IDENTIFIED: GPD asks public for help identifying burglar at Spyglass Apartments clubhouse

Perpetual strategy to subjugate and instill fear and loathing of “others” for political gain.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

President Nixon’s creation of a war on drugs to criminalize Black people amplified the presumption of guilt assigned to Black people since slavery and entrenched the racialization of criminality that began in earnest with lynching.

The Nixon Administration’s strategy of using drugs to “vilify [African Americans] night after night on the evening news” fostered a politics of fear and anger that reached frenzied heights in the 1990s. Sensationalist media accounts of “soaring” crime rates in the 1980s and early 1990s combined with extraordinary resentment about rehabilitation programs within prisons to create a political environment in which every elected official sought to be “tough on crime.” Decrying that “[g]angs and drugs have taken over our streets and undermined our schools,” President Bill Clinton in 1994 signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, allotting $12.5 billion to states to increase incarceration.