Debating Drug Barricades: Removing Rights or Providing Protection?

BACKGROUND

Fed up with a steady stream of drive-by drug buyers in residential neighborhoods, police have barricaded a 20-square-block area in Sepulveda to deter narcotics traffic.

No organized opposition has surfaced to the concept, which reportedly is the first such effort on a large scale in the nation. Since November, when police first set up wooden sawhorses around a Pico-Union neighborhood, at least three more neighborhoods have been barricaded in other parts of the city: Sepulveda, South-Central Los Angeles and Koreatown.

AGAINST

ABRAHAM ABRAMOVSKY

Abraham Abramovsky, 43, is a law professor and the director of the International Criminal Law Center at Fordham University in New York. Since 1982, he has written a column on criminal law for the New York Law Journal, published by the state of New York. He says residents pay too high a price in lost civil liberties to justify the barricades.

Q. Residents of the barricaded Sepulveda neighborhoods apparently support them. Why do you see a problem?

A. The major reason there is support for this is that it is a quick-fix policy. And when you have a neighborhood that is beset by continuing drug activity, at first citizens will agree to almost any program to get the menace off the streets. But I think that once they think about it a bit and see that their constitutional rights are being invaded, they’ll change their minds.

Q. Which rights do you believe are being violated?

A. Primarily, we’re talking about a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people against unreasonable searches and seizures. Also, the barricades violate the right to travel and the basic right of free association, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Ordinarily, before any person can be stopped, there has to be reasonable suspicion that a crime has or is about to be committed. In this situation, where only residents and their guests are permitted in the neighborhood, and anyone else can be stopped, it seems to me they’ve dispensed with that. When you indict a whole neighborhood, you throw probable cause out the window.

Also, I think you have an equal protection problem here because this is done in areas inhabited by minorities and poor people and older people. I don’t think you’d see such a program in Beverly Hills, for example, even if there was drug dealing there, because I don’t think the residents wouldn’t stand for it.

Q. Perhaps the drug problem is severe enough to warrant drastic solutions as proponents of the barricades have suggested?

A. There’s no question that we have a serious narcotics problem. But I think civil liberties are being violated in the name of the drug war. We have a saying in law that tough cases make bad law, and tough situations make bad law.

Once you have the Fourth Amendment diminished, it takes years to overturn that. The very people that are now applauding its demise will be right there screaming for its revival once it’s their son or daughter who is arrested.

Q. Are the barricades an effective means of ridding neighborhoods of street-level drug sales and associated crimes?

A. No, narcotics dealers will return to the neighborhood once the barricades are taken down. They’re not just going to fold up their tents and leave town. As soon as an area is barricaded, they’ll just move elsewhere and then other areas will have to be blocked off.

I’d hate to see that happen because we’ll have cities with walls, gates and locks. The irony here is we’re locking in the populace as much as we’re locking out the drug dealers.

I’d like to see the walls come tumbling down, like Joshua and the walls of Jericho, and like the Berlin Wall, as opposed to being built up. In Eastern Europe people sacrificed their lives to see the Berlin Wall fall. The world was joyous at the news that the wall will come down. To wall in communities in the leading democratic state in the world goes against everything we stand for and is nothing less than a quick-fix policy that won’t work.

Q. But don’t the barricades afford poor people the same protection that rich people are able to buy when they choose to live in gated communities?

A. Gated communities for the rich increase the right of privacy because they are optional. In a barricaded community, you have a decrease in the right of privacy because the situation has been forced on them. There’s no plebiscite here.

Q. What alternatives do you suggest to solve the drug problem?

A. If you’re truly going to lick the drug problem, there are two sides you have to address: supply and demand. On the supply side, you have to get into agreements with the Colombians, Peruvians, the manufacturing states wherein you eradicate the crops.

Next, you have to engage in serious interdiction efforts at our borders and points of entry. Third, you have to have investigations, which are not merely placebos, but that really focus on the kingpins.

At the same time you have to look at the demand side, which won’t be cured by barricades, whether they are cement or wood. The way to do this is to educate youngsters, to have family counseling, to increase treatment facilities, rather than jailing first-time offenders. Right now, when someone comes in needing help, we tell them to come back in nine months when there is a spot open in a treatment facility.

Q. Many of your suggestions are long-term solutions. What immediate alternatives do you suggest for neighborhoods beset by drive-by drug buyers?

A. One way to make sure the buyers don’t drive into the neighborhood is to immediately revoke their driver’s license if they are caught trying to buy drugs. No one has a constitutional right to a license, and if word got around, you’d see fewer commuters exiting the freeway to pick up some drugs on their way home.

I also think what you have to do is bring in role models to the neighborhoods, people whom the youngsters respect. Another type of role model that has been used successfully in the city of New York to deter drug abuse and sales are ex-convicts, who say the only result of this kind of behavior is either the morgue or jail.