Police ‘disreputable’ behaviors these past 4-5 years was predicted by visiting ‘top cop’ Det. Chief Super Eddie Ellison. He laid the responsibility for the emerging dysfunction at the feet of poor drug policy. Eddie had recently retired as head of New Scotland Yard.
The NZ Police are not as corrupt as some, but what’s norm elsewhere is no standard to aspire too. Eddie addressing NZ Rotary’s said that under existing drug policy ‘give me a rookie cop and in three years I’ll give you a compromised cop’. He also predicted that NZ’s Methamphetamine prevalence and problems would get worse.
Few Police believe the war on drugs is winnable. Visiting Judge Jerry Paradis [LEAP.CC] remarked on the death of Don Wilkinson in Sept. “An honorable man on a hopeless cause”.
The longer we fail to understand the social mechanisms that create this dysfunction we will continue to find Policing in disrepute. And that serves no one.
The White House had the National Research Council [www.nationalacademies.org/nrc/] examine the data being gathered about drug use and the effects of U.S. drug policies. NRC concluded, “__the nation possesses little information about the effectiveness of current drug policy, especially of drug law enforcement.__” And what data exist show “little apparent relationship between severity of sanctions prescribed for drug use and prevalence or frequency of use.” In other words, there is no proof that prohibition “the cornerstone of U.S. drug policy for a century” reduces drug use. = National Research Council. Informing America’s Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don’t Know Keeps Hurting Us. National Academy Press, 2001. p. 193.
“There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana.” = Milton Friedman (an economist of note that BERL might recall)
In the “The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition,” a report recently done by Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Miron, on the causes of drug crime, Miron said his research “very much suggests that it is prohibition. It’s not drug-consumption-related, it’s fighting-over-disputes-in-the-illegal-drug-trade-related. And that’s a result of prohibition, not a result of the drug.”
Hubert Williams, President, Police Foundation; former Chief of Police, Newark, New Jersey said “Miron persuasively demonstrates, the net effects of prohibition, both past and present, are to increase violence, enrich criminals, threaten civil liberties, and make drug users more ill. The right question for policy makers, he concludes, is not whether drugs are misused but whether the benefits of prohibition outweigh its exorbitant costs. All in all, this is a solidly researched and dispassionate discussion of a topic that is too often couched in moral and emotional terms.”
Aside from the NZ Police’s questionable use of the DRUG HARM INDEX to self interestedly perpetuate an unaccounted policy, demanding as it were ‘more resources’ without any accounting for ‘deliverable outcomes’ is entirely contestable in managerial let alone economic terms. The Drug Squad is in effect ‘deficit funded’ without as much a skerit of evidence that the resources AND priorities are allocated with ANY efficiency.
This is POOR management. This was roundly critiqued by visiting top cop and former head of Scotland Yard Narcotics/London Metro, Chief Super Det. Eddie Ellison to the Ministry of Justice in 2004. (Eddie was also a founding member of TRANSFORM, now with UN consultative standing ) “It wouldn’t pass muster at Police College in let alone the Home Office. There is no room in modern policing for unaccountable deployment blindly following political directives” -(private conversation with the writer) Eddie presented to 17 MoJ Officials alongside Snr Detective Jack Cole, both of whom were executive directors of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition [www.leap.cc] also recently
accredited by the UN. Eddie also conveyed this to Gregg O’Conner of the Police Association. Some months later the MoJ couldnt find a single person who attended the board meetingroom presentation, declaring again in a recorded telephone conversation to the writer “we have a very high staff turnover’
The BERL DRUG HARMS report and the subsequent Police Intelligence claims that cananbis is the problem, bring the POLICE once again into disrepute.
There is no accounting the POLICE and JUSTICE stupidity of continuing to bang ones head against the wall and hoping it will soon stop hurting….
Eddie Ellison member of LEAP ( Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) and former head of scotland yard drug squad. He spoke to Ali this morning about LEAPS views on bringing about a safer society by legalising drugs and getting them out of the hands of criminals. LEAP do not condone the use of drugs.
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