These are not cops who take bribes or commit other crimes. Other than routinely lying, they are law-abiding and dedicated. They don't feel lying under oath is wrong because politicians tell them they are engaged in a ``holy war'' fighting evil. Then, too, the ``enemy'' these mostly white cops are testifying against are poor blacks and Latinos.
The federal government reports that more than 1.3 million drug arrests were made in 1994, 480,000 of which involved marijuana. About 1 million of the total drug arrests were for possession, not selling.
Despite government drug-war propaganda that big-time dealers are its targets, only 24 percent of the total drug arrests were for selling. Almost all those arrested for selling are small-timers, in large part supporting their own drug use. Often they are inveigled by undercover police to up the ante. Many of the arrests for selling are made without search warrants and almost all the possession arrests are without warrants.
In other words, hundreds of thousands of police officers swear under oath that the drugs were in plain view or that the defendant gave consent to a search. This may happen occasionally, but it defies belief that so many drug users are careless enough to leave illegal drugs where the police can see them or so dumb as to give cops consent to search them when they possess drugs. But without this kind of police testimony, the evidence would be excluded under a 1961 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Mapp vs. Ohio.
I became a New York City policeman five years before the Mapp decision. We were trained to search people who appeared suspicious. I questioned the apparent contradiction posed by the Fourth Amendment, which guaranteed that people would be secure in their person and house from a search without a warrant. The instructor said not to worry. A suspect could sue in a civil action but no jury would find against a cop trying to stop dope from being sold. He went on to say that if the courts really meant it, they wouldn't allow such evidence into a criminal trial.
In its Mapp decision, the Supreme Court cited this police attitude and the routine violations of the Fourth Amendment as reasons enough to establish a national rule to exclude illegally obtained evidence. Gradually, as police professionalization increased, police testimony became more honest.
But the trend reversed in 1972, when President Nixon declared a war against drugs and promised the nation that drug abuse would soon vanish. Succeeding presidents and Congresses repeated this false pledge despite evidence that drug use, drug profits and drug violence increased regardless of expanded enforice perjury is a part of the drug war.
But recently a number of police leaders have conceded that racially disparate arrest rates and illegal police searches and testimony are a problem. Last year, for example, New York Police Commissioner William J. Bratton warned his officers not to lie about how they obtained evidence, saying that he would rather they lose the case than commit perjury. Last month, Baltimore Police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier ordered his cops to stop arresting awks pontificate about the immorality of people putting certain kinds of chemicals into their bloodstream.
Joseph D. McNamara, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the former police chief of San Jose, wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times
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