“I WENT BECAUSE I WAS TIRED, and I was hurting. I guess
that’s the difference. I was done,” says Vance.
Vance is just one of many names on Portland’s “secret list.” In
short, it’s a list of frequent arrestees kept by downtown police,
targeted for priority drug treatment. If anyone on this list is busted
for regular drug possession in certain areas of Portland—say, if
they’re carrying a crack pipe in Old Town—it’s no longer a
misdemeanor. Instead, they are prosecuted with a felony, and given a
choice: Either enter drug treatment, or go to jail.
It’s been 18 months since the Mercury first learned about
Portland’s secret list, but as this story goes to press, it’s been only
two weeks since I first met someone who’s actually been through the
controversial rehabilitation program.
It’s been a long road. First, the city denied the existence of the
list altogether—City Commissioner Randy Leonard, who takes credit
for spearheading the program, went so far as to write extensively about
it on this paper’s website last September:
“I have never been told of a list,” he wrote. “I have never seen a
list, I have never been told by the police bureau there is such a list,
and I have never emailed an officer or anyone else about a list.”
Leonard insists he was telling the truth at the time.
“When I said I didn’t know about a secret list, it’s because I
didn’t know,” Leonard says. “I knew they tracked people, but I didn’t
know it was on a list, and the moment I learned that the list was
secret, I asked why. Because it’s public information.”
It then took a legal fight by the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) of Oregon in February to get the city to formally articulate how
someone could end up on the list—ACLU partner attorney Elden
Rosenthal even compared those running it to the Gestapo.
“The principle at stake is not wanting to collect secret police
lists,” he said. “Secret police lists have never come to any good,
whenever they are used. There’s just too much opportunity for
abuse.”
Bizarrely it was Leonard, not the ACLU, who eventually forced Police
Commissioner Dan Saltzman to make the list public at a council hearing
on October 21. Saltzman has argued that the people on the list are
vulnerable individuals who should be protected from the glare of the
media. But ironically, some of these “vulnerable individuals” have been
more than happy to talk about the program, while Saltzman declined to
be interviewed for this story.
All participants in this article were willing to have their full
names printed—but the Mercury has chosen to omit last
names to protect their privacy, as well as to avoid any future problems
that could be caused for them by the long memory of the internet.
VANCE AND FLOYD
“I’ve been out here with no shoes on, no shirt, my pants full of
shit, down to 120 pounds,” says Floyd. “You become what the street
turns you into. Aggressive, careless, you take, take, take, and you
run, run, run.”
Floyd and I are enjoying coffee with Vance at Backspace on NW 5th
and Couch on Monday afternoon, October 26. On the short walk over from
the Estate Hotel where both men are now in “dry housing,” they cast
their eyes around for drug dealers.
“If anybody sees us coming over here with you, they’ll think you’re
a mark,” Floyd smiles. “And they’ll come get your money.”
“You best be careful,” Vance laughs.
They may be cracking wise now, but until earlier this year, Floyd
and Vance were among Old Town’s most desperate crack addicts. Floyd has
a string of felony convictions going back to 1988—mostly for
dealing, but a few for theft and two fairly recently for unlawful
possession of a firearm.
“I’ve been arrested eight times in a day,” he shrugs. “For 20 years,
I stayed numb.”
Floyd does most of the talking. Meanwhile, Vance has a string of
misdemeanor theft and cocaine possession convictions on his record, and
a couple of felonies for theft and burglary in the ’80s and ’90s. He
also has several convictions for alcohol on public property.
“Me, in a sober frame of mind, I’m not going to walk out and smoke
crack,” he explains. “You’ve got to get me drinking first.”
I like both men. I first met them five days earlier, at the day
treatment center run by Volunteers of America (VOA) in Southeast
Portland.
Vance went into rehab on May 12. “I was told nine months before I
went that I could go,” he says.
“He gave me some burritos and some bread as he was going,” says
Floyd, as he breaks into another smile. “I sold half of that shit.”
Floyd followed Vance into treatment on June 18. They stayed for
about three months—actually, Floyd stayed four—in the VOA’s
new 12-bed residential treatment center on SW 2nd. Both men have been
through treatment programs in the past, but this time, it was
different, they say.
“A lot of it, to me, was seeing people I’d been out on the street
with,” says Vance. “I’d say, ‘Well shit, I knew how Darryll was when he
was out there—he ain’t no worse off than I was. This could work
for me, too.'”
The 24-hour support offered by the program was vital for Floyd. In
previous treatment programs, he says, he would have an “issue” in the
middle of the night and have nowhere to turn for help. Both men are
about three months from looking for housing for themselves and
acknowledge that the road ahead isn’t easy.
“But we’re both gonna make it,” says Floyd. “We are. I networked to
get my drugs. I did everything I could to get my dope, and I’m gonna
get this too. The same way I went after my dope.”
DARRYLL
Darryll is further along than Floyd and Vance. He graduated from the
program in December last year, and is now living in Gresham, having
once been homeless in Old Town.
“We called ourselves the 12 generals,” Darryll says, describing his
three months in the residential treatment center with 11 other men. “On
the streets we couldn’t interact too much because we had to share the
money. Now we were all sleeping next to each other—we had to be
kind, turn the music down. And we couldn’t BS each other because we
knew the game.”
Now Darryll is facilitating his own rehabilitation groups at the
Grove Hotel on W Burnside, and organizing a blanket drive for the
homeless at VOA this winter. If he stays arrest free for three years,
Darryll’s name will fall off the list. At 6 am on Friday, October 23, I
followed Darryll around Portland as he opened and cleaned a series of
restrooms—the first of which at NW 5th and Glisan is known as
“Randy’s Loo,” Commissioner Leonard’s brainchild which was built last
year.
Darryll has a job with the downtown Clean & Safe program—a
collaborative effort between the Portland Business Alliance (PBA) and
social service agency Central City Concern. As he arrives at Randy’s
Loo, there’s a strung-out old homeless couple inside, and Darryll asks
them if they “got done with their business.” They say “yes,” and scurry
off. Darryll cleans things up and puts in fresh toilet paper, before
getting into his Chevy Astro and heading up to Couch Park in Northwest
Portland.
“I used to get high in those bathrooms,” he told me, two days
earlier, when we met at VOA’s day treatment center. “I’ve been booked
more than 100 times, I’ve got 14 felony drug convictions, just a whole
life. They gave me a second chance and I’m grateful for it.”
The PBA did not allow me to talk to Darryll while on the job,
because they too identified him as “vulnerable,” and it’s against their
policy to allow Clean & Safe employees to be interviewed. But
regardless, I decided to observe him on his rounds from a distance,
because he works in the public right of way. He appeared to be enjoying
himself.
We had scheduled a follow-up meeting on Tuesday, October 27, but
Darryll cancelled, sending this text message: “I have been told 2 break
all contact with u. I don’t want 2 b in the middle of what is going on.
Sorry.”
The PBA did not confirm or deny by press time whether they gave
Darryll these instructions.
Earlier at the VOA, Darryll had told me he can’t go back to
using.
“I have to ask myself, is it realistic for me to go back?” he said.
“When I go down to do the bathrooms, I’ve been really surprised by the
level of respect I’ve gotten. People say, ‘Darryll got a job.'”
THREE OUT OF 77
Floyd, Vance, and Darryll: Their stories are all inspirational. For
example, two weeks ago, Floyd went to visit his mother’s grave for the
first time, having avoided it for three years after her death while he
was in the penitentiary.
“I was too embarrassed, too hurt,” he says. “I had a lot of shame.”
Now, he says, he can begin grieving.
This is heady stuff—and as we’re talking, I find myself
wanting to praise the program from the rooftops. However, overcoming
even a run-of-the-mill booze addiction is an emotional experience,
fraught with pitfalls. Darryll, Floyd, and Vance say they know of a
handful of people who dropped out of the program—and VOA didn’t
have time to arrange more meetings with others on the list, making it
difficult for me to fairly judge the program’s success. So I attempted
to get some more objective information.
Since February 2008, 77 people have gone through the rehab program
associated with the list, says Pam Kelly, division director for
rehabilitation service at VOA. Fifty-five have been discharged, 22 are
in treatment now, 14 have been re-arrested, and 18 have been
re-enrolled. There are currently 359 people on the list, in total.
There wasn’t much more statistical information available during the
course of researching this article to ascertain the success of the
program. And Kelly didn’t have any additional information on why those
clients had been re-arrested or re-enrolled, or whether the others had
left town, or stayed here, and so on.
Indeed, Kelly admits, the city’s contract with VOA doesn’t require
that the success of this program be measured in the same way as its
contracts with Multnomah County. For example, the success of another
VOA contract with the county’s Department of Community Justice is
measured by tracking how many clients get arrested before they go
through the program and how many afterward. Kelly says partners in this
program are due to go on a “facilitated retreat” later in November to
begin working out what the “criteria for success” might look like.
“This is a very difficult population,” Kelly admits. “So success for
these folks might not look the same as it does for other people.”
Last year, Leonard and others were touting a “71 percent reduction
in recidivism” associated with the program. He says he thinks it’s
higher now, but the Mercury has seen no clear evidence to back
that up−and without it, how are we to know if that figure wasn’t
essentially meaningless to begin with?
“If Leonard is trusting the police bureau with this 71 percent
figure the same way he trusted them that there was no secret list,”
says Chris O’Connor, a defense attorney who has represented a handful
of clients on the list, “then that’s a cause for concern.”
NO MEASURE OF SUCCESS
The Mercury asked the city to put a dollar amount on the
program over the last year. In the fiscal year 2008-2009, the city
spent $2.43 million on the program. In 2009-2010, the city has spent
$2.55 million—a total of $4.98 million over two years. In
addition to housing and treatment, that figure includes $412,000 in
police bureau overtime over the same period.
Copwatch activist Dan Handelman has been trying to track the
expenditure of tax dollars at council meetings, but has found it
difficult because the city has kept changing the name of the program
over the last year and a half.
“It’s been called the Service Coordination Team, the Neighborhood
Livability Crime Enforcement Program, Project 57—the secret list,
of course—and the Treatment Priority List,” says Handelman.
“There are so many names for this program, it makes your head spin. And
I think that’s been the idea—that you can’t nail it down.”
City Commissioner Nick Fish has described the program as a
“substantial investment of public resources.” Indeed, for just $1.2
million, said Fish, voting for the allocation of money to housing for
the program on October 21, “we can tackle about 40 percent of the
homeless problem on the streets of Portland.”
Central City Concern boss Ed Blackburn feels Fish is comparing
apples and oranges. “This has a different objective from housing
homeless people,” he says. “There’s a huge cost benefit in terms of the
crimes these people are not committing.”
Nevertheless, Blackburn says he suggested “two or three times”
during the establishment of the program that an independent contractor
be brought in to do a cost-benefit analysis, and that he was
ignored.
“I’m not necessarily the most influential person with those folks,
and I think they were more focused on their own ideas for measuring
success,” he says. “Now, of course, the question is being raised, and
they don’t have those statistics.”
Dividing the number of people (77) who have gone through
rehabilitation on the list into the cost ($4.98 million) equals a total
cost of $64,675 per person going through rehabilitation.
“You could have hired a ton of social workers for that money,” says
O’Connor. “You could have paid for a social worker to stand on every
corner of the city for a year. It’s one thing if the police want to be
social workers—but should we really be paying them police
overtime wages to do that?”
Leonard, like Blackburn, says the program is worthwhile because of
the damage the worst offenders can cause to the community.
City Auditor LaVonne Griffin-Valade says the city has no immediate
plans to audit the program—at least until its next reassessment
of auditing priorities next spring. She doesn’t feel qualified to
comment directly on the program without knowing more about it, but
says, “We would hope that when any bureau is trying to establish a new
program, they will determine how to track outcomes, and then how to
measure those outcomes for success.
“That’s just basic good management practice,” Griffin-Valade
continues.
The program has also been ramped up after the demise of the city’s
controversial Drug-Free Zones (DFZ) in late 2007, after the DFZs were
caught overwhelmingly targeting African Americans, says Copwatch’s
Handelman.
“I think the people behind the new program are hoping it won’t
attract the same level of scrutiny as the DFZs,” he says.
However, when the Mercury first saw a leaked copy of the
secret list in April 2008 [“Blacklisted,” News, April 24, 2008], 52
percent of the people listed were African American, while comprising
just 6 percent of the population. Today, that number has only dropped
to 50 percent.
“I do support treatment,” says Reverend Doctor LeRoy Haynes from the
Albina Ministerial Alliance. “But at the same time we want to make sure
that African Americans who are homeless or addicted are not being
abused by law enforcement.”
Haynes adds that city council has always expressed a wish for
transparency around the police bureau, in the past. Commissioner
Leonard says he would now support more statistical information being
made publicly available about the program, “as long as it’s not
redundant.”
“They don’t always connect the dots on the politics,” says Leonard,
referring to Officer Jeff Myers and Bill Sinnott, the managers of the
program at the police bureau. “They can sometimes be their own worst
enemy by looking like they don’t want to share information—but I
don’t think they’re intentionally hiding anything.”
Both Myers and Sinnott declined to be interviewed for this story and
did not return repeated emails seeking comment.
CLUMSY OR CALCULATED?
It’s difficult to tell whether the city’s elusive answers to
questions about this program over the past 18 months have been the
result of calculation, defensiveness, clumsiness, or a combination of
the three. Either way, Handelman says he now wants a thorough public
debate about the merits of the program, its expense, and whether it
might be cheaper to pursue alternatives.
“Ten years ago if you were a desperate addict, you could get 90 days
of inpatient treatment just by asking for it,” says Jason Renaud with
the Mental Health Association of Portland—who ran the Estate
Hotel for Central City Concern for three years in the early ’90s. “The
people on this list would have gotten access to treatment without
having to go through the criminal justice system first.”
Since then, says Renaud, state and federal funds to provide
rehabilitation services at a local level have been lost and the police
are left to fill in the gap.
“They’re just trying to make this work in their own clumsy way,” he
says.
Being included on the list, Vance does express concern about being
given a felony before he could enter treatment. But Vance, Floyd, and
Darryll are largely unconcerned by many of the problems associated with
the program in the eyes of its critics.
“Maybe the white guy in the bar selling cocaine is just using his
brain a little bit more than I am,” says Vance. “At the end of the day
what I see from the guys that are in charge of this is a ‘give and
take.’ You can’t imagine the amount of crime that’s not happening right
now because of this program.”
Floyd is more succinct.
“When I look at all the money the government wastes on bullshit,” he
says, “it’s still worth it, even if you only save two people.”
You can donate to Darryll’s blanket drive at Volunteers of America
(537 SE Alder). If you would like to see the city auditor take a closer
look at the program next year, email your concerns to her office
representative at andrew.bryans@ci.portland.or.us.
It’s ironic that you choose to redacted last names “for privacy” after pushing for over a year to make the list public and available for those who would not extend the same courtesy. It’s ironic that after comparing the program to Gestapo tactics, the people you interview describe how it has saved their lives. You express concern about the “long memory of the Internet”, yet that’s exactly what these vulnerable people are going to have to face. The “villains” in this saga care much more about actually helping these people and breaking the cycle than you or Mr. Rosenthal or Mr. O’Connor ever will. They are mercenary enablers. Joust the windmill, damn the consequences.
Nick Angel, as in, Simon Pegg’s character from Hot Fuzz? Nice!
Copwatch Activist Handleman obviously knows what he is talking about. All you have to do is google “Project 57” and find out that it’s a jail bed agreement for pre-arraignment lodging of arrestees. Has nothing to do with a “secret list” targeted for drug treatment. Clearly he’s got his facts straight. Maybe the Mercury ought to check out the credibility of the people they quote before publishing it. It took me less than 10 seconds to google search to find that one out. Way to go guys!
Your best public writing to date.
50% of the list are African American. 6% of the general population are African American. That’s all well and good, but it begs the question: what percentage of drug addicts are African American? If it’s around 50%, then it’s evidence of a problem in that population for sure, but would show that this program isn’t racially targeted in any way; it just reflects wider societal problems. If it’s around 20%, it’s evidence that there’s a racial element to the enforcement.
I know it’s not an easy number to pin down, but even an estimate would be helpful, because it makes a huge difference to how we should react to this program.
O’Connor’s idea is to take away drug treatment money and spending it on social workers (really? really?). I think Vance, Floyd, and Darryll would find that argument to be pretty nutty. Then again, O’Connor profits from the recidivism of those too poor to hire their own attorney.
On the topic of charges, it is and has always been a felony to possess any amount of the drugs we’re talking about here. About 10 years ago, to reduce case load, the Mult. Co. DA’s office decided to automatically reduce residue to “attempt”. Take your crack pipe anywhere else in Oregon and you’ll face a felony. The option of charging as a felony for the most chronic offenders was used to encourage people to agree to treatment. At the time, plenty of “activists” were arguing “treatment, not jail”. Since you can’t force treatment (something they like to ignore), charging the actual law in the most chronic cases (the folks in the worst shape and who needed the most help) was the incentive to commit to treatment.
The racial issue is a direct result of the geography of the program (primarily Old Town). If this program was in place in 1994 the list would be 50% Honduran and 50% white. Powder cocaine and heroin ruled downtown/old town. Crack was primarily in NO/NE. The fact is it’s a logical target because the dealing there is (and has been for 30 years) out on the street, in a concentrated area, 24/7 even when every business is closed, and fuels nearly all of the downtown/NW crime. It has been a thorn in the city’s side for decades.
To Renaud, don’t play dumb on the issues of addiction. “…just by asking for it” is a huge roadblock for addicts. The 3 men featured were all out there 10 years ago. It was the “push” from the program that gave them a real opportunity to make the hardest choice an addict can make.
@AliceAbernathy: The Google hit you talk about the program as it worked in 2007. At that time, most of the Project 57 arrestees are drug related, and many of them had been arrested before. As of 2007 they’d noticed that there were a certain number of people that had gone though Project 57 multiple times, so they created a program within Project 57, (with what do you know, a “list,”) called the “Chronic Offenders Strategic Intervention Program (COSIP)” to deal with those (at the time 15) people. Normally Project 57 is voluntary, because for those sorts of crimes that Project 57 targets the people are normally released on their own recognizance, but for those people it wasn’t, (it doesn’t say exactly how they do that, but certianly one way to do that is to charge those people with felonies instead of misdemeanor, which means that they’d have to post bail before they went to court, and given that bail money tends to be kind of hard to come up with when you are a serial drug dealer, that means that the vast majority of them would be forced to stay in jail.) The COSIP program also directed the police to work with those individuals to make sure they get the services, [read: treatment] that they needed in that time period. So while you are correct that Project 57 may not have been the “secret list” program itself in 2007 it certainly seemed to have generated a secret list, and the COSIP program within Project 57 in 2007 did exactly what the secret list program does now. Now, given that the secret list program existed back in 2007 and was ramped up in late 2007, how exactly do you claim that those have “nothing to do with” each other?
I’ll tell you that you certainly can’t claim that with 10 seconds on Google, but if you have more information, than that, by all means share it. However, there is a reason that there are reporters to look into the details on complicated issues, instead everyone spending 10 seconds on Google. Often times things are just more complicated than the title of a pdf from 2007.
Alice Abernathy as in, Milla Jovovich’s character, from the Resident Evil films? Nicer!
Am I understanding this article correctly? Someone on the list had a misdemeanor for cocaine possession? I have a friend in her 30’s who has a good job and a nice place and was caught with $10 worth of cocaine. She has no criminal record but she was charged with a felony and has to enter intensive drug treatment (STOP) for a year (consisting of 4 x a week, 2 hour meetings, random daily UA’s, etc), pay thousands of dollars, go to court every 2-4 weeks for a year and then the charge will be dismissed. HOW did this person get a misdemeanor? I’m sure my friend would like to know because I think she’s getting screwed.
I forgot to mention – you are also not allowed to drink alcohol in the STOP program, even though it is a legal substance. Drink a beer after work & fail a UA…you can go to jail.
Crack pipes only contain residue—it’s usually charged as a misdemeanor. But in this case, if you’re on the list, it’s a felony. And you’re right that STOP court is the standard course for people convicted of drug-related crime.
And while the city is spending $4.8million on this program, the county is struggling to find just $85,000 to keep the STOP court going.
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.s…
Residue possession is and always has been a felony. The Mult. Co. DA’s office decided about 8 years ago that to cut case load they would begin automatically reducing residue cases to “attempted possession”, which dropped it to a misdemeanor and an easier plea. The option to charge to go back to charging these as felonies has always been there because, well, it’s a felony.
Oh, and Alice is hawt.
Yep! Except the basis for being charged as a felony is presence on the list. If you’re on the list you get the felony. If you’re off the list you get the misdemeanor. Speaking of which, there are only about three people in Portland who would be able to stick up for the program like Nick and Alice, and the irony is, I suspect they’re among those who obstructed my work on this feature.
I hope this isn’t on the city, county, or PBA dime, guys. I’ve only heard three people make these arguments repeatedly.
Matt,
Nope, I don’t have anything to do with you, your work on this feature, or the program you’ve been investigating. I’ve never met or talked to you, and I’m not on anyone’s dime (I would have to guess what PBA even stands for).
What got me commenting on this article is the hypocrisy of fighting so hard to make these names public, and then not using their last names in the article out of respect for their “privacy”…something that Saltzman has been arguing all along.
As far as the felony goes, you get the felony if you’re on the list and refuse treatment. Treatment is what everyone has been campaigning for, right? The reality is that when you’re a chronic offender and hardcore addict, you’ll eat 100 misdemeanors and not bat an eye. That’s not normal, and is reserved for a relatively small group of people who’s lives have deteriorated so far that they literally don’t care. If it takes the threat of consequences from a felony to get them to make the difficult decision to go into treatment, then perhaps the ends justify the means since they did in fact commit the crime. Ask Vance, Floyd, and Darryll about that.
The truth is, I liked the article. I didn’t like the fight to “expose” people who I consider to be some of the biggest victims of addiction in our city. That addiction is also directly affecting crime and livability in the city. There were other ways to audit or investigate the process without making it about these specific individuals, but people got so caught up in the “Gestapo” comparisons that it didn’t matter anymore if it hurt the people they were claiming to be fighting for.
Nick,
Thanks for clarifying. I appreciate it. I’d still be more comfortable talking to someone who went by a real name, instead of a British police officer from a movie, but you’re probably “vulnerable,” too. To exposure, I mean.
I haven’t been fighting to “expose” people. I’ve been fighting for information about a shady program that’s been kept under wraps for two years despite costing taxpayers $4.8million. This “victims of addiction,” and “vulnerability” angle, it’s being used to perpetuate the program but I see it as less important than the public interest in the end.
My editor agrees. Which is why we have continued to pursue the story.
As I mention in the piece, the only “victims” supplied to me were these three guys. So you think asking Vance, Floyd, and Darryll about the success of the program is the best way to measure its success? I think I’d be a pretty gullible journalist if I just took the three guys I’d been given by the people running the show and said, “OH, my mistake, it’s marvelous, after all.”
I agree with you. I didn’t have any idea how you came across those three. I’m sure there are just as many failures because that’s the nature of addiction.
I also agree with the concern over the cost. I think that’s a completely valid angle.
The media angle, however, has always been “the list”. It didn’t help that Leonard was denying it’s existence when everyone knew it existed, and perhaps much of the blame of where this went lies there (not specifically with only Randy, but you know what I mean).
Still, in the end, it was the public release of the names on the list that was the topic of City Council debate, attorney soundbites, and media coverage.
The program absolutely should not be secret. 4.8 million in taxpayer money absolutely should fall under scrutiny and oversight. Cost/benefit should be weighed. All that is good stuff. The focus was, however, on the public release of the names on the list…something I believe was motivated by something other than a quest for transparency. There should have been a way to deal with it without a public release.
Thanks for returning this to a healthy discussion. I just got a little fired up when you specifically wrote that you withheld their last names for privacy reasons considering everything that’s been done to make them public.
I am by no means an expert on this. But here are some thoughts:
1) If the city says the program has a 70% successful recidivism prevention rate, then there should be some numbers to back that up. Saying the numbers are meaningless without evidence to the contrary is kind of silly. Also the headline “but is it worth saving” is silly.
2) The list is based on frequency of property/drug crimes committed in the city center, so I understand. Basically, drug addicts caught in the cycle of stealing to get drugs to use. So, its not a “deal for jail beds” as much as its a deal to get strung out serial property crime offenders out of the cycle of drugs and stealing. Apparently it works pretty well.
3) Regarding the racism charges, I think you can get over that pretty quickly by looking at the methods they use to determine who goes on the list. I think from what I’ve heard they are completely 100% race neutral, meaning it is impossible for the list to be racist. Like it is a blind system where the list is based purely on drug and property crimes committed and has nothing to do with anybody’s perception of the race of the offender. If I’m wrong about that, then yes definitely it would be fair to revisit the issue of whether the list is racist. If not, stop making these racism claims because they are not well-founded.
So …. this is a good thing, right?
Hi Stu
I think the racial ratios may be related to the expectation of the crack user that the crack dealer is African American. People without dealer connections go to Old Town looking for street dealers they don’t know and approach African Americans. It becomes easy for a African American desperate for drug money to scam and sell to these strangers.
Expectation may be the driving force behind the disproportional rate of African American arrests in Old Town. Then again the Bloods and Crips have cultures that encourage selling drugs to achieve social status. This may help provide a steady supply of young dumb African Americans will to throw away their lives on this fools gold.
Wow, you two guys are really going at it, let me tell you what I think about this “secret list.” This is for Matt and Nick, Do I think its a good thing? Well for me it is. Being on this list has opened up oppurtunities for me to do something different with my life other than hang out down in old town manipulating people while I feed my drug addiction. Granted I could have asked for help a lot sooner, and possibly went another route into treatment. Didnt happen that way, this is how it happened, I’m not gonna get into how much better or worse the facility we went to for treatment, is compared to others, Because that is totally up to the individual. If a person has had enough and is” willing” to make a change it doesnt really matter what facility that they go to. Being at the level of a “downtown cracksmoker” is low, low low. The intervention that this list causes, presents a welcome choice for some of us, who would otherwise may never seek help even knowing that we want help and need help. Do I think it targets African Americans, not specifically, I think it targets people who have a problem dealing with life on lifes terms, who choose to bury themselves in their addiction. It just so happens that most of the people that are doing that in oldtown just happen to be African American.
I don’t know folks, I keep thinking of the 6th amendment here.
The 6th Amendment doesn’t apply here because these guys aren’t actually charged with the crime yet. The clock only starts ticking when you’re charged. As I understand it, the deal is, “you get treatment OR we’ll charge you with a felony.”
Well for the people that dont know you are charged with the felony, the only choice you have after that is jail or treatment.