Drug arrests nab minorities

A crowd gathered around Dan Bigg on a recent Sunday afternoon as he sat in the back of an oversized, silver-gray van parked with the engine running in Uptown's "Blood Alley," an area off West Wilson Avenue.

For two hours, Bigg talked to drug users, handed out supplies and performed about 10 HIV tests--just some of the services offered by the Chicago Recovery Alliance, a group Bigg started about a decade ago to educate drug users and reduce the spread of infectious diseases.

Last year, the program exchanged 2.65 million clean needles for used ones and provided HIV testing, condoms, counseling, medical referrals and other services to more than 14,000 drug users in Chicago and nearby suburbs. "The majority of them were white," Bigg said.

That is different from the group of people arrested in Chicago for the possession or sale of drugs. "There is a massive racial disparity in arrests and incarceration for drugs," he added.

"There's two different kinds of drug scenes," Bigg said of Chicago. "There's an open and obvious drug scene. The other is a little more discreet."

The overt drug scene is a trade carried out in the streets, alleyways and apartment doorways of Chicago's mostly poor, predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods, according to arrest records. The covert scene, less visited by Chicago police, occurs in predominantly white, middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods, according to academics and drug counselors.

Four out of every five people arrested for drugs in Chicago in 2000 were black. Most of the arrests took place in poor, predominantly black and Latino police districts. However, a 1998 telephone survey of Illinois residents, conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, showed that blacks, whites and Latinos had similar rates of recent and lifetime drug use. Rates were also consistent across class lines.

The Chicago Reporter analyzed data from Chicago Police Department drug arrest records for 2000, studies on drug-related emergency room visits and deaths, Census 2000, and income estimates. The Reporter found that:

* While blacks accounted for 79 percent of Chicago drug arrests, they comprised 66 percent of the area's clients in state-funded drug treatment centers, 57 percent of drug-related emergency room visits and 45 percent of drug-related deaths.

* In the seven police districts where whites outnumber blacks and Latinos, there were 4,243 drug arrests, or 12 percent of the citywide total. But 63 percent of the drug arrestees in those areas were black.

* More than half the city's drug arrests occurred in six districts, clustered together across the city's South and West sides.

* Blacks were arrested at a rate eight times higher than whites, and Latinos were arrested twice as often as whites.

* Arrests were nearly four times more likely to occur in the poorest districts than in the wealthiest districts, where blacks were 16 percent of the residents but 73 percent of the drug arrestees.

"We've been referring to the 'War on Drugs' the last few years as 'America's new Jim Crow,'" said Deborah Small, director of public policy and community outreach for the Drug Policy Alliance, a reform organization based in New York City.

"Black and brown people do not represent the majority of the people who buy, use or sell drugs," she said during a 2001 conference. "So, the fact that this is the result that we [in the United States] have after 25 to 30 years of fighting the 'War on Drugs' should say a lot about the country that we're living in today."

"I don't know of any part of this country, regardless of the black population, that doesn't have a disparity," Small said in a later interview.

Police and prosecutors said they do pay less attention to the more inconspicuous drug activity in predominantly white, middle-class neighborhoods and more attention to the open-air drug markets on the corners of the South and West sides. But the open street trade involves heavy gang activity and violence that endanger the community and are lightening rods for police.

"There's guns, gangs and drugs ... and there are drive-bys and there are people being shot through their windows," said John Gorman, communications director for Cook County State's Attorney Richard Devine. "There are people living in these neighborhoods who put their children to bed in bathtubs to keep them safe. People shouldn't have to do that."

"When you're sitting back in a classroom or in an office and you're looking at these figures, of course, they're going to look bad," said Jerry Robinson, chief of the Chicago Police Department's Organized Crime Division, which investigates drugs, gangs and prostitution.

"When you're driving around ... and you see what's going on out there on the street, then you can understand the reasons why something like that occurs," said Robinson, a 33-year veteran of the force. "It's what we see when we're out there on patrol, what we're told by the citizens from complaints we receive."

Phil Clime, formerly the commander of the Chicago Police Department's narcotics division and now chief of detectives, said police are aware that illegal drugs exist throughout the city.

Except for a dip in 1999, Chicago drug arrests rose each year from 1995 to 2000, but many residents and police said they often chase problems from one corner to the next.

Jamie Fellner, director of Human Rights Watch's U.S. Program, which investigates human rights violations, said losing scores of adult males to the criminal justice system might be too high a price for minority communities to justify the approach.

"They want something that addresses the problems of nuisance and violence but not at such a high cost," Fellner said. "What are [police] accomplishing with the arrest approach?"

Robinson said police are too often placed at the front of the fight against drugs. Law enforcement's primary role is to arrest drug dealers and drug users, he said. But there should be more partners to get at the drug problem from other directions.

"We're in this fight with the community," he said. "We can't do it alone."

Target Markets

From the living room window of her West Side home, Annie Mae Dickson can see young guys dealing dope to lines of cars.

Along with her husband, Willie, Dickson has lived for nearly 50 years on a bustling street in the 11th Police District, also known as the Harrison District. It has the busiest drug activity of the city's 25 police districts.

In 2000, police made 8,957 drug arrests--16 percent of Chicago's total--in Harrison. More than 8,000 blacks were arrested there for drugs, nearly twice the number of whites arrested in the entire city.

Although Dickson, 78, doesn't like to see the street dealers, whom she calls "foot soldiers," the older men who organize the operations really get under her skin.

"These boys, nice looking boys. Young boys. Dead. Shot down on the street," Dickson said. "I look at it first as a family, black family. Then I look at it as a community, black community. Third, I look at it as the black race. What's going to happen?"

West of Harrison is the 15th Police District, or Austin District, where officers made 6,097 drug arrests--5,579 of African Americans. Combined, these two West Side districts accounted for more than a quarter of the city's drug arrests.

Robinson said the city's open-air markets are almost entirely in low-income neighborhoods. And that's what residents most often report to the police, he said.

The two West Side districts ranked among the five poorest in the city, according to 2002 per capita income estimates from Claritas, Inc., a national marketing research firm. And in 2001, Chicago Police received 47,000 calls for service about drug activity in those districts compared with about 2,200 in the predominantly white 16th and 19th districts, said Pat Camden, deputy director of the department's News Affairs Division.

While the two West Side districts have nearly 2,400 white residents, according to the census, records show about 900 whites were arrested for drugs there in 2000. In the Northwest Side's 16th Police District, where more than 160,000 whites live, 335 whites were arrested.

One of the Dicksons' four children, Jerome, owns two apartment buildings and a parking lot on the same street as his parents' home. While all three Dicksons agreed police have made the neighborhood better in recent years, they wish there was another way.

Jerome Dickson said more black entrepreneurs in the area could buy and develop vacant land, producing jobs for young people who see no other opportunities but drug dealing.

"It's like you see a hole in the middle of the road down there and you know they're heading for it. You want to grab them," Jerome said. But "they just keep walking in that direction and sooner or later they're going to fall into that hole, or jail, or the grave."

Hidden Trade

For 15 years, Paul Jones, a northwest suburban white man, would call his drug dealer, arrange a meeting and pick up his crack and heroin. He was never arrested.

But sometimes Jones would get impatient waiting a couple of hours for a call back from his source. So he began making weekend trips to the West Side for drugs.

"I can have it in 10 minutes instead of waiting for a guy to wake up and do his family business or whatever," said Jones, who asked that his real name not be used since his employer is unaware of his drug use.

But he was arrested for drug possession three times on the West Side in 1995 and 1996, according to court documents. Now Jones said he will wait rather than risk getting picked up again.

Jones said he meets his dealers at various North and Northwest side locations. "Mostly mixed neighborhoods ... where I don't really stick out and neither does my dealer," he said. "We never meet at the same corner twice. You can go on like that for years."

It's seemingly a sound strategy. Police make few drug arrests on the North and Northwest sides. When they do, they usually pick up African American or Latinos, according to police data.

In the five police districts where the majority of the population is white, blacks were arrested 2,566 times and whites 1,034. In those five districts, 58 blacks were arrested for every 1,000 blacks living there; for whites, the rate was 3 of every 1,000 residents.

"Cops know that it's easier to go to the West Side," Jones said. For example, "the college may be full of [drug dealing], but you're not going to see freshmen standing out in front of the school yelling, 'Rocks and blow."'

Almost every day last year after class, David Burns, a student at a Chicago university, would return to his dormitory room and smell pot in the hallway.

Burns said several students often exchanged drugs in the dorms. "It wasn't really hidden," he said. Most of the users, he said, were "white, middle-class, from the suburbs."

Burns said a friend's older brother grew marijuana in the suburbs and would sell it in his and a neighboring dorm for $400 an ounce. "Probably [he] sold an ounce or two a day," he said.

Burns said students often smoked marijuana and bought Ecstasy. Ecstacy is a synthetic hallucinogenic, usually a pill or capsule, that his grown in popularity in the last few years.

He once accompanied a friend to buy Ecstasy: "We went into the dorm. We paged him from the front desk. He came down, signed us in. We went upstairs, went into his room, shut the door, bought the drugs, came down, signed out and went home. That easy."

Another friend was caught red-handed with drugs. "His punishment was not a fine. He was not reported to the police. Instead, he was asked to move dorms," Burns said. After the move, his friend continued to sell drugs.

Most students don't fear consequences, Burns said. "Eventually, you do it 30 times and you don't get caught," he said. "You kind of grow a little more comfortable."

Cline, of the police department, said fewer arrests are made in middle-class communities because drug trafficking is more difficult to detect there. Hte transactions often occur indoors and out of sight.

In a 1997 report on drug purchase and usage patterns in six cities, including Chicago, for the National Institute of Justice and the Office of National Drug Control Policy, K. Jack Riley wrote that whites and Latinos were more likely than blacks to buy their drugs indoors and in locations outside their neighborhoods. Riley is the director of the criminal justice program at RAND, a nonprofit Santa Monica, Calif.-based public policy research firm.

"In the middle-to-upper-class areas, they still have drug dealers working but they're not out there in the open, openly dealing their drugs the way you see in the low-income areas," Robinson said.

Dealers in these neighborhoods, like Jones', often deal to a select clientele--"people they know"--and supply lower-level dealers like those found on the corners, Robinson said. They also choose these neighborhoods to store large amounts of dope because there is little traffic to draw the attention of neighbors and police, he said.

But Darnell F. Hawkins, professor of sociology, criminal justice and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said, "Not all of the drug trafficking in affluent communities is that covert.

"One could go into affluent areas of north Chicago and the suburbs... [where] not all activity is hidden and unavailable for observation," Hawkins said. "A well-trained observer could detect drug trafficking on the street level as well as indoors."

John Hagedorn, a criminal justice professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that even a novice can detect the illegal drug trade among the middle class.

Hagedorn said a family friend invited him to a downtown Milwaukee nightclub to see the drug activity for himself.

For "The Business of Drug Dealing in Milwaukee" his 1998 report for the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, Hagedorn studied several of the city's drug markets, including the open-air markets in two inner-city minority neighborhoods as well as drug dealing among the middle class in the city's fringes and suburbs.

"Dealing was as open in those night clubs as it was on the streets of the center city," Hagedorn said. "If you know what you're looking for on those street corners, you can see it all over, and the same thing is true in these downtown night clubs.

"This one night club sold pizza from the drive-thru window, and cocaine was hidden in the crust," Hagedorn said. "It went on for years."

Reinforced Practices

Racial disparities also surface in arrest data for offenses that aren't drug related, Riley said.

He added that the practice stems not from intentional racial bias or "deliberate targeting," but from years of efforts to crack down on rising crime--efforts that have focused largely on non-white communities.

"I think that's [been] the pattern ... as long as there has been law enforcement and underprivileged classes," said William Chambliss, a sociology professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. For example, gambling arrests of 40 years ago also ended up targeting lower classes, he said.

"They could have found more poker games in white, middle-class homes but they were making arrests of guys shooting craps in the alley or having card games out of their apartments."

In Seattle, blacks were 8 percent of the population but 57 percent of those arrested for drug crimes in 1999. "Complex and indirect" police practices played a role in the racial disparity, Harvard University researchers Tal Klement and Elizabeth Siggins wrote in their report, "A Window of Opportunity: Addressing the Complexities of the Relationship Between Drug Enforcement and Racial Disparity in Seattle."

Again, researchers found no intentional bias, but concluded that "more private [drug] markets fall largely outside the radar" of police enforcement. The researchers recommended that Seattle police develop a focused drug enforcement strategy, target buyers rather than sellers and, to evaluate their progress, develop performance standards beyond arrest rates.

Robinson said the Chicago Police Department has a strategy for attacking drug crime. He would not provide details.

"We target drug activity in all areas of the city," he said. "I'm not going to say that we go out of here and our goal is just work in this low-income area of the city."

Chambliss said the racial gaps are likely to continue nationwide because police and prosecutors can maintain high arrest and conviction rates for the poor and minorities without provoking much public outcry.

The young African American male, he said, has become the accepted image of drugs in America. "If all the poor people in the U.S. were white, as they are in Sweden and Denmark, there would be much less tolerance for [the arrests] of drug offenders," he said. "The law enforcement system is simply constructed so that it's the powerless that are always going to be the raw materials for keeping it going."

This story is one in a series supported in part by a grant from the Criminal Justice Initiative of the Open Society Institute.

Tarshel Beards, Conethia D. Campbell, Josh Drobnyk, Rachel Kanter, Audra Martin, Chloe Mister, Cyril Mychalejko, Elizabeth Olsson and Jocelyn Prince helped research this article.

[Graph omitted]

Drug Arrestees

African Americans accounted for most of Chicago's drug arrests, even in
majority-Latino or predominantly white police districts.

         Black Districts  Latino Districts

Blacks         94%              62%
Whites          4%               9%
Latinos         2%              29%

Note: Table made from pie chart
         White Districts  Mixed Districts

Blacks         58%              70%
Latinos        14%              17%
Whites         27%              12%
Others          1%               1%

Notes: "Black" and "White" districts were at least 70 percent black or
white. "Latino" districts were at least 50 percent Latino. Of the city's
25 police districts, seven were "black" five "Latino" and three "white."

Source: Chicago Police Department and Census 2000; analyzed by The
Chicago Reporter.


Note: Table made from pie chart

COPYRIGHT 2002 Community Renewal Society
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