Nancy Reagan's Zero-Tolerance Policing

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“Our job is never easy because drug criminals are ingenious. They work everyday to plot a new and better way to steal our children's lives…They prosper on our unwillingness to act. So, we must be smarter and stronger and tougher than they are. It's up to us to change attitudes and just simply dry up their markets…. when it comes to drugs and alcohol just say no.” Nancy Reagan’s famous remarks, made during a 1986 White House Address, are testament to the fear, uneasiness, and desperation which plunged the United States into a “war on drugs.” Beginning with Nixon’s 1974 proclamation of drugs as “public enemy number one,” American law enforcement has widely adopted a zero-tolerance approach to enforcing drug statutes, following Nixon’s advice …show more content…

Jeffery Fagan, a criminologist at Columbia University, reported, “There’s no good scientific evidence that broken-windows works or has much to do with crime… the few claims for it that people try to make have been contested. None of them stand up to really close examination.” (Auletta 2015). But not only is zero-tolerance policing ineffective, it is destructive; zero-tolerance destroys community trust in law enforcement and discourages community cooperation with officers, especially in inner cities (Carbonaro 2017). In The Wire, Carver is unable to provide Bunny with a list of gangs in the Western District because none of the people that he routinely “jacks up”, such as Poot, are willing to provide him with any information; Carver’s hostile treatment as seen in the beginning of season three reinforces legal cynicism, which has unfortunately become imbedded in the Code of the Street (Carbonaro

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