Drug prohibition has contributed to police brutality and racial injustice in countless ways. Here’s one: “The escalation of the War on Drugs gave police officers both motivation and excuses to engage aggressively and maliciously with black communities.” Criminalization means more encounters with the police--encounters that can turn violent and even deadly.
But it’s worth recognizing that other, innocuous-seeming paternalistic prohibitions also provide the police with “motivation and excuses to engage aggressively and maliciously with black communities.” For instance, Jess has noted that mandatory seatbelt laws provide the police with an excuse to stop drivers--stops that can turn violent and even deadly. The police are also more likely to pull over black drivers than white drivers, and more likely to use force during an interaction with a black person than a white person.
Or consider the increasingly popular proposal to ban cigarettes outright. While this ban might appear benign at first blush, it too creates new occasions for the police to abuse their power. Yale Law Professor Stephen Carter says, “On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.” Carter specifically mentions the case of Eric Garner, who was killed by a New York City Police officer. His alleged crime? Illegally selling cigarettes. Any law, no matter how beneficial it seems in principle, can be violently abused in practice. So we would do well to heed Carter’s advice: “Don’t ever fight to make something illegal unless you’re willing to risk the lives of your fellow citizens to get your way.”