Tag: the war on (some) drugs

D.A.R.E. Officer Dies of Overdose While Raiding Evidence Locker and Gets a Parade the Next Day

In June of this year, a police officer with over two decades on the job was found dead in the Winnemucca Police Department’s evidence locker. He had a bag of fentanyl in his pocket, yet when his death was announced, it was reported that officer Matt Morgan died of “natural causes.” The very next day, dozens of police departments from around the area put together a procession parade two hours long in his honor as people stood along the route to pay their respects. But Morgan didn’t die of natural causes and he had no business being in the department’s evidence locker that day.

“A procession honored Winnemucca Police Department Detective and community hero Matt Morgan, 47, who passed away unexpectedly while at work on Thursday, June 25, 2020, of apparent natural causes,” the report read after Morgan passed away.

But his death was not natural. Weeks later, an investigation would reveal that Morgan overdosed on fentanyl and methamphetamine in that evidence locker. What’s more, Morgan was not supposed to be in the locker that day and the investigation revealed that the evidence (seized drugs) had been tampered with by this “hero cop.”

According to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, who is conducting the investigation, it is still ongoing.

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Biden Tries To Gloss Over His Long History of Supporting the Drug War and Draconian Criminal Penalties

During his ABC “town hall” last night, responding to a question from moderator George Stephanopoulos, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden agreed that it was a “mistake” to “support” the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. At the same time, he defended parts of the law, including the Violence Against Women Act, funding to support “community policing” by hiring more officers, and the now-expired federal ban on “assault weapons.” He also implied that the real problem was not so much the law itself but the way that states responded to it. “The mistake came in terms of what the states did locally,” he said.

Both the question and the answer were highly misleading. First, Biden did not merely “support” the 1994 law; he wrote the damned thing, which he has proudly called “the 1994 Biden Crime Bill.” Second, as much as Biden might like to disavow the law’s penalty enhancements now that public opinion on criminal justice has shifted, he was proud of them at the time. Third, the 1994 crime bill is just one piece of legislation in Biden’s long history of supporting mindlessly punitive responses to drugs and crime.

Biden is trying to gloss over a major theme of his political career. “Every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress—every minor crime bill—has had the name of the Democratic senator from Delaware, Joe Biden,” he bragged in 1993. Now he wants us to believe his agenda was limited to domestic violence, community policing, and gun control.

“Things have changed drastically” since 1994, Biden said last night, noting that “the Black Caucus voted” for the crime bill, and “every black mayor supported it.” In other words, now that black politicians and Democrats generally have rejected the idea that criminal penalties can never be too severe, Biden has shifted with the winds of opinion. But as Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) noted during a Democratic presidential debate last year, that does not mean we should forget Biden’s leading role in the disastrous war on drugs and the draconian criminal justice policies that put more and more people in cages for longer and longer periods of time.

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