Mayor for Life by Marion Barry

Author:Marion Barry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Strebor Books

CHAPTER 11

D.C. DRUG WARS

No one was prepared for the drug culture and the violence that took over the streets in the mid-1980s with crack cocaine; it simply took over. And it was not only happening in Washington; it was all over America: New York, Florida, California, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit. The police weren’t prepared for it and the federal government wasn’t ready for it, either. There was no amount of money that we could toss on it with more police to make it go away. You try to cut money in one area to make more available for something else, and you find that it still isn’t enough to make that much of a difference.

The culture of unemployment and the increasing cost of living made the time ripe for a lot of young men who fell right into the fast money that they were making out in the streets. That was the quandary I was in. You could never stop people from wanting to take or sell drugs unless you had enough jobs or treatment for them. That was undeniable! Once they started making thousands of dollars selling drugs out on the streets, a lot of the kids didn’t want my jobs anymore. You were not going to make thousands of dollars a day in the mayor’s summer youth jobs program.

I continued to think about more ways to help people to find employment while creating more opportunities for them in Washington. I felt the improvement of the people’s lives was the most important thing and the only way to make a difference. But the violence of the drug years was so brutal that it took precedence over everything. We started having more murders in one year than we had in ten years. We had over two hundred murders in 1983 and the numbers continued to escalate.

That was Police Chief Maurice “Big Mo” Turner’s solution: “Let’s lock ’em all up.” Police chiefs all over the country were struggling. Mo Turner, whom I appointed in my first term, had been on the force for many years. In the beginning of his career patrolling, he couldn’t arrest white folks. He could only detain them. He worked his way through the ranks from officer to sergeant. He was one of the few blacks who could pass the test at the time, until he finally made the rank of captain, where the mayor could appoint him to any position above captain. He finally made it to assistant chief. He was a policeman’s policeman. He was D.C.’s second black police chief.

Mo Turner was in the same dilemma other police chiefs were in—locking up drug dealers and drug users. That was Mo’s recommendation to me. He called it Operation Clean Sweep. There were over 12,000 people arrested over the years fighting the drug wars. In hindsight, this was not the solution. If police arrested twenty in one night, there were twenty more to take their place. Then there were the federal crack versus powder cocaine laws.

It was the beginning of a really tough and agonizing situation in D.

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