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"What gets me is when I watch the show "Cops" on TV where they not only act as the police, but the judge and the jury by letting someone go because they ratted out their friend even though they were found to be in possession or whatever. If they've broke the law then arrest them. Let the judge and jury do the work after that."

I don't really have a problem with law enforcement exercising their discretion not to arrest someone who hasn't really done anyone any harm. That's nothing new. They've been doing that forever and it's not that big of a deal.

I don't really like the way it's working out in drug cases these days though where I live. Around here local laweforcement and the drug task force have this "bust three, stay free" thing going on. They try to pressure anyone who is busted for drugs into setting three different people up. They want these guys to find three people who will sell them drugs. In theory that might sound alright. If you don't know any better you might think they are getting a lot of drug dealers this way. What's really going on though is they are busting an awful lot of drug users and treating them like major dealers just because they happen to be stupid enough to help a friend get some drugs.

It used to be that law enforcement would gather intelligence on who the real dealers were, and then watch these people and try to get in and make buys from them. It took a lot of time to make a bust and it involved a lot of work, but they'd end up getting the real dealers that way. What they get now mostly are just drug users who would help a friend find drugs. That ends up being just about all of them. There are no stores where people can buy these substances. People get them from the black market and the way the black market for drugs work at least here is that dealers deal with as few people as possible so they don't expose themselves to undue risk of getting busted. Drug users sometimes don't even know any dealers. They ask their friends to pick stuff up for them. And if they do have a dealer they get stuff from sometimes that dealer will be out of stock or out of pocket and they have to get their friends to get what they want for them. Their friends will expect the same from them when they can't find anything.

Anyway, what happens is that these people who get busted are threatened and coerced into "helping themselves out" buy wearing a wire and making drug buys, usually involving a gram or less of white powder drugs (coke or meth). If they don't know any dealers, they just call around and beg their druggie buddies to get them some drugs and then they make controlled buys for the cops. Most of these guys probably don't know three actual dealers, certainly not major ones anyway. And they don't tend to go after the real dealers anyway if they do know any because real drug dealers are in many cases the kind of people who will kill someone or have them killed for doing something like that. Instead these guys try to think of three people least likely to seek violent retribution against them, three meek people who won't doing anything about being set up. The net result of course is that while we may be sending more people to prison than ever for selling drugs, the percentage of these people who are what you would think of as real dealers, with all the money and guns and so on, is shrinking against the percentage of people being sent to prison for delivery of drugs.

More and more of the people we are overfilling are prison with are just party people stupid enough to help someone they think is a friend get a tiny amount of drugs. A lot of them are just harmless idiots who don't know how to say no to people who persistently ask them for a favor. And as the number of narcotics officers continues to grow, so does the number of people like this going away for a long time for being dealers when they aren't really dealers. Each one of these officers working in narcotics has to make a lot of busts to justify his existence. It's a numbers game and the more narcotics officers we hire competing for busts, the more they have to go after the relatively harmless casual drug users and make them look like real drug dealers. I think they'd like to focus on getting the really bad guys off the streets, but you can't keep your numbers up devoting your time to making big busts that eat up all your time. You have to focus on quantity of busts rather than quality. The guy that busts twenty druggies in a month for making half gram sales to their doper buddies begging them to help them out looks a lot better than the guy who only makes one bust during that time, even if the guy that only made one bust got a pound of meth off the streets, 453.59 grams, compared to 10 grams each for those who were able to get half gram buys from twenty idiots. I see cases all the time where they'll catch a guy with an ounce (28.35 grams) or something and then let him stay out of prison if he sets up three guys on tiny gram or less purchases. These were people he was probably selling dope to. He's worse than them but they go to prison and he walks free. It's stupid, and it's packing our prisons beyond capacity such that we have to keep letting really bad guys go earlier and earlier.

Hopefully someday the powers that be will see how counterproductive this is. We need to change the focus from arresting as many people as possible to seizing as much drugs as possible. While we'll never make the drugs go away, the more drugs we seize the better the chances that drug prices will go higher or that we'll at least curb the downward slide of drug prices. That's something at least. High prices serve as a barrier to entry into hard drug use for some people and for those that try them anyway high prices make it such that not so many will be able to afford to do these drugs enough to become addicted. Locking up scads of druggies who would help a druggie comrade find a tiny amount of drugs does not keep prices up because we seize such tiny amounts of drugs that way. Rewarding officers for busting as many people as possible rather than seizing as much drugs as possible acts as a disincentive to them focusing on the really big busts that take large enough amounts of dope off the streets to raise prices or at least prop them up. On top of that, it's filling our prisons and jails with people who aren't that big of a threat, costing us a fortune, and making it harder to keep the really bad people behind bars and away from the rest of us because we are constantly having to figure out ways to free up prison bed space for the influx of new convicts.