It's a popular misconception that ending the drug war would end the injustice. But as much as I'd like to see the war on drugs put to a swift end, it's not the root of the problem.
Arrest quotas have become the standard for judging police officer performance in many cities, and fines for trivial offenses have become a key revenue generator for many local governments (see the DoJ review of Ferguson for a particularly awful example). "Justice" for petty crime has become a self-sustaining industry - and a profitable one, as we can see with the rise of private for-profit prisons.
If it's not drug paraphernalia, it's some other charge - jaywalking, loitering, and the ever popular "resisting arrest". A recent video interview with a former Baltimore cop summed it up well. He pointed out that it's pretty much impossible to drive a car or walk down the street without breaking some law or another. So cops can easily arrest anyone, at any time, for largely fabricated reasons.
Throw in arrest quotas and fine revenue as municipal funding, and you have a formula for mass arrests and incarceration for trivial offenses. The trick then is to find people who can be arrested who won't rock the boat politically... the poor, and the non-white. Now, you wind up with a racist justice system, not out of racist intent, but out of its very architecture.
The solution is for comfortable, safe, middle class white Americans to stop ignoring and start caring.
>The solution is for comfortable, safe, middle class white Americans to stop ignoring and start caring.
This is pretty laughable. Not only will the wider class of people benefiting from racial and class privilege never actually care, but they'll be shocked out of caring as soon as it impacts their bottom line.
Remember also that the FBI and other police organizations explicitly rely on entrapment to make examples as to why people shouldn't be involved in activism, so people from privileged backgrounds will be afraid to even get involved in social change.
I'm right with you there. On the other hand, I think it can be done, with the right leadership, and the right combination of circumstance, delicacy, and brute force. Historically, it happened very quickly in the 1950s/1960s, due in no small part to the arrival of television. When comfortable white America finally saw what was happening, out of sight, they became agents of change themselves. The distance from Brown vs Board of Education to MLK's assassination is only about ten years, but things changed tremendously in that time.
Likewise, I think the rise of easy cell phone recording and viral stories has the potential to change the situation very quickly. We got our first taste of this with Rodney King two decades ago, but it's really coming to the fore now. We're seeing police getting charged with murder now in cases where they would have gotten a commendation before, because the violence is recorded. I think we're only a few years out from body cameras being standard equipment.
I've already noticed a significant change in tone in discussions online, with a lot less reflexive defense of the police, and a lot less crypto-racist "thug" stuff. Progress is being made.
I think part of the solution is to ban quotas for performance review. The only metrics that should matter are the average rate of reported crimes (solved vs unsolved if they're investigators) and the average number of non-trivial complaints (excessive force, IA investigations or infractions, and so forth). Anything else should be ignored as to the LEO's performance such as the arrest rate. It just seems logical that we get our metrics of how well cops are doing in line with what actually needs doing.
