AlterNet has reprinted an excerpt from the new book, Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé on the Dark Side of American Policing, in which former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper writes about the trouble with American law enforcement today.

“Even today,” Stamper writes, policing “serves the interests of politicians over ‘the people,’ landlords over tenants, merchants over consumers, whites over blacks, husbands over wives, management over labor — except when ‘labor’ is the police union.” — San Diego Union-Tribune

Breaking Rank primarily focuses on police corruption, but Stamper takes a chapter to look at the effect of the war on drugs on America.

Nowhere is this misguided campaign waged more mindlessly than in New York. The “Rockefeller Drug Laws” call for life in prison for first-time offenders convicted of possessing four ounces, or selling two ounces, of a controlled substance. The result? The state’s prison system is filled to the gills with drug offenders, most of them convicted of minor offenses, most of them nonviolent, taking up 18,300 of its beds.

By any standard, the United States has lost its war on drugs. Criminalizing drug use—for which there is, was, and always will be an insatiable appetite — has been a colossal mistake, wasting vast sums of money, and adding to the misery of millions of Americans.

The solution? Decriminalization. (Not “legalization,” which would take government out of the picture altogether — and doom desperately-needed drug reform.) Decriminalization means you take the crime out of the use of drugs, but preserve government’s right — and responsibility — to regulate the field. — Breaking Rank

Stamper entered law enforcement as a beat cop in San Diego in 1966. In 1994 he was named as Seattle police chief. He retired in 2000 amid controversy over his handling of the 1999 Seattle WTO riots. Stamper gives a detailed account on what was happening behind the scenes during the WTO riots:

In the Incident Command System, which we had adopted (and trained for) long before WTO entered the picture, the chief of police has, by design, no “operational” role. His or her name and title might appear at the top of official documents, but if you searched those documents for a job description you’d find none.

There are compelling reasons to keep police chiefs out of the operations arena. They are simply too busy, across a broad range of organizational and community duties, to master the kind of continuously updated specialized expertise needed to handle a SWAT incident, a crime scene, or a major demonstration. . . .

If [mayor] Paul Schell wasn’t responsible for this mess, who was? I was. The chief of police. I thought we were ready. We weren’t. I thought protest leaders would play by the rules. They didn’t. I thought we were smarter than the anarchists. We weren’t. I thought I’d paid enough attention to my cops’ concerns. I hadn’t. All in all, I got snookered. Big time.

To this day I feel the pangs of regret: that my officers had to spend long hours on the streets with inadequate rest, sleep, pee breaks, and meals, absorbing every form of threat and abuse imaginable (including, for a number of officers, a dose of food poisoning, from eating vittles that had been sitting out all day); that Seattle’s businesses were hurt during the rampaging; that the city and the police department I loved lost a big chunk of collective pride and self-confidence; that peaceful protestors failed to win an adequate hearing of their important antiglobalization message; and, yes, that Paul Schell’s dream of a citywide “dialogue” had been crushed. — Breaking Rank

Tavis Smiley has an interview with Norm Stamper on PBS on Thursday, 23 June.