For the People

by Larry Krasner

  Yes, these sites reduce harm to drug users. And they do more. By saving drug users’ lives, they reduce harm to their families and communities. The vast majority of syringes are either disposed of safely as medical waste inside red plastic sharps containers at the sites or collected on the streets, rather than remaining on sidewalks and in parks. Users inject indoors and in private rather than in public for children to witness on their way to school. The spread of HIV and hepatitis C and hepatitis A is reduced throughout the entire population, including among people who never inject drugs because these diseases also spread in other ways. And the sites build a relationship of trust with users that is a catalyst for drug treatment the only time it will work—when the user is ready.

  In Vancouver, where harm reduction sites had been legal and prevalent for roughly fourteen years when I ran, some supervised injection sites looked like a hair salon. Each site had numbered open booths, with cleanable surfaces and chairs. There were two-way mirrors at each booth, making what happened there more visible. Drug users entered the site with their own drugs. At the safest sites, they could put their own drugs into a drug spectrometer that provided information on the drug’s ingredients—information that might have steered them away from an overdose, or a poison dose. Then, at the time of their appointment, they were provided clean needles and syringes. They discarded their old ones safely. They injected themselves under the watchful eye of trained people, many of them medical professionals. The lines of sight and the mirrors at each booth allowed workers to keep an eye on a couple of dozen users at the same time at a distance of twenty feet or so.

  At a harm reduction site, resuscitation was not complex. If a user nodded off, a worker saw it. The worker would nudge or bump the user, rub their shoulders, rub their sternum, or provide oxygen through a mask from a tank to wake them up. As in any medical facility, oxygen saturation in the blood of a nodding user could be monitored via plastic clips that fit onto the user’s fingertips if the user was slow in waking. In the rare instances when easy resuscitation methods did not work, naloxone was used to reverse the overdose, or an ambulance was called, or both.

  In more than a decade of legal harm reduction sites in Vancouver, people suffering from addiction had injected themselves over three million times. A few hundred had overdosed. None had died. And everyone who went there to inject saw people and felt compassion that gave them at least one more chance to feel their own value, to remember their own decency and find their own salvation from drug addiction—or at least their own peaceful way to abide a little longer with a shred of dignity despite suffering from a disease they might never shake. The supervised injection sites stopped people from dying, and I told people on the campaign trail I was okay with that. I was okay with that whether those people eventually succeeded in making a complete recovery or not. I was okay with giving them a shot at their own redemption. You have to survive to recover.

  Historically, Americans have reacted emotionally in rejecting harm reduction efforts, especially supervised consumption and needle exchanges, as if harm reduction were untested and new. The next time you’re having a drink in a bar, ask the other patrons their opinions on harm reduction or supervised consumption. They should know something about it. In a bar, information on the potency of each dose is provided and available—percent alcohol by volume (ABV) for beer, percent alcohol for wine, proof for liquor. The widespread availability and common use of alcohol in its milder versions (lite beer, beer, wine) rather than hard liquor is the result of ending Prohibition in the United States, when hard liquor of unpredictable quality and potency ruled because its higher potency was better suited to transport and commerce in a black market.

  Alcohol is America’s most ubiquitous and fatal drug. It kills ten times as many people a year as all other drugs combined. It shortens American lives by millions of future years annually. But because it is legal and regulated, purity and lack of adulteration are assured. A bartender is trained to watch the patrons and monitor their well-being, providing water or coffee or refusing to serve more if intoxication is out of bounds. And the bartender and waitstaff are trained to provide or call for medical assistance if intoxication becomes medically emergent, just as you would expect in a supervised injection site. But bartenders do more than workers at a supervised injection site do. Bartenders provide the drug. The bar owners and bartenders profit from it. And despite the fact that alcohol abuse is the third worst cause of preventable death in the United States, Americans are okay with it being legal for adults to consume it under supervision in bars and restaurants, because legalizing alcohol and reducing its harm work far better than Prohibition ever did, back when the illegal trade in alcohol drove official corruption, gun violence, and murder.

  Or check out Lisbon and Portugal’s highly successful public health approach to using civil court to address drug addiction by addicted people’s voluntary participation, which works infinitely better than our punitive criminal justice approach, thanks in part to Portugal’s decision more than twenty years ago to treat addiction as a public health problem rather than to criminalize it.

  A neighborhood built into a few steep miles of hillside in Lisbon used to be a hellacious death zone for heroin use in the 1980s and ’90s. These badlands were the primary home to about five thousand addicts who bought, sold, used, lingered, lived, unwittingly spread HIV and hepatitis C, and often died there. The rest of the city loathed this district, and its blighted existence made drug dealing and public drug use crucial political issues. This was the genesis of Portugal’s decriminalization approach, created by a medical doctor.

  Things had gotten much better by the time of my campaign. Lisbon’s badlands had become a residential area that, in discrete pockets, was still home to a sparse group of mostly aging drug users. Approximately one thousand remained—an 80 percent reduction. The fact that they were an aging population whose young members were a rarity was encouraging evidence that Lisbon’s methods were working. Users in Lisbon were usually in their forties or older and were often undergoing a relapse from their youth after many years of being clean. There were very few new or young users of heroin or crack anymore in Lisbon.

  In 2017, Portugal prosecuted drug dealers in criminal court and always had. But it treated drug users differently. Rather than arrest them and prosecute them in criminal court, Portuguese police wrote civil tickets (much like parking tickets) to drug users that required them to attend a meeting with a “dissuasion committee.” The committee generally consisted of a few people with psychology and social work backgrounds who interviewed the user to determine whether the user was addicted or was engaging in recreational use. Users in both categories were recommended services of different types. Other factors that underlay or exacerbated the drug use were explored—trauma, homelessness, mental health issues, and extreme poverty, among others. Users were encouraged but not required to voluntarily pursue the services. The ones who were ready accepted the services. The ones who were not ready might accept the services later, after multiple contacts with the dissuasion committee and multiple citations. But the users were not arrested, held in custody, or sentenced to incarceration for using or for failing to stop. They were offered support and treatment, just like sick people are offered in hospitals for any other disease. And this public health approach worked, unlike the prohibitionist and punitive system we had in the United States—the failed one that other candidates stood for to greater and lesser degrees when we ran for district attorney.

  Arguably no area of criminal justice policy has been more flawed than America’s punitive, prohibitionist approach to the use of drugs. Just as Prohibition failed with alcohol, the war on drugs has utterly failed to stop drug use or mitigate the health effects. There are more drugs available now, often of increasing potency at a lower price, and more people using them than ever before. Treatment for addiction and its underlying causes has been replaced with absurd levels of punishment and starkly racis
t incarceration.

  There is a link between justice and public health. It is the height of abusive government to stand with disease and fight for it against the bodies of its own people—any of its own people. For the people harmed, there is little difference between government attacking them and government standing by while disease attacks. Whether the disease is HIV, COVID-19, or addiction, we and our government’s legitimacy depend on doing less harm and feeling the justice inherent in harm reduction’s contribution to public health.

  CHAPTER 7

  Police Integrity

  We ain’t never gonna change

  We ain’t doin’ nothing wrong

  We ain’t never gonna change

  So shut your mouth and play along

  —Drive-By Truckers, “Never Gonna Change”

  There was a question I heard frequently during the campaign from police officers and their staunch supporters who were uncomfortable with my campaign’s emphasis on police accountability and equal treatment for all. They asked, in a tone more accusatory than curious, “Do you have our backs?” as if it were obvious that any candidate’s answer should simply be yes. Mine wasn’t. My more complicated answer was “Yes, I have the backs of police when they follow the law, just like I have every civilian’s back when they do the same. But no, I don’t have their or anyone else’s backs when they commit crimes.” Should I? It’s basic: Don’t commit crimes, regardless of your job or your group. Accountability has to be equal in a just system.

  The subtler assumption of the question “Do you have our backs?” is a blurred line between police and prosecutors, the false implication that police and prosecutors are a single team. That implication would negate the prosecutor’s job to be a check on illegal police behavior and to hold their criminal conduct accountable, as required by the prosecutor’s oath and basic fairness. Too often within police ranks, the unquestioned notion is that police, whose job it is to hold others accountable, shouldn’t really be held accountable themselves. Underlying the police culture that expects a free pass is the inflated notion that police officers’ jobs are the most dangerous of all (factually untrue), or perhaps more important than any other (I can think of a lot of really important jobs). No such free pass can exist for any tribe, including any tribe defined by their job or profession.

  But police culture expecting a free pass is what happens when you let a small number of rogue cops run the show and establish the culture. But it’s also the result of bad incentives and procedures. When a system has rogue elements for long enough, the rogue elements start to feel like the system itself. What do you do when certain behaviors are so widely accepted that they seem institutional? And how do the rogue cops get to run the show? In most major American cities, police know it’s because the city “has their backs.” For reasons that are primarily political, city governments have acquiesced to removing control from police chiefs on discipline and firings, instead giving it to police unions, to the great detriment of the best cops and civilians. Even the small number of police personnel who are terminated, demoted, or disciplined by their police commissioner or chief usually succeed in reducing or reversing that accountability due to a rigged system that gives insider arbitrators more power than the commissioner. Rogue cops are enabled by rogue arbitrators. And the whole fix is enabled by state and local politicians who look the other way, more interested in pleasing the police union to advance themselves than they are in achieving police accountability, police integrity, or stopping crime.

  As I campaigned, I knew there were rotten cops just like I knew there were rotten lawyers. The incumbent DA had withdrawn his effort at reelection and was facing federal charges that called for jail time. In the absence of any real police accountability coming from the Philly DAO, during my career I had played private prosecutor with few tools, spending more than my share of time in criminal and civil court pushing back against police officers who thought the badge meant they could do whatever they wanted: lie, steal, brutalize and abuse, and leverage their police power in personal disputes. And those officers knew their business. Prosecutors and the police department had looked the other way for decades. As a busy criminal defense attorney and civil rights attorney in 2017, I had seen an indefensible culture of abusive power of the type that can grow only in a vacuum of accountability.

  Around 2010, a woman named Maria sat in my office and told me that her police officer husband, Peter, was cheating again. She said she had caught him for the second time and this time it would mean divorce. There would be important, ordinary issues to be resolved in ordinary ways: They had a daughter and owned a home together. But, as a Philadelphia police officer, Peter Acevedo had the means to do things that were far from ordinary. Maria had come to speak to me about what he had done: arrest her twice and falsely charge her with serious crimes.

  Both times Peter arrested his wife, he claimed he was the victim. First, he falsely claimed she tried to hit him with her car (and that she nearly hit their daughter at the same time) in the parking lot of a police station where they were temporarily required to be to exchange custody of the child. Next, he falsely claimed that a month or so later she tried to run him and his minivan off the road. These were well-crafted stories for a man trying to demonstrate that his wife was unfit for custody of their child. They cast her as a violent felon, an impulsive and unsympathetic hothead who endangered her own child. The consistency of these fictions created the illusion of credibility: By twice accusing her of trying to hurt people while driving her car, Peter knew that the similarity of the two separate accusations supported credibility.

  Maria was forced to pay bail for each of the two felony charges. She was tense when she came to my office to hire me to represent her in criminal court. As she told me her story and we talked through the process and what was at stake, she eventually broke down and started weeping. She knew that she would have to win both criminal cases in order to have a fair fight over child custody and child support in family court. It was a lot to ask from a system she wasn’t sure she could trust.

  As I sat in my office talking to Maria, I thought about another cop’s wife I had represented. She, too, had been arrested by her cheating husband during a divorce. Her name was Zoe, and her husband was having an affair with a female police officer. He and the female cop arrested Zoe and provided matching false statements against her. To bolster their story, they also arrested and falsely accused Zoe’s innocent, docile brother, who was present for the estranged couple’s brief argument and backed Zoe’s claim that there had been no crime—they needed to neutralize him as a witness for his sister.

  Like Maria, Zoe had gone to family court with a family attorney to resolve her divorce, custody, alimony, and child support issues at the same time she was separately fighting her criminal case in a different courthouse. From representing Zoe, I knew the quid pro quo offer that would come next for Maria in family court. The husband, accompanied by his FOP lawyer, would use the criminal charges as leverage in family court. Either the client or the lawyer or both would suggest or state outright that the wife’s criminal cases would be dropped in exchange for the wife giving the husband the terms he wanted in family court on child custody, home ownership, child support payments, or alimony.

  It is strictly unethical for a lawyer to manipulate criminal charges in order to influence a civil proceeding, especially if the charges are false. It is a bunch of crimes for anyone to knowingly push false charges, to get others to lie in court, to provide false information to police, to obstruct justice in any way in any court proceeding, or to falsely imprison someone else, even for a few hours. And, law aside, it’s unconscionable to do these things to the parent of your child, your intimate partner, no matter how estranged.

  Maria was in my office and crying again a couple of months later, after going to family court. The scumbag move was back. I confirmed her hunch that the trade-off her husband wanted was essentially extorti
on and also unethical, if his attorney was involved. I stared at the conference room table quietly for a moment, feeling the weight and consequences for the rest of Maria’s life if we lost in such a fixed game. I had to keep her spirits up. Without conveying the obvious irony, I told her to trust the process. We went to criminal court to do battle.

  In criminal court, Officer Acevedo produced no independent witnesses to support either arrest. First, his daughter destroyed one case when she said that Maria never attempted to or even accidentally came close to hitting anyone. Then Officer Acevedo’s own father blew up the other case. He testified that Maria had not tried to run the minivan off the road. He quickly moved on in his testimony to argue passionately for his son Peter and him to have more custody of the child, as if we were in family court.

  After two victories in criminal court, Maria and I, as her lawyer, filed a civil lawsuit against Officer Acevedo, a couple of supervisors, and the city. We asked for money damages, just as we had when Zoe won her criminal case and filed her lawsuit. But this time I also asked for a change in how the Philadelphia Police Department did its business. I asked for injunctive relief—a policy change moving forward—that would require high-level scrutiny of arrests orchestrated by police officers of anyone close to them. It wasn’t a perfect safeguard, given that the blue sometimes covers for its own—it would be easy enough for the vengeful cop to get another bad cop to the make the arrest—but it was an improvement. And it was what the next Zoe or Maria or their kids deserved: protection.