Published on 6 Aug 2013
“The police have become more militarized, more soldier-like in the last generation or two,” explains journalist and author Radley Balko. “It applies to the weapons they are using, the uniforms they wear…to the tactics they use, to what I think is the most pervasive problem which is the mindset that police officers take to the job.”
Balko, author of the new book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, sat down with ReasonTV to discuss the book, the growth and development of SWAT forces, and how the drug war has fostered an “us against them” mentality within police departments.
Balko is a senior writer and investigative reporter at the Huffington Post. His work primarily focuses on the drug war and police abuse. Previously, Balko worked as a senior editor for Reason Magazine.
August 7, 2013
Reason.tv – Radley Balko Discusses Militarization of Police Force
August 1, 2013
BBC News Magazine features Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop
Non-embeddable video, so you’ll have to click here to see it.
Police officers in the US today are increasingly not only armed but heavily armoured.
The author and investigative reporter Radley Balko traces this shift in his book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.
Balko explains that race riots in the ’60s and America’s war on drugs in the subsequent decades led police departments to adopt weapons, uniforms and tactics inspired by military special forces. He writes that fears of terrorism after 9/11 accelerated the trend — even in unlikely targets such as rural Idaho.
And he argues that the military appearance of officers today makes it much harder for them to connect with civilians in communities they are policing.
Produced by the BBC’s Ashley Semler and Bill McKenna
June 24, 2013
Read an excerpt from Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko
There is an excerpt from the book Rise of the Warrior Cop in the July issue of the ABA Journal:
Are cops constitutional?
In a 2001 article for the Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal, the legal scholar and civil liberties activist Roger Roots posed just that question. Roots, a fairly radical libertarian, believes that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t allow for police as they exist today. At the very least, he argues, police departments, powers and practices today violate the document’s spirit and intent. “Under the criminal justice model known to the framers, professional police officers were unknown,” Roots writes.
The founders and their contemporaries would probably have seen even the early-19th-century police forces as a standing army, and a particularly odious one at that. Just before the American Revolution, it wasn’t the stationing of British troops in the colonies that irked patriots in Boston and Virginia; it was England’s decision to use the troops for everyday law enforcement. This wariness of standing armies was born of experience and a study of history — early American statesmen like Madison, Washington and Adams were well-versed in the history of such armies in Europe, especially in ancient Rome.
If even the earliest attempts at centralized police forces would have alarmed the founders, today’s policing would have terrified them. Today in America SWAT teams violently smash into private homes more than 100 times per day. The vast majority of these raids are to enforce laws against consensual crimes. In many cities, police departments have given up the traditional blue uniforms for “battle dress uniforms” modeled after soldier attire.
Police departments across the country now sport armored personnel carriers designed for use on a battlefield. Some have helicopters, tanks and Humvees. They carry military-grade weapons. Most of this equipment comes from the military itself. Many SWAT teams today are trained by current and former personnel from special forces units like the Navy SEALs or Army Rangers. National Guard helicopters now routinely swoop through rural areas in search of pot plants and, when they find something, send gun-toting troops dressed for battle rappelling down to chop and confiscate the contraband. But it isn’t just drugs. Aggressive, SWAT-style tactics are now used to raid neighborhood poker games, doctors’ offices, bars and restaurants, and head shops — despite the fact that the targets of these raids pose little threat to anyone. This sort of force was once reserved as the last option to defuse a dangerous situation. It’s increasingly used as the first option to apprehend people who aren’t dangerous at all.
June 18, 2013
Radley Balko’s new book
I’m a fan of Radley Balko’s work (I quote him and hat-tip him a fair bit), so I’m looking forward to reading his new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. Here’s a glowing review from Scott Greenfield:
The book, published by Public Affairs and scheduled for release on July 9, 2013, starts at the beginning, taking us from the days when Americans policed themselves to the birth of the occupation of policing. While I was well aware of Radley’s persistence and acumen at chronicling current events, I never realized what a thorough researching her is. The history of policing is remarkably impressive.
It’s critical to appreciate the history of policing, to understand that what we now see as normal and inescapable wasn’t always the case. For most of our history, this country did not have a group of people with shields and guns who wandered the streets ordering people about. The fall from grace, If you perceive it as I do, came fast and hard.
American attitudes toward police were built on images of Andy Griffith, strolling the streets of Mayberry to save random cats and, an allusion Radley employs, serving as guest umpire in the occasional baseball game. Good. Honest, One of us. This was the police officer upon whom we relied, and the one we pictured as we told our children that they were here to help us; they were our friend.
Starting in the 1960’s, Radley takes us decade by decades down the road to perdition. As he wears his libertarian politics on his sleeve, it came as no surprise that he gave the politics of law enforcement special scrutiny. His hatred of Richard Nixon for manipulating the silent majority’s hatred of hippies and counterculture into the War on Drugs is palpable. On the other hand, there is no reluctance to blame Bill Clinton for his deceitful abuse of the COPS program, and its infusion of billions into the drug war a few decades later.
Radley is not only a surprisingly good story teller, generally low key in recounting tales of individual harm interspersed with broad influences that gave rise to putting heavy weaponry into the hands of children. There are times when the narrative gets a bit breathless, trying hard to capture the confluence of political deceit on the part of some and ignorance on the part of others. Then again, the alternative would be to simply call out the liars and morons for their contribution to a state of affairs that served to put a naïve American public at grave risk for such puny and transitory purposes as winning an election.
June 20, 2011
Radley Balko dispels a few myths about the justice system
In his new column at the Huffington Post, Radley Balko discusses some common myths in US criminal justice:
Myth 1: You Can’t Be Tried More Than Once For The Same Crime
The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that no person shall “be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.” This protection against “double jeopardy” is intended to prevent the government from retrying the same defendant over and over until prosecutors can get a conviction.
But there are some exceptions. First, the protection only comes into play once a jury has convicted or acquitted a defendant. So in trials that end with a hung jury or a mistrial, the prosecution can usually bring the same charges again. One particularly egregious example is Curtis Flowers of Mississippi, who has been tried an incredible six times for the murder of four people in 1996.
Second, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the government can charge a defendant with both a crime and the conspiracy to commit that crime without violating the constitutional prohibition on double jeopardy. This gives the government two opportunities to convict for is essentially the same offense. Conspiracy is often easier to prove than the underlying crime. It also gives prosecutors a way to rope in alleged offenses they can no longer charge separately due to statutes of limitations.
Finally, there is the “separate sovereigns” exception to double jeopardy. This allows a defendant to be tried, convicted and sentenced for the same crime in both state and federal court. The most well-known example of the separate sovereigns exception is when the Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted in state court, then convicted in federal court of violating King’s civil rights.
May 2, 2011
Radley Balko: “He won”
A distressing round-up of the lifetime achievements of the late Osama Bin Laden:
We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 . . .
- We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
- We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
- In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
- We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
- The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
- The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
- Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)
The list, unfortunately goes on.
Yes, bin Laden the man is dead. But he achieved all he set out to achieve, and a hell of a lot more. He forever changed who we are as a country, and for the worse. Mostly because we let him. That isn’t something a special ops team can fix.
July 12, 2017
Someone at the NRA finally speaks out on the shooting death of Philando Castile
Radley Balko on the problems the NRA creates for itself by its reflexive support of the police, which weakens its efforts on upholding gun rights for ordinary Americans:
At long last, someone from the National Rifle Association has spoken up about Philando Castile. Sort of. During a CNN segment, NRA spokeswoman and pundit Dana Loesch said this:
I think it’s absolutely awful. It’s a terrible tragedy that could have been avoided. I don’t agree with every single decision that comes out from courtrooms of America. There are a lot of variables in this particular case, and there were a lot of things that I wish would have been done differently. Do I believe that Philando Castile deserved to lose his life over his [traffic] stop? I absolutely do not. I also think that this is why we have things like NRA Carry Guard, not only to reach out to the citizens to go over what to do during stops like this, but also to work with law enforcement so that they understand what citizens are experiencing when they go through stops like this.
As Jacob Sullum points out at Reason, this is pretty weak stuff. A law-abiding gun owner was shot and killed by a cop after doing everything he was supposed to do. It then took more than a year for anyone from the nation’s largest gun rights organization to comment, and when she did, she offered a vague, heavily qualified, quasi-criticism of the cop while implying not only that Castile contributed to his death but also that he might be alive if only he were carrying an NRA Carry Guard card.
This is about par for the course for the NRA. This is the group that claims to be the only thing preventing the government from obliterating the Second Amendment, yet they’re noticeably quiet about the people doing the most violence to the Second Amendment — the armed, badge-wearing government employees we call law enforcement officers. For all the NRA’s dire warnings about government gun confiscation, the real, tangible threat to gun-owning Americans today comes not from gun-grabbing bureaucrats but from door-bashing law enforcement officers who think they’re at war — who are too often trained to view the people they serve not as citizens with rights but as potential threats. Here, the NRA just doesn’t want to get involved.
[…]
In short, the NRA seems to think we’re at risk of creeping tyranny and abuse of power from all sectors of government except from the men and women armed, badged and entrusted with the power to kill. That’s a problem, because if armed agents who enforce the laws on the ground aren’t required to respect our rights, our rights don’t really exist.
The Supreme Court could rule the NRA’s way on the Castle Doctrine for the next 25 years, but if the police continue to kick down doors with impunity, law-abiding gun owners will be at risk, and the Second Amendment will be more of an empty gesture than a constitutional protection. The Supreme Court could rule the NRA’s way on conceal carry for the next 25 years, but if the organization keeps pushing the line that cops are at war, that the populace is dangerous, and that every citizen is a possible threat, the right to carry a gun in public will always be constrained by cops conditioned to see every weapon as a threat to their existence.
Finally, the Supreme Court could rule the NRA’s way and abolish all the state laws like those that ensnared Shaneen Allen, but as long as the NRA and its allies push rhetoric that makes white people (and white cops) see all crime with a black face, the right to bear arms for people who look like her — or who look like Philando Castile — exist only in theory.
February 3, 2017
The Gorsuch nomination
In the Washington Post, Radley Balko says that the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch is actually a gift to the Democrats:
It always seems a bit futile to speculate about how a Supreme Court nominee will behave down the line. Conservatives are still kicking themselves over David Souter. Eisenhower called Earl Warren the biggest mistake of his career. I personally was skeptical of Sonia Sotomayor’s history as a prosecutor and her judicial record on criminal-justice issues. She has turned out to be the court’s most reliable defender of due process and the rights of the accused.
But, of course, we do need to look into nominees, and their records and personal histories are all we have. So let’s have a civil liberties-centric look at Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee to replace the late justice Antonin Scalia.
The Good: As far as I’m concerned, the most important thing to look for in a Supreme Court justice right now is a willingness to stand up to executive power. For at least the next four years (in all likelihood), the White House will be occupied by a narcissist with a proclivity for authoritarianism. We aren’t yet two weeks in to Trump’s administration, and we’re already barreling toward one or more constitutional crises. Oddly and perhaps in spite of himself, of the three names said to be on Trump’s shortlist (Gorsuch, Thomas Hardiman and William Pryor), Gorsuch appears to be the most independent and has shown the most willingness to stand up to the executive branch. […]
Gorsuch is perhaps most known for his decision in the Hobby Lobby case, in which he wrote a strong opinion denouncing the birth-control mandate in the Affordable Care Act. Whether you think that’s a plus or a minus obviously depends on whether you prioritize reproductive rights or religious freedom. But even if you’re bothered by his opinion in that case, Gorsuch’s championing of religious freedom does at least seem to be careful and principled, and not partisan toward Christianity. In Yellowbear v. Lampert, a majority of his fellow appeals court judges ruled that a federal statute required the state of Wyoming to grant a Native American prisoner access to a sweat lodge on prison grounds. Gorsuch went farther, arguing that even prisoners still retain a right to practice their religion.
Gorsuch is a critic of “overcriminalization,” or the massive and growing federal criminal and regulatory codes. I think that’s a good thing. The Volokh Conspiracy’s Ilya Somin points out that he has history of ruling that criminal laws should be read narrowly, with ambiguities resolved in favor of defendants. That, too, is a good thing.
I was also struck by Gorsuch’s acceptance speech. It was noticeably un-Trumpian. He was humble, reverent of institutions and deferential to the office for which he had just been nominated. Unlike the man who nominated him, he came off as someone devoted to the law, not someone who believes he is above it.
December 31, 2016
What I was reading in 2016 (and 2015)
I don’t read as much as I’d like, and time spent blogging or gaming certainly eats into the available time that would otherwise be spent between the covers of yet another book. Here are the books and publications I managed to digest this year (not counting re-reads of old favourites):
October 15, 2015
Opponents of sentencing reform
Jacob Sullum points out a few misconceptions about sentencing reform:
Anderson, with Sessions’ help, manages to pack at least half a dozen serious misconceptions into a 375-word post. Let’s consider them one at a time.
Is “crime rising in America”? As Jesse Walker noted here last month, the latest FBI numbers show that violent and property crime both fell last year, continuing a “long decline” that began in the mid-1990s. Although some American cities have seen spikes in violent crime this year, it is not clear whether they represent a nationwide increase or, if so, whether that increase represents a reversal of recent trends or a blip.
Are police “increasingly under siege”? Last month my former Reason colleague Radley Balko, who writes about criminal justice for The Washington Post, reported that “2015 is on pace to see 35 felonious killings of police officers” and that “if that pace holds, this year would end with the second lowest number of murdered cops in decades.” As Jesse Walker pointed out here, such numbers have never deterred law-and-order types who propagate “the eternally recurring legend of a ‘war on cops.'”
Are drug traffickers “violent criminals”? Some are, but there is a clear distinction between stabbing or shooting someone and engaging in consensual transactions that Congress has arbitrarily decided to prohibit. Under current law, doing the latter is enough to trigger mandatory minimum sentences ranging from five years to life. By pretending there is no difference between violent predators and nonviolent drug offenders, opponents of reform make a hash out of any effort to focus criminal justice resources on the lawbreakers who pose the biggest threat to public safety.
August 18, 2015
How police departments justify militarization
In the Washington Post, Radley Balko looks at some documentation recently acquired by Mother Jones showing how police departments explain why they need war-fighting tools for police work:
Mother Jones got ahold of some of the forms police agencies fill out when requesting military gear from the Pentagon. They’re pretty revealing.
… the single most common reason agencies requested a mine-resistant vehicle was to combat drugs. Fully a quarter of the 465 requests projected using the vehicles for drug enforcement. Almost half of all departments indicated that they sit within a region designated by the federal government as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. (Nationwide, only 17 percent of counties are HIDTAs.) One out of six departments were prepared to use the vehicles to serve search or arrest warrants on individuals who had yet to be convicted of a crime. And more than half of the departments indicated they were willing to deploy armored vehicles in a broad range of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) raids.
Police officials frequently say they need these behemoth vehicles to protect officers from active shooters. But that isn’t what they’re telling the Pentagon when they request them.
By contrast, out of the total 465 requests, only 8 percent mention the possibility of a barricaded gunman. For hostage situations, the number is 7 percent, for active shooters, 6 percent. Only a handful mentioned downed officers or the possibility of terrorism.
“This is a great example of how police as an institution talk to each other privately, versus how they talk to the public and journalists who might raise questions about what they’re doing with this equipment,” says Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University who has studied police militarization for decades. When police are pressured in public, Kraska says, “They’re going to say, ‘How about Columbine?’ or point to all these extremely rare circumstances.”
Kraska is correct to call such situations extremely rare. Despite the saturation coverage mass shootings get, statistically, the odds of one occurring in your immediate community are still incredibly low. I suspect one big reason the public hasn’t been more outspoken in opposing the transfer of this sort of gear is because most people think such shootings are more common than they are. That’s mostly because the media have been good at scaring people into thinking as much. (Ironically, one of the media outlets most guilty of overstating the frequency of such events … is Mother Jones.)
July 27, 2015
The “Ferguson Effect”
Radley Balko explains why the concerns and worries of police officials have been totally upheld by the rising tide of violence against police officers in the wake of the events in Ferguson … oh, wait. No, that’s not what happened at all:
The “Ferguson effect,” you might remember, is a phenomenon law-and-order types have been throwing around in an effort to blame police brutality on protesters and public officials who actually try to hold bad cops accountable for an alleged increase in violence, both general violence and violence against police officers.
The problem is that there’s no real evidence to suggest it exists. As I and others pointed out in June, while there have been some increases in crime in a few cities, including Baltimore and St. Louis County, there’s just no empirical data to support the notion that we’re in the middle of some national crime wave. And while there was an increase in killings of police officers in 2014, that came after a year in which such killings were at a historic low. And in any case, the bulk of killings of police officers last year came before the Ferguson protests in August and well before the nationwide Eric Garner protests in December.
Now, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund has released its mid-year report on police officers’ deaths in 2015. Through the end of June, the number of officers killed by gunfire has dropped 25 percent from last year, from 24 to 18. Two of those incidents were accidental shootings (by other cops), so the number killed by hostile gunfire is 16. (As of today, the news is even better: Police deaths due to firearms through July 23 are down 30 percent from last year.)
[…]
A typical officer on a typical stop is far more likely to die of a heart attack than to be shot by someone inside that car.
It’s important to note here that we’re also talking about very small numbers overall. Police officer deaths have been in such rapid decline since the 1990s that when taken as percentages, even statistical noise in the raw figures can look like a large swing one way or the other. And if we look at the rate of officer fatalities (as opposed to the raw data), the degree to which policing has gotten safer over the last 20 years is only magnified.
But the main takeaway from the first-half figures of 2015 is this: If we really were in the midst of a nationwide “Ferguson effect,” we’d expect to see attacks on police officers increasing. Instead, we’re seeing the opposite. That’s good news for cops. It’s bad news for people who want to blame protesters and reform advocates for the deaths of police officers.
May 29, 2015
The legacy of the great satanic sex abuse panic still resonates today
Radley Balko reports on the recent release of two former Austin, Texas daycare owners … who’ve been in prison since 1992 on the testimony of a toddler and “expert evidence” from a satanic ritual expert and how the moral panic of the day made it impossible for the courts to see how utterly unlikely the case actually was:
The panic actually began in the 1980s. It was instigated and perpetuated mostly by groups of fundamentalist Christians who saw Satan in every heavy metal album, “Smurfs” episode, and Dungeons & Dragons game, along with a quack cadre of psychotherapists who were convinced they could dig up buried memories through hypnosis. What they did instead was shed some light on just how potent the power of suggestion can be. Remarkably, children were convinced to testify about horrifying — and entirely fictional — violations perpetrated on them by care workers and, in some cases, by their own parents.
But it wasn’t just children. As the Kellers’ conviction shows, the panic was so overwhelming, it could convince trained medical professionals to see abuse where there was none. Some defendants were convicted of gruesome crimes such as the aforementioned dismembering of babies despite the fact that there were no corpses and no babies missing from the immediate area.
[…]
That the highest court in Texas still can’t bring itself to declare the couple innocent, in spite of all that we know now, shows just how difficult it can be to undo the damage caused by a moral panic and junk science in the courtroom.
[…]
Here’s an observation from the panic that I don’t think has been fully explored: These kids didn’t make up these stories. In this case and dozens of others, the kids were telling tales with details about geography, history and current events about which kids of their age couldn’t have known. That’s likely what made their stories seem somewhat credible. But the fact that it all was fictitious reveals a particularly unsettling truth: These sick, lurid, unimaginable abuses could only have been a product of the imaginations of the therapists, social workers, cops and/or prosecutors who interviewed the children. If the memories were implanted, those are the only people who could have implanted them. That means that the same people entrusted to protect these kids, and in whom these communities trusted to police the streets, prosecute crimes and administer therapy, were ultimately the ones capable of dreaming up detailed sexual fantasies that put children in bizarre rituals involving violence, animals, corpses and so on.
There’s a lot to be learned from these cases. For one, there are lessons about professional accountability: Not only were the vast majority of the prosecutors who put these innocent people in prison in these cases never sanctioned, but also most went on to great professional success, sometimes because of their role in these high-profile cases, and sometimes even after it was widely known that the people they prosecuted were innocent. There are other lessons here about how we screen “expert” witnesses, and how bad science gets into the courtroom. There are lessons about the power of suggestion that could be applied to eyewitness testimony and how we conduct police lineups.
But the drawing of lessons is something we typically do once a crisis is over. This one still isn’t. There are still people in prison awaiting exoneration in these cases.
October 23, 2014
Another quirk in the American justice system
In the Washington Post, Radley Balko explains how judges can convict you of crimes you were acquitted on or even crimes you were never charged with in the first place:
Most Americans probably believe that the government must first convict you of a crime before it can impose a sentence on you for that crime. This is incorrect: When federal prosecutors throw a bunch of charges at someone but the jury convicts on only some of those charges, a federal judge can still sentence the defendant on the charges for which he was acquitted. In fact, the judge can even consider crimes for which the defendant has never been charged.
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Jones v. U.S., a case that would have addressed the issue. The National Law Journal summarizes the facts:
[A] District of Columbia jury found Antwuan Ball, Desmond Thurston and Joseph Jones guilty in 2007 of selling between two and 11 grams of cocaine, relatively small amounts. They were acquitted on racketeering and other charges that they were part of an extensive narcotics conspiracy.
Yet, when U.S. District Judge Richard Roberts sentenced the three, he said he “saw clear evidence of a drug conspiracy,” and sentenced Ball, Thurston and Jones to 18, 16 and 15 years in prison, respectively — four times higher than the highest sentences given for others who sold similar amounts of cocaine, according to filings with the Supreme Court.
There have been other cases like this, including at least two in which federal judges sentenced defendants for murders for which they were never even charged, never mind convicted. So not only can a judge sentence a defendant for crimes for which a jury acquitted, he can sentence a defendant for crimes for which prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to charge.
May 8, 2014
Weighty injustice
Scott Greenfield discusses something most of us have never given any though to:
In a New York Times op-ed. former AUSA turned Minnesota lawprof Mark Osler did a mitzvah by explaining the game played in drug sentencing. After noting some of the problems recently raised about mandatory minimums, the pardon game and absurdly long Guidelines sentences, he goes on:
Unfortunately, none of this addresses a very basic underlying problem: We continue to use the weight of narcotics as a proxy for the culpability of an individual defendant, despite this policy’s utter failure. If a kingpin imports 15 kilograms of cocaine into the country and pays a trucker $400 to carry it, they both face the same potential sentence. That’s because the laws peg minimum and maximum sentences to the weight of the drugs at issue rather than to the actual role and responsibility of the defendant. It’s a lousy system, and one that has produced unjust sentences for too many low-level offenders, created racial disparities and crowded our prisons.
[…]
But when a person is prosecuted based upon an arbitrary distinction, that he carried a certain number of grams of dope (because we can all distinguish between the weight of 7 grams and 8, right?) it should reflect a significant difference in crime and sentence.
[Radley Balko] goes on to discuss a related, but separate, issue, that drug weight is aggregate rather than pure. In other words, ten kilos of cocaine can contain 9 kilos of baby laxative, cut as it’s called in the trade, and only one of active narcotic, but it’s still ten kilos for the purpose of charging and sentence. This is a policy decision, that the purity of the drug is not considered, even though it tells a great deal about where the defendant is on the food chain of drugs. The higher the purity, the higher on the food chain, as drugs get “stepped on,” or diluted, at each level down the chain.
This applies even with less applicable concepts, such as marijuana, where the weight of stalks and stems of seized marijuana plants can be included in aggregate weight even though they are useless as drugs. The message is, you pay by the pound, regardless. It simplified the police and prosecutorial function, even as it undermines any doctrinal justification for the charge and sentence.
