Joseph McNamara, Drug Warrior Turned Conscientious Objector, RIP

Joseph McNamara, who
died on Friday at the age of 79, had been publicly criticizing
the war on drugs since retiring from his last job in law
enforcement, running the San Jose Police Department, more than two
decades ago. When he began his second career as a drug-war
dissident in 1991, Americans were
overwhelmingly opposed to legalizing even marijuana, so it took
guts for him to argue that violence is not an appropriate response
to drug use, especially given his professional background. That
background made McNamara an especially effective critic of
prohibition, since he had witnessed its futility and pernicious
consequences firsthand.

In a 2002 interview
with Reason‘s Michael Lynch, McNamara explained that he
had harbored doubts about the vain crusade to stop Americans from
using certain arbitrarily chosen psychoactive substances since his
days as a New York City beat cop in the 1950s. Those doubts
solidified when he wrote the thesis for a Ph.D. in public
administration from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
“I wrote my dissertation in 1973 and predicted the escalation and
failure of the drug war—and the vast corruption and violence that
would follow,” McNamara told Lynch. “I never published it because I
wanted a police career and not an academic career.” But after he
retired in 1991 and became a fellow at the Hoover Institution,
McNamara was increasingly outspoken on drug policy, serving as an
adviser and speaker for Law
Enforcement Against Prohibition and bringing a much-needed
insider’s perspective to discussions of prohibition’s impact on
policing. 

McNamara was especially incisive in explaining the relatively
subtle ways in which prohibition corrupts police practices, as in
this excerpt from the Reason interview:

Last year, state and local police made somewhere around 1.4
million drug arrests. Almost none of those arrests had search
warrants. Sometimes the guy says, “Sure, officer, go ahead and open
the trunk of my car. I have a kilo of cocaine back there but I
don’t want you to think I don’t cooperate with the local police.”
Or the suspect conveniently leaves the dope on the desk or throws
it at the feet of the police officer as he approaches. But often
nothing like that happens.

The fact is that sometimes the officer reaches inside the
suspect’s pocket for the drugs and testifies that the suspect
“dropped” it as the officer approached. It’s so common that it’s
called “dropsy testimony.” The lying is called “white perjury.”
Otherwise honest cops think it’s legitimate to commit these illegal
searches and to perjure themselves because they are fighting an
evil. In New York it’s called “testilying,” and in Los Angeles it’s
called joining the “Liar’s Club.” It has lead some people to say
LAPD stands for Los Angeles Perjury Department. It has undermined
one of the most precious cornerstones of the whole criminal justice
process: the integrity of the police officer on the witness
stand.

McNamara was talking about the militarization of policing long
before it became a subject of much discussion following the recent
unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. “When you’re telling cops that
they’re soldiers in a Drug War,” he
said at the International Conference on Drug Policy Reform in
1995, “you’re destroying the whole concept of the citizen peace
officer, a peace officer whose fundamental duty is to protect life
and be a community servant.” He elaborated on the theme in a 2006
Wall
Street Journal essay:

Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed. An
emphasis on “officer safety” and paramilitary training pervades
today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that
cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed.
Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six
.38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols
with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles,
weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary
circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated
areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that
the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be
heavily armed.

McNamara also highlighted the racist origins and racially
disproportionate impact of drug prohibition, a theme that would
later be taken up by critics across the political spectrum,
including
Michelle Alexander and
Rand Paul. “The drug war is an assault on the African-American
community,” McNamara told Lynch in 2002. “The laws that we have are
the last vestiges of Jim Crow.”

For years McNamara, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer
last year, was working on a book titled Gangster Cops: The
Hidden Cost of America’s War on Drugs. Given the insights
he must have gleaned from 35 years as a cop and two decades as a
scholar, I was eager to read it. It would have been a fitting
coda to his brave work as drug-war veteran turned conscientious
objector.