Christopher Ingrham writes:
No, The Wire does not explain what's happening in Baltimore this week, asmy colleague Alyssa Rosenberg wrote yesterday. Still, the show's creator and former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon knows a lot more about the city than most of us. And in a wide-ranging and riveting interviewwith The Marshall Project today, he offers an unequivocal assessment of how to turn things around in that city today.
"So do you see how this ends or how it begins to turn around?" Bill Keller asks him.
"We end the drug war," Simon says. "I know I sound like a broken record, but we end the [expletive] drug war. The drug war gives everybody permission to do anything. It gives cops permission to stop anybody, to go in anyone’s pockets, to manufacture any lie when they get to district court... Medicalize the problem, decriminalize [it] — I don't need drugs to be declared legal, but if a Baltimore State’s Attorney told all his assistant state’s attorneys today, from this moment on, we are not signing overtime slips for court pay for possession, for simple loitering in a drug-free zone... then all at once, the standards for what constitutes a worthy arrest in Baltimore would significantly improve."..."Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war."
A good start but let's face it legalizing drugs isn't going to solve every problem. As much as there is a chasm between thick and thin libertarians, there is also a difference between realistic libertarians and utopian libertarians (with considerable overlap between thin/realistic and thick/utopian).
ReplyDeleteThe utopians think that if you decriminalize or legalize drugs and police racial profiling then urban crime will be much reduced. The realists realize that gangbangers that sell drugs non-violently will need a new source of income as the income from selling drugs is cut off, and there is no telling what the picture of urban crime will look like after drug legalization (which should happen anyway).
One must not only abolish the foolish drug war but also the welfare-regulatory state and minimum wage, the latter which is essentially a price control. The welfare state encourages women to have children out of wedlock, thereby creating a de facto, dysfunctional familial situation. Unless these problems are sufficiently addressed the problem will continue to become increasingly acute.
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