From "Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America":
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This was how Coughlin did his job on many a night. Coughlin couldn’t do much about all the shooters in Southeast who got away with it. But he could enforce drug laws, gang injunctions, and parole and probation terms relatively easily just by driving around and making “good obs”— good observations, cop lingo for catching, at a glance, a bulge under a shirt, a furtive motion of hands. A chase might ensue, and sometimes ended with the cops shutting down whole neighborhoods as the LAPD “airship,” or helicopter, thumped overhead. Coughlin took extra risks to get guns— this was the gold standard.
Coughlin’s methods were guaranteed to look like straight harassment to those on the receiving end. After all, how important was a bag of marijuana in a place where so many people were dying? But Coughlin’s motivation wasn’t to juke stats, boost his department “rating,” or antagonize the neighborhood’s young men. He had seen the Monster, and his conscience demanded that he do something. So he used what discretion he had to compensate for the state’s lack of vigor in response to murder and assault.
This practice of using “proxy crimes” to substitute for more difficult and expensive investigations was widespread in American law enforcement. The legal scholar William J. Stuntz singled it out as a particularly damaging trend of recent decades. In California, proxy justice had transformed enforcement of parole and probation into a kind of shadow legal system, sparing the state the trouble of expensive prosecutions. State prisons, already saddled with sick and elderly inmates, were all the more crammed as a result.
But in the squad rooms of Southeast station, cops insisted that desperate measures were called for. They would hear the name of a shooter, only to find they couldn’t “put a case” on him because no witnesses would testify. So they would write a narcotics warrant— or catch him dirty. “We can put them in jail for drugs a lot easier than on an assault. No one is going to give us information on an assault,” explained Lou Leiker, who ran the detective table in Southeast in the early aughts. To them, proxy justice represented a principled stand against violence. It was like a personalized imposition of martial law.
Leovy, Jill (2015-01-27). Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (pp. 140-141). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
When the author was asked in the comments to expound on the thesis he just provided a link to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Court#Due_process_and_r...
I think the crux is in the last paragraph of that section, although the link to the War on Drugs is not made explicit:
> Conservatives angrily denounced the "handcuffing of the police." Violent crime and homicide rates shot up nationwide in the following years; in New York City, for example, after steady to declining trends until the early 1960s, the homicide rate doubled in the period from 1964 to 1974 from just under 5 per 100,000 at the beginning of that period to just under 10 per 100,000 in 1974. Controversy exists about the cause, with conservatives blaming the Court decisions, and liberals pointing to the demographic boom and increased urbanization and income inequality characteristic of that era. After 1992 the homicide rates fell sharply.
I think it's entirely reasonable that the War on Drugs began as a reaction to rising crime rates.
My two additional bits: I've often heard that the US is a little exceptional in that it approaches the problem of "police doing bad things" by throwing "tainted" evidence out and mostly not holding the police accountable for their actions, whereas other countries allow the "tainted" evidence to stand but then allow some sort of proceeding against the police to address the bad behavior. It seems from my limited understanding that the US approach stands on the Warren Court.
It's interesting that both aspects of the US approach (War on Drugs, shielding the police from liability) are under fire. I wonder if these things are as controversial in other Western countries -- if not maybe the Warren Court really does deserve some scrutiny. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that the Warren Court caused the police protectionism, rather that it tacitly allowed it to persist with frameworks that mostly provide indirect corrective feedback to police misbehavior.
