what has it accomplished? It directly supports Evo Morales and has resulted in thousands of deaths and nearly open civil war in Mexico. It has concentrated an enormous amount of wealth and weapons in the hands of the worst. It disproportionately punishes people of color, which slows down our improvement in national race relations. It fills our jails with non-violent offenders costing us billions of dollars each year... and it takes away detectives within the Chicago PD that should be capturing the brutes that bashed that poor girl's head in. Change is needed.

Contemplating Barak

I've listened to and heard the discontent with Obama for quite a while. In some ways... I don't get it. He's passed more common-sense legislation than anyone I can remember. But still, I guess when your campaign is about excelling and being different, perhaps being very good just doesn't live up to expectations. Well I recently read an email from a young, black attorney that wrote to Andrew Sullivan and it really gets to the heart of how I feel about it:

Thank you so much for writing such an eloquent defense of Obama. I'm a black attorney in my mid-20s and I'm very gainfully employed at a big law firm. My parents grew up in poverty, raised themselves to the middle class and then sacrificed so that I could go to elite schools for my entire life with the hopes that I will do better than them one day. Things are good for me mostly, but times are tough for a majority of my friends. My minority friends and I are very happy with the president and take attacks on him very personally. To the first point, we are happy because it seems that minorities, unlike the liberal white students I went to school with, had reasonable expectations. We knew that Obama could only do but so much in the face of the opposition he has to deal with and we are happy with what he has achieved.


And not to be too racial about this, but myself and a lot of my minority friends sense that white liberals' disappointment from Obama comes from a sense of entitlement.

Unlike affluent white liberals, minorities in this country seem to have a better grasp of a key truth in life: you don't always get everything you want. We know, if not firsthand then from the stories of our parents, that America isn't always a nice place, and all you can hope for is incremental change. Unlike a lot of our affluent white liberal friends, we are used to not getting it all and have learned to live with it.

To the second point, the way Obama is attacked hurts us personally because so many of us see ourselves in the president. We are middle-class black and Hispanic kids who did all the right things. Worked hard. Went to elite schools. Got the right jobs. We did what conservatives often accuse blacks of not doing. We pulled ourselves up.

And then what? We are torn down, doubted by our white coworkers and called affirmative action phonies by our white supervisors. We see it in the workplace in a thousand different subtle ways. We are held to a different standard. So when we see the best of us, a man who has independently climbed to the top of the American meritocracy, be attacked in such unreasonable and personal ways, we take it hard. If the editor of the Harvard Law Review can't be accepted as competent in this country, then how can we?

But again, we still 'know hope' because we know how the world works. We know how America is. We hold onto incremental progress and don't fixate on what hasn't been achieved. We've done it for 400 years. We'll keep doing it because this is home and we don't have any other choice.