Breaking Rank Page 4

  One member of our national group, the National Football League’s chief psychologist, a former tackle, started off like the sport’s chief apologist. Several of us wanted to choke him, but, given the nature of the forum (and the man’s size), we thought better of it. Soon enough, however, he came around, and in the end scored a big TD for us: NFL sponsorship of a powerful anti-DV ad.

  Not that that solved the problem—read today’s paper. If it’s not there, it was in yesterday’s or it’ll be in tomorrow’s: Some boneheaded jock slaps his wife and tears her dress off at a party, or rapes a groupie, or smashes up his girlfriend and her apartment. That tearjerker NFL TV spot notwithstanding, we still see countless owners, coaches, athletic directors, teammates, and alumni boosters make excuses for criminals who happen to be athletes. That ain’t the Bubba Bob I know; the Bubba Bob I know is a role model, a pillar of decency and decorum . . . Chainsaw didn’t mean to do it, he was drinkin’ that whiskey and snortin’ that nose candy . . . It’s Merle’s first time away from home, the boy just got carried away . . . Boys will be boys.

  Something else, David. After killing your wife, and damaging your kids for the rest of their lives, you took the coward’s way out. Maybe you think you held yourself “accountable” by taking your own life. But all you did was spare yourself the humiliation and degradation of public knowledge of your abuse of women, especially the wife you purported to love. It was a dishonorable thing to do, your suicide. At least O. J. stuck around—a living, respirating reminder of his dead wife. Every time we see that smug mug on the golf course we can use the image as inspiration to redouble our efforts to make women safe. And to hold men like us accountable.

  I know you said you were religious, David. I’m not. I don’t belong to any church but I’m a spiritual creature, and I believe in a higher power I’m happy to call “God.” I believe all God’s creatures have souls. I believe in redemption, the opportunity for those of us who’ve done wrong to try to make ourselves right with the universe—and with our partners, if they’ll have us. But that seems possible only if we do the work. You didn’t do the work, David.

  Sincerely,

  Norm

  I’m at a meeting on Capitol Hill, in Seattle. I get beeped. There’s been a shooting. An address shows up on my pager. I know right where it is. It’s across the street from “Common Ground,” a social services agency that oversees the safe transfer of children in joint custody cases—you know, mom drops the kid off at 8:00 A.M., dad picks her up fifteen minutes later. Dad returns the child at 5:00 P.M., mom picks her up at 5:15. That way mom and dad never have to see each other.

  I glide my vehicle under the outer perimeter tape held high by two of my officers and pull up to the inner perimeter. A car is parked facing south in the northbound lane, its driver’s door open, the dome light on. Lt. Harry Bailey says, “I thought you’d want to roll on this one, boss.” He’s right, he’s wrong. Behind the wheel of the car is the sprawled body of a woman, dressed in business attire. She’s dead. In back, buckled snugly into her car seat, a little girl about two. White tights, patent leather shoes, plaid skirt, puffy nylon jacket. Dark curly hair, long eyelashes, the face of an angel. Her eyes are wide open, her two little fists clenched. She’s also dead, shot through the chest.

  It was a little after five, a dark, moonless evening when Melanie Edwards had picked up Carli from this “safe house.” Her estranged husband, Carl Edwards, had dropped the child off fifteen minutes earlier. Then he stuck around, lying in wait. When the mother and daughter got to the car he shot them both, most likely Carli first so that mom would be forced to watch. Then he sped off.

  A week or so later, as a California Highway Patrol officer approached him in Marin County, Edwards shot and killed himself.

  Melanie Edwards did everything right. She got a protection order. She moved out of the house. She connected with and got help from a battered women’s shelter. She kept her new location secret from Carl. She even seized his gun and turned it over to Seattle police. She arranged for the hassle-free transfer of Carli at the beginning and end of her workday—something she was forced into doing because a clueless judge ruled that Carli’s daddy had a right to see his daughter, even in the face of an amply justified protection order. To learn more about why this happens, read Professor Sarah Buel, founder and codirector of the University of Texas’s Domestic Violence Clinic (see especially “Access to Meaningful Remedy: Overcoming Doctrinal Obstacles in Tort Litigation Against Domestic Violence Offenders,” Oregon Law Review, No. 83, 2005.) Buel has spent twenty-six years in the courts as an advocate and prosecutor. Her examples of the “acculturated non-empathy” of lawyers and judges are as jolting as they are revolting. To repeat: Melanie Edwards did everything right.

  What is it with these fathers? David Brame names his son, “David, Jr.,” and five years later kills the boy’s mother in front of the kid. Carl Edwards names his daughter after himself, then shoots her. What else can we conclude: To men such as David Brame and Carl Edwards and God knows how many others, families are disposable property.

  Let me guess, if you’re a certain kind of man you’ve already blown a gasket. Yes, you say, it’s horrible what some men do to their wives and children. But, not all men are like Brame or Edwards. Men are also beaten and battered, knifed or shot by their women partners. If you’re a certain kind of male cop you’re especially impatient for me to acknowledge this, to say something about these women, the female DV offenders you encounter on the job—the ones who scream and rant and spit and hit.

  They’re out there, believe me. Misogynist cops call them nags, cunts, bitches, ball-busters. Even before “primary aggressor” became part of our lexicon I encountered several such women. In fact, I choked one out one night. Her name was Kathryn Knox. She was beating the crap out of my partner after she’d beaten the crap out of her partner, a good-sized male.

  My heart goes out to any man who’s been falsely arrested, maliciously prosecuted, wrongly convicted. An injustice is an injustice.

  But hear this, guys: domestic violence is overwhelmingly a male problem. Look at the numbers. In about 15 percent of DV cases the woman goes to jail. Many men say that that number underestimates the incidence of women who batter men. I say bullshit.

  Often, women are arrested because they’ve committed the “crime” of self-defense. Or, they’ve simply had enough and decided to retaliate. Sorry, man, but if your partner comes at you as you sleep off a drunk, after having sliced her with a box-cutter, thrown hot coffee in her face, or blackened her eye—and she puts a 12-gauge shotgun under your chin and pulls the trigger . . . let’s just say you don’t want me on your jury.

  And how many men are actually afraid of their female partners? Some, to be sure (I’d rather not have to face Kathryn Knox again). But, most? I doubt it. Men are simply bigger, meaner, scarier, better acculturated to violence.

  Look, the time has come for us boys to grow up, to take responsibility for our actions. A big step in that direction, if you’re a batterer, is to get help. Now. Today. It won’t be easy, even if you’re highly motivated. But you can do it. (And, for God’s sake, avoid batterers’ treatment programs that try to “pathologize” you or “anger management” you out of your abusive ways. True, you may be nuts, and you may have a hell of a temper. But DV, like rape, is a crime of power and control. If I’m a controlling, self-centered abuser driven by an ingrained sense of entitlement, the last thing my partner needs is a calmer, “less angry” me. Something tells me David Brame was devoid of all anger when he put that .45 slug into his wife’s head.)

  Another suggestion? Look for a treatment program led by a male-female team, for reasons you’ll understand when you get there. This bit of wisdom brought to you by my friends Don Drozd, a California attorney, and Anita Castle, executive director of the San Juan County, Washington, Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault program—who’ve teamed up to provide excellent batterers’ treatment.

  There’s so much that needs to be do
ne to make the American home a safe place for every member of the family. Research tells us that violence is learned behavior. As a society we do a depressingly superb job of teaching violence to our children, particularly our little boys. We need to instruct our kids in nonviolence, and gender equality, starting in grade school. Men in positions of power and/or celebrity—athletes and actors, pastors and principals, police officers and politicians—need to speak out. I’d love to see these guys use their positions to convey the message that real men don’t hit women or kids.

  Within the criminal justice system, police departments, prosecutors, and judges need to be held to a much higher standard of performance. For years it was the cops who sat in the cellar of learning and acumen about domestic violence; now it’s mostly our judges, some of whom continue to make spectacularly stupid decisions when it comes to the protection of women and children.

  Our communities at large need to insist on a vastly improved social and governmental response to prevention, enforcement, shelters, and other services, including batterers’ treatment. I’ve never seen an instance of sustained community pressure that didn’t exact significant changes in the priorities or performance of a public agency.

  Every person convicted of domestic violence who has undergone batterers’ treatment or who has been previously sentenced for domestic violence, and who re-offends (and is convicted a second time of stalking or felonious spousal assault or child abuse) should be sent to prison for life. Such a person is simply too dangerous to live in the free world. The victim/survivor needs to know that her assailant will never again harm or terrorize her or her children.

  To end on a positive note, a story of at least one exclusively male sports organization that did the right thing by women. In 1995 the Seattle Mariners came from thirteen games back in August to win their division. “Mariner fever” gripped the city, and a slogan—“Refuse to Lose”—was born. “Refuse” signs and T-shirts cropped up everywhere. My staff and I scurried down to Pioneer Square near the old King Dome and purchased armloads of the shirts. I set aside a day where all nonuniformed personnel could wear them and show off our Mariner spirit (it must have worked—we beat the Yankees in the playoffs). And all this has what to do with DV?

  The next year, I joined a group of state and local DV advocates who presented a proposal to Mariners’ management. They loved our idea, and soon thereafter launched the “Refuse to Abuse” campaign. The club dedicated a ball game at Safeco Field to the cause, and invited my Seattle colleague on the national advisory council, Dr. Marie Fortune (and rabid Mariners fan), to throw out the first pitch of the night. Throughout the game anti-DV messages were flashed on the scoreboard. Our new “Refuse” T-shirts were all over the ballpark. But the strongest component of the campaign, which resonates to this day, was a series of TV ads, featuring Mariner stars (carefully vetted to make sure we weren’t showcasing a batterer).

  Here’s Joey Cora’s, a favorite of Seattle fans: “When I’m on the field I do everything in my power hit the ball. But I will . . . never . . . ever . . . hit . . . a . . . woman.”

  CHAPTER 2

  WAGE WAR ON CRIME, NOT DRUGS

  I FLOATED INTO THE conference room and settled into a chair that seemed to have been constructed of warm air and goose down. A moment later my colleagues filtered in, in slow motion, the contours of their bodies blurring into gold and cerulean auras. These were the finest individuals in the universe. Worthy, noble, virtuous. It was a marvelous meeting, each person respectful, no one interrupting. Everyone agreeing with my point of view on every item on the agenda. It was a perfect Percodan day.

  Alcohol had always been my drug of choice, but in the mid-eighties I went to work with my pockets full of painkillers. I popped them throughout the day, long after the misery of a failed kidney stone extraction had worn off. Administrative problems vanished, or lost their weight; organizational enemies became pals; dreaded bureaucratic meetings turned into pleasant, almost cosmic out-of-body experiences. After a couple of months, though, I stopped. Cold turkey. Why? Because I ran out of pills, and as a deputy chief of police I was afraid to ask for more.

  I wasn’t the only doper in government. There were far more consequential personages into the drug scene. Richard Nixon, depressed over the public’s reaction to Vietnam and Watergate, scored a dealer-volume supply of Dilantin and wolfed down hundreds if not thousands of the mood-altering caps from 1970 through the end of his presidency in 1974.* Bill Clinton denied inhaling but confessed to puffing. Al Gore copped to being a heavy weed smoker in college. George W. Bush refuses to refute accounts he was a cokester in school. And Marion Barry? Please.

  Where does it end? It doesn’t, and it’s not just politicians, of course, or the occasional police official. It’s everybody—every demographic, every occupation in the country is well represented, including shock-talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh whose housekeeper kept him supplied with cigar boxes full of OxyContin and other narcotics. We do like our drugs.

  And so what? If I want to inject, ingest, or inhale a mood- or mind-altering substance—whether to find God, flee personal problems, or just feel good—that’s my business. Not the government’s. Unless . . . well, exceptions to follow.

  I say it’s time to withdraw the troops in the war on drugs.

  For a jaw-dropping illustration of drug enforcement’s financial costs, take a look at drugsense.org’s “Drug War Clock.” To the tune of $600 a second, taxpayers are financing this war. For the year 2004 the figure will have added up to over $20 billion, and that’s just for federal enforcement alone. You can add another $22 to $24 billion for state and local drug law enforcement, and even more billions for U.S. drug interdiction work on the international scene. We’re talking well over $50 billion a year to finance America’s war on drugs.

  Think of this war’s real casualties: tens of thousands of otherwise innocent Americans incarcerated, many for twenty years or more, some for life; families ripped apart; drug traffickers and blameless bystanders shot dead on city streets; narcotics officers assassinated here and abroad, with prosecutors, judges, and elected officials in Latin America gunned down for their courageous stands against the cartels; and all those dollars spent on federal, state, and local cops, courts, prosecutors, prisons, probation, parole, and pee-in-the-bottle programs. Even federal aid to bribe distant nations to stop feeding our habit.

  “Plan Colombia” was hatched under the last year of the Clinton administration to wage America’s drug war on Colombian soil. Costing over $1.3 billion ($800 million going to the military), the plan sought to “eradicate” that nation’s coca and heroin poppy plants (Colombia supplied 95 percent of this nation’s cocaine). The chemical used was the herbicide glyphosate which, sprayed on crops, does untold damage to the environment; when sprayed on water supplies or unprotected people it causes a host of serious to fatal medical problems. Similar efforts in Peru and Bolivia have reduced production only temporarily, and always at high cost: recall that the Peruvian air force, on the strength of mistaken U.S. drug intelligence, shot down a civilian aircraft carrying an American missionary and her infant daughter in April 2001.

  In Afghanistan, the Bush administration supported the Taliban, to the tune of $125 million in foreign aid, plus another $43 million for enforcing its ostensible ban on poppy production—right up until September 10, 2001. (As Robert Scheer makes clear in his May 22, 2001, column in The Los Angeles Times—“Bush’s Faustian Deal with the Taliban”—the president knew all along that the Taliban was hiding Osama bin Laden.)

  Today Afghanistan’s drug lords give the country’s warlords (when they’re not one and the same) a run for their money. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) in the summer of 2004 issued a scathing report citing the phenomenal growth in Afghan poppy production—and the Bush administration’s failure to monitor its own anti-drug aid. The United Nations estimates the value of the 2004 crop at $2.2 billion, with production up 40 percent, breaking all records for a single year. Accor
ding to Peter Rodman of the Pentagon, “profits from the production of illegal narcotics flow into coffers of warlord militias, corrupt government officials, and extremist forces” (BBC News, September 24, 2004).

  The United States has, through its war on drugs, fostered political instability, official corruption, and health and environmental disasters around the globe. In truth, the U.S.-sponsored international war on drugs is a war on poor people, most of them subsistence farmers caught in a dangerous no-win situation.

  Another casualty of the drug war: the reputation of individual police officers, individual departments, and the entire system of American law enforcement. If you aspire to be a crooked cop, drugs are clearly the way to go. The availability, street value, and illegality of drugs form a sweet temptation to character-challenged cops, many of whom wind up shaking down street dealers, converting drugs to their own use, or selling them. Almost all the major police corruption scandals of the last several decades have had their roots in drug enforcement. We’ve seen robbery, extortion, drug dealing, drug stealing, drug use, false arrests, perjury, throw-down guns, and murder. And these are the good guys?

  There isn’t an unscathed police department in the country. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Miami, Oakland, Dallas, Kansas City—all have recently suffered stunning police drug scandals. You won’t find a single major city in the country that has not fired and/or arrested at least one of its own for some drug-related offense in the past few years, including San Diego and Seattle. Smaller cities have not been spared. The cities of Irvington and West New York, New Jersey, and Ford Heights, Illinois, saw cops transporting, peddling, using, protecting drug shipments, and/or extorting dealers. In Ford Heights, it was former police chief Jack Davis. A twenty-five-year veteran, he was convicted of extorting heroin and crack cocaine dealers, allowing them to operate on the streets of his own city as he pocketed their dirty money.