11:30am | Motivated by a recent court decision, on January 17 the city council will consider explicitly banning medpot collectives — a course of action advocated by Chief Jim McDonnell, who has told the council that such a ban is enforceable by the LBPD.
Maybe it is. But there’s an overarching question here that no one in city government seems willing to discuss. No, I’m not talking about the one that goes something like, Why is city staff so hot to disregard the possibility of having any oversight of the inevitable presence of marijuana within Long Beach — a choice, by the way, that would increase the suffering of chronically and even terminally ill patients by limiting their access to medicine, since they’re the ones least able to obtain cannabis on the streets?
What I’m asking today is: Is an increased focus on marijuana-related issues the most pragmatic use of our cut-to-the-bone-by-fiscal-
The answer couldn’t be more obvious.
A police force is an unfortunate but necessary concession to the worst in our present nature. It is undeniably the case that certain members of the population are willing to use aggression, force, and even the most abject forms of violence to get what they want — financial gain, vengeance, fulfillment of sadistic impulses, &c. Rather than leave the peaceful remainder of us to fend for ourselves against such elements, we have set up society to include a “Thin Blue Line,” to which we cede a measure of power — including the right to carry an array of weaponry — so as to enable the brave men and women accepting this heavy responsibility to deter and respond to those violent elements. It’s a dirty, dangerous job, but someone’s got to do it.
Pretty much everyone will agree that this is — or should be — law-enforcement’s number-one priority; and that whatever other jobs we assign to this sector, those other jobs descend in order of importance — property crime ahead of jaywalking, drunk driving ahead of garden-variety speeding, and so forth. We call this “prioritizing.”
Perhaps the most controversial law-enforcement issues — in societies that pride themselves on individual freedom, at least — involve the policing of what we do with our own bodies. And this, ultimately, is what all drug prohibitions come down to: the government’s criminalizing your ingestive choices.
There is no question that many illicit (and licit, for that matter) substances are no damn good for you. Let us say for the sake of argument that not only does cannabis have no medicinal value, it is downright detrimental to your health. Even if so, no one believes it to be an especially dangerous substance, at least relatively speaking. You’d be laughed out of any educated room for so much as suggesting that with cannabis comes anywhere near the addiction and mortality rates associated with legal, commercialized substances such as alcohol and cigarettes.
Police don’t make the laws, they enforce them. But police do have some latitude in that enforcement. It would be impractical for patrol units to chase after every motorist exceeding the speed limit by 1 mph, both because there are simply too many of us violating that law to that small degree, and because the societal problem is not the driver doing 61 in a 60 mph zone, but rather the lad doing 55 in a 30 or the lass veering in and out of her lane and causing her fellow drivers to swerve for their lives.
Police departments as a whole also have some latitude, in that they can — and do, and must –prioritize the expenditure of their finite resources. In theory, the aim of a police department is “to protect and to serve,” and so in theory police prioritize in order to do the best possible job of protecting and serving.
This is why Kalamazoo, MI, just joined the likes of West Hollywood, Santa Barbara, Oakland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver — as well as tiny bergs like Hailey, ID, and Fayetteville, AR — on the ever-growing list of cities that have officially made marijuana law enforcement’s lowest priority. And even though such directives generally appertain only to possession for personal use, they send a strong message to police: You have better things to do.
It’s long past time that Long Beach joins that list and sends that message.
It’s simple math: every dollar and hour the police — or the city attorney, or the courts — spend dealing with cannabis “crimes” is a dollar and hour they can’t spend on [fill in the blank with the crime of your choice]. So when Chief McDonnell asks the city council to ban collectives and says he can — and, I presume, will (try to) — enforce the ban, he’s saying he wants X-number of police hours and dollars to go toward that end and not somewhere else. (Not that he’s claiming this will stop the marijuana trade on the streets: he knows it won’t.)
As someone who spent years volunteering for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, during which time I heard numerous stories from police officers (and prosecutors, judges, etc.) who saw first hand the waste and corruption and increased crime that the “War on Drugs” begets, I can’t begin to fathom how Chief McDonnell can believe enforcing a ban on medpot collectives is the best use of any part of his shrinking department.
Nonetheless, I’m willing to take it on faith that he sincerely does. So I suggest we take the matter somewhat out of his hands. Short of decriminalizing cannabis (which I fully advocate), if the City of Long Beach — by ballot measure or council directive, by hook or by crook — directs the police department to make marijuana its lowest priority, then our police department will be that much freer to focus just that little bit more on issues that I dare say are more important — like EVERYTHING.
“I think most officers would say they’d rather be paying attention to the crack dealer with a gun in his belt than medical marijuana,” LBPD Sgt. Paul LeBaron once told a certain District Weekly writer. Nothing I knew then led me to believe he was mistaken, and nothing I have learned in the three years since has led me to doubt the truth of his statement.
I betcha Chief McDonnell would even agree. So let’s not handcuff our officers by making them misprioritize even the smallest amount of their too-limited resources. That’s not what most of them signed up for. They have an important job to do. So let them do it.