Re-Branding the War on Drugs: Three Decades of Race, Drugs and Street Policing in New York

• In Event: Fifty Years of Drug Arrests: Crime Control or Oppression? (Session 1)

Abstract

Crime trends in New York over the past 50 years show a recurring pattern of cascading and concurrent drug and crime epidemics. Beginning with the heroin epidemic of the 1960s and continuing through the emergence of robust street markets in cocaine and later crack, policing tactics through the 1990s focused on controlling drug markets and containing their endemic violence. Despite the collapse of street drug and crime markets in the 1990s, two features of the earlier eras carry over: the disparity between race-specific trends in drug use and drug arrests, and the constancy of race-specific drug enforcement. This paper shows enduring racial disparities in drug arrests even as street policing has been rebranded from the “buy and bust” tactics of the earlier epidemics to proactive street policing in the Order Maintenance and Stop-and-Frisk the current era. We show that racialized drug enforcement, at one time endogenous with crime, has become an externality today, carried forward with a new label and logic but with a tenuous and distal connection to crime and drugs.

Author

• Jeffrey Fagan, Columbia Law School