Racial Criminalization and the Origins of the Los Angeles Drug Wars
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RACIAL CRIMINALIZATION AND THE ORIGINS OF THE LOS ANGELES DRUG WARS Thesis submitted to the faculty of 45 San Francisco State University 36 In partial fulfillment of ten the requirements for the Degree ,tf66 Master of Arts In Ethnics Studies by Roberto Antonio Monico San Francisco, California May 2018 Copyright by Roberto Antonio Monico 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Racial Criminalization and the Origins of the Los Angeles Drug Wars by Roberto Antonio Monico, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree (Example) Master of Arts in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. Melissa Guzman-Garcia, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Ethnic Studies Cesar “che” Rockrgue^tjh D. Assistant Professor, Crimmal Justice Studies RACIAL CRIMINALIZATION AND THE ORIGINS OF THE LOS ANGELES DRUG WAR Roberto Antonio Monico San Francisco, California 2018 This thesis examines how the Los Angeles Police Department increased their narcotics drug arrests in neighborhoods of color in 1956-1957. Drawing from historical and social scientific accounts of racialized criminalization and federal drug policies of the 1950s, I examine how LAPD’s narcotics arrests were used as a tool of racial segregation and disproportionately affected African and Mexican American neighborhoods. Specifically, I discuss how Police Chief William H. Parker had a significant impact on the racial and class boundaries that were enforced by the newly restructured LAPD. I argue that the racially neutral process of gathering statistical data of arrests enabled the LAPD to book more people of color for illegal narcotics. Finally, I examine how academic publications further justified racialized constructions of Black and Latino criminality in Los Angeles. I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this Choose an item 7 L6 is Committee Date PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge and express my appreciation to the incoming Ethnic Studies cohort of 2016. Without them I would not have felt motivated to persevere through one of the most difficult periods in my life. It is with the upmost sincerity that I dedicate this thesis to a group of individuals who showed me how remove all obstacles that lay in front of me. For that, I thank you for showing me the true meaning of integrity. Additionally, Professors Melissa Guzman, Cesar “che” Rodriguez, and Tomas Almaguer for their support. Your experiences have set the bar high and that I now understand what it takes to be an astute scholar. I hope to one day follow in your footsteps and become the educators that you all are. Thank you for your unwavering support and always pushing me to challenge myself. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction........................................................................................................1 War on Poverty and War on Drugs.........................................................................4 Racialized History of Drug Laws and Maintaining Racial Segregation................. 7 Chapter 2: Literature Review............................................................................................ 14 Racialized Criminalization.................................................................................... 15 Race and Class Boundaries in Los Angeles..........................................................21 Drug Policy and Law Enforcement.......................................................................27 Chapter 3: Methodology.................................................................................................... 34 Reviewing Police Legitimacy throughthe Academy.............................................37 Strengths and Limitations...................................................................................... 39 Chapter 4: Findings........................................................................................................... 42 Crime Data as a Enforcement Tool.......................................................................44 Chief William H. Parker........................................................................................46 Parker: The Cold War Warrior.............................................................................. 52 Drug Policy: The Boggs Act of 1951 & Narcotics Control Act of 1956.............. 54 Racial Enforcement............................................................................................... 56 Data Analysis 1957 ............................................................................................... 57 Media as an Enforcement tool...............................................................................74 Chapter 5: Conclusion....................................................................................................... 78 Suggestions for Future Research........................................................................... 82 LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. LAPD Salaries, 1950-59.........................................................................................50 2. Population and Density.......................................................................................... 58 3. Arrests by Descent/Sex 1956.................................................................................. 61 4. Adult Arrests by Division 1957...............................................................................64 5. 1956 Divi si on Arrests............................................................................................64 6. Juvenile Arrests 1956............................................................................................ 68 7. Division Arrests 1956............................................................................................ 73 1 Chapter 1 Introduction: Critical criminologists, legal scholars, and prisoner advocacy organizations have documented that the prison boom’s origins can be found in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs (Alexander, 2010, Western, 2006, & The Sentencing Project, 2017). President Reagan employed racialized rhetoric on drug crime to gain political support from working-class whites who felt threatened by the political gains made by people of color during the Civil Rights Movement (Alexander, 2010). Policies such as the federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986,1 were created to criminalized individuals who were caught in the participation of illicit drug markets. They would endure increasingly punitive measures through mandatory and lengthy prison sentences. However, some of the first mandatory minimum sentencings policies were first introduced in the 1950s, to construct racial boundaries between with the notion of dangerous people of color and innocent white youth (Lassiter, 2015). In this thesis, I examine drug arrests in Los Angeles in the 1950s and the emerging leadership of William H Parker with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) who enforced racial segregation in a drug war context. I will try to show the enactment of federal drug laws in the 1950s that the LAPD used to record more narcotics arrests in Black and 1 The Anti-Drug Abuse Act was passed in a bi-partisan effort. Democratic leaders, such as Joe Biden and Charles Rangel were instrumental in enacting the law, which stipulated the inequities of 100-to-l crack to powder cocaine disparity; 500 grams of cocaine to 5 grams of crack. 2 Brown neighborhoods. The LAPD was organized by the conservative leadership of William H. Parker who viewed illicit drugs as perilous condition in Los Angeles. I reviewed demographic data collected by the LAPD, in order to illustrate how these narcotics arrests disproportionately impacted communities of color in L.A. Moreover, the communities that felt the impact of these drug arrests were mostly made up of the poor and working-class communities (Davis, 1990). During and World War II, jobs were made available in the defense industry in cities like Los Angeles for African Americans escaping the Jim Crow South. Los Angeles provided a beacon of hope to breakout of generations of domestic terrorism in the South (Hernandez, 2017). In this context, the LAPD selectively enforced drug laws in the urban regions of Los Angeles were many African Americans and Mexicans resided and where most of these drug arrests were concentrated. At the same time, federal drug policies such as the Boggs Act of 1951 and the Narcotics Control Act of 1956 were utilized by the Los Angeles Police Department as a method to arrest people of color. Historian Matthew Lassiter provides us with the systematic methods that were introduced by the federal government to stop drug addiction and peddling: Congress unanimously doubled the mandatory-minimum sentences for selling heroin and marijuana, providing five to ten years for the first offense and ten to forty years without the opportunity for parole for the second, and a maximum of life in prison or the death penalty for providing narcotics to a minor (Lassiter, 2015; 797). 3 While the criminalization of drugs has been a proxy to apply repressive methods by state and local actors against racialized communities in the mid-nineteenth century, this thesis argues that Parker’s policing on illegal drugs in the 1950s, resulted in higher arrest rates in communities of color. Eventually, the Parker and the LAPD produced the model of policing that expanded across the United States in methods of arresting people of color in relation to