A War on People. Jarrett Zigon
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thousand individuals were stopped and frisked in New York City alone, 87 percent of whom were either African American or Latino American. Perhaps most disturbing about this form of surveillance is that 89 percent of these stops turned up nothing. Yet the highest number of arrests (over five thousand) were for possessing personal-use quantities of marijuana, which under New York City law is not an offense unless shown in public, which occurs when a police officer asks you to empty your pockets. Overwhelmingly, those stopped, frisked, and arrested are young African American and Latino men, and this tactic is predominantly carried out in the neighborhoods where these men live.29 The result, as illustrated by Terrance, is that this very real possibility of stop-and-frisk that many African Americans and Latino Americans must live with every day in New York and elsewhere has left many feeling that their neighborhoods, their streets, and even their own front stoops are no longer places where they can dwell.30
Stop-and-frisk is likely the most “successful” police tactic in the war on drugs. This is particularly so in New York City, although similar tactics are used in other cities in North America, Great Britain, Russia, and likely elsewhere. As we saw with Bud, this police tactic is also used on a lonesome California highway. It is not only responsible for a significant amount of the surveillance the drug war allows to be placed on neighborhoods and individuals—it also contributes to the vast increase of incarceration rates in the United States and other countries, particularly for those carrying small, personal-use amounts of marijuana. Indeed, the policing and surveillance techniques of the drug war are largely responsible for the mass incarceration of nonviolent and low-level drug users around the globe, as the global prison population has skyrocketed in the last three decades to over ten million persons.31 Thus, for example, when Thailand renewed its war on drugs with vigor in 2003, in addition to the over two thousand extrajudicial killings done by the police and military, over seventy thousand people were also rounded up and detained without due process.32 Although the government claims that these were all drug dealers, reports by various nongovernmental organizations and anti–drug war organizations show that most of them were simply drug users. Furthermore, prison population numbers alone do not accurately depict the total number of drug users who are incarcerated, as millions more around the globe are held against their will in the prison-like conditions of various rehabilitation and detention centers. Thus, for example, it is estimated that up to a half million people are held in drug detention centers in China, where they are systematically exposed to “beatings, lack of medical treatment, and rape,” as well as forced labor up to sixteen hours per day, oftentimes in centers that have labor contracts with private companies.33 Similar conditions can be found in such centers across Russia.34
But no country incarcerates drug users, and its population in general, like the United States, which now has the highest level of incarceration on the planet and, for that matter, the highest level in modern history approached, but not surpassed, only by the Soviet gulag system under Stalin.35 The drug war and its often racialized tactics have fed this mass incarceration such that, for example, in 2012, 1.55 million people were arrested on nonviolent drug charges, the vast majority of whom were African American or Hispanic.36 Indeed, those who profit from this carceral political economics recognize the centrality of current drug policy and laws to their corporate success. Thus, for example, in a 2010 report to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, the country’s “largest owner and operator of privatized correctional and detention facilities” highlighted changes to current drug law as one of the primary risks to its growth and profit.37 This recognition and concern is not surprising since in the last thirty years (or, as we will see shortly, since the militarization and law enforcement aspects of the drug war have become fully knotted) the prison population in the United States has increased by 500 percent, and stop-and-frisk and other forms of drug war surveillance have been key factors in these skyrocketing numbers. Thus, for example, in 1980, a total of 41,000 drug offenders were in all state and federal prisons and local jails, while in 2011 this total stood at 501,500.38
If we follow the assemblic relations of the drug war from these situated manifestations of stop-and-frisk through the hyperaggressive act depicted by Bud of “both cops pull[ing] their guns and aim[ing] them at me,” we are able to disclose how such policing that takes the form of intense violence, intrusive surveillance, and excessive incarceration are in fact intertwined with another aspect of this assemblage. That is, the global militarism aspect. The link between these localized police tactics and global militarism is the militarization of the police. Although police militarization had already slowly started to occur in the 1960s in response to increased civil unrest and urban rioting, it finally emerged as the phenomenon it is today in the 1980s as just one part of what at the time was called a “total war” against drugs. From the 1981 Congressional Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act; to the 1986 National Security Decision Directive 221 that not only instructed the U.S. military to further assist law enforcement agencies but also mandated that it train and help foreign militaries carry out antidrug operations;39 to the 1988 bill authorizing the National Guard to assist local police in drug interdictions; to the 1989 policy that established regional task forces within the Pentagon to work closely with local police in antidrug efforts; to “the 1033 program” of the National Defense Authorization Security Act of 1997, which established the Law Enforcement Support Program to more easily transfer military equipment to local police—all of this resulted in the close cooperation between the military and the police, including the training of the latter by the former, and thus the militarization of police equipment and tactics.40 As was recently revealed by the events in Ferguson, Missouri, American local police are now armed with machine guns, tanks, and military-style surveillance equipment and trained in military-style siege, combat, and “interrogation” tactics, enabling them to control and occupy entire neighborhoods and regions in military fashion. Indeed, those weapons manufacturers who sell to both the military and local police recognize the intertwining of global militarism and militarized policing within the drug war assemblage. Thus, for example, the German defense manufacturing company Heckler and Koch advertises the MP5 semiautomatic weapon with: “From the Gulf War to the Drug War—Battle Proven.”41
This militarization of the police as one aspect of the larger militarization of the drug war has its origins in the 1980s, despite the overwhelming media claim that this is an offshoot of the war on terror. As Radley Balko has convincingly shown, to a great extent the war on terror—like the hostage and rioting scenarios before it—has largely been used as a convenient excuse for the militarization of the police.42 For the overwhelming majority of the actual use of militarized police since the 1970s and right up to the writing of this book have been in drug war situations, such that most of the over one hundred SWAT raids that occur daily in the United States are drug related. And, for example, of the fifty thousand to sixty thousand times in 2005 that SWAT teams “violently smash[ed] into private homes,”43 oftentimes in the middle of the night with machine guns blasting, they were not for the purpose of taking down cartels or breaking up a trafficking ring but rather “to enforce laws against consensual crimes,” such as the personal use of some drug.44 To the extent, however, that police militarization has increased in response to the war on terror, this is best understood as a tighter intertwining knot of the surveillance and control, carceral political-economic, and global militarism aspects of the drug war assemblage. How this intertwining became knotted can be seen in the development of the latter aspect of the drug war and particularly in the increasing link between counternarcotics and counterterrorism.
The global militarism aspect of the drug war has been significant from the war’s declaration by Nixon in 1971. For not only did this declaration result in the increased funding for domestic law enforcement training and cooperation between enforcement agencies and the creation of new state and federal legislation in support of this law enforcement, but Nixon also used military and economic aid to force countries “to reduce the manufacture and trafficking of narcotics within their borders.”45 Beginning from this decisive moment, the drug war assemblage increasingly became—and particularly so during the Reagan and Bush years—partially constituted by an intertwining of national and international legislation, economic aid and development, and military aid and eventually intervention, all of which rested on the international inequalities that characterized Cold War politics.46