and dangerous possibilities of the becoming of these found elsewhere has itself now become an object of interest for police. Police will now regularly watch this building, take note of who enters and leaves, and use this as an excuse to stop, question, and frisk those who do so. In the situations of the drug war, then, the being of all of these objects and more has become something entirely different than what it is in other situations. Situations, then, are also constituted by aspects of diverse nonhuman objects and affect and alter the being of those objects in turn.
The way in which the drug war situation turns certain buildings, streets, parks, and neighborhoods into objects of surveillance returns us along the assemblic relation of state-based surveillance and control back to Bud’s poem. After having traveled some way along the various assemblic relations disclosed in the poem, we can perhaps now come to see that although spectacularly disturbing, rape, torture, and other forms of police violence may not be the most insidious situated manifestation of the drug war revealed in Bud’s poem. For the intertwining of the carceral political-economic and the surveillance and control aspects of the drug war are most clearly disclosed in the very fact that the police stopped Bud in the first place. This is a variant of what has come to be called stop-and-frisk. Stop-and-frisk essentially means that police officers with so-called reasonable suspicion can stop any individual to question and frisk. This tactic, which initially aimed to get weapons off the streets, has morphed into a means of controlling and watching populations. As Terrance, a fifty-year-old African American man from the Bronx, a former crack user who has been incarcerated twice, and now a leader of VOCAL-NY, once told me: stop-and-frisk tactics make him feel as if “I’m trespassing in my own neighborhood.” He continued with a description of his experience with stop-and-frisk:
If I’m coming out of my building, like I been many times, and stopped and frisked because I’m a person of color and I don’t have my sneakers tied or I’m wearing, you know, or I have clothes on that are related to gangsters or whatever, which are the clothings that a lot of people in the neighborhood wear, you know, and I’m going to work and I’m still being stopped. And I got my bag and everything, my ID is out, you know, come on. You’re not giving me no freedom to walk in my own neighborhood, but if I was in another neighborhood, another color, you wouldn’t be stopping me. So why am I, at this point right here, being profiled?
Terrance’s question is one increasingly asked by African American and Latino American persons who are systematically watched by this and similar forms of surveillance.28 In 2012, for example, over five hundred thousand individuals were stopped and frisked in New York City alone, 87 percent of whom were either African American or Latino American. Perhaps most disturbing about this form of surveillance is that 89 percent of these stops turned up nothing. Yet the highest number of arrests (over five thousand) were for possessing personal-use quantities of marijuana, which under New York City law is not an offense unless shown in public, which occurs when a police officer asks you to empty your pockets. Overwhelmingly, those stopped, frisked, and arrested are young African American and Latino men, and this tactic is predominantly carried out in the neighborhoods where these men live.29 The result, as illustrated by Terrance, is that this very real possibility of stop-and-frisk that many African Americans and Latino Americans must live with every day in New York and elsewhere has left many feeling that their neighborhoods, their streets, and even their own front stoops are no longer places where they can dwell.30
Stop-and-frisk is likely the most “successful” police tactic in the war on drugs. This is particularly so in New York City, although similar tactics are used in other cities in North America, Great Britain, Russia, and likely elsewhere. As we saw with Bud, this police tactic is also used on a lonesome California highway. It is not only responsible for a significant amount of the surveillance the drug war allows to be placed on neighborhoods and individuals—it also contributes to the vast increase of incarceration rates in the United States and other countries, particularly for those carrying small, personal-use amounts of marijuana. Indeed, the policing and surveillance techniques of the drug war are largely responsible for the mass incarceration of nonviolent and low-level drug users around the globe, as the global prison population has skyrocketed in the last three decades to over ten million persons.31 Thus, for example, when Thailand renewed its war on drugs with vigor in 2003, in addition to the over two thousand extrajudicial killings done by the police and military, over seventy thousand people were also rounded up and detained without due process.32 Although the government claims that these were all drug dealers, reports by various nongovernmental organizations and anti–drug war organizations show that most of them were simply drug users. Furthermore, prison population numbers alone do not accurately depict the total number of drug users who are incarcerated, as millions more around the globe are held against their will in the prison-like conditions of various rehabilitation and detention centers. Thus, for example, it is estimated that up to a half million people are held in drug detention centers in China, where they are systematically exposed to “beatings, lack of medical treatment, and rape,” as well as forced labor up to sixteen hours per day, oftentimes in centers that have labor contracts with private companies.33 Similar conditions can be found in such centers across Russia.34
But no country incarcerates drug users, and its population in general, like the United States, which now has the highest level of incarceration on the planet and, for that matter, the highest level in modern history approached, but not surpassed, only by the Soviet gulag system under Stalin.35 The drug war and its often racialized tactics have fed this mass incarceration such that, for example, in 2012, 1.55 million people were arrested on nonviolent drug charges, the vast majority of whom were African American or Hispanic.36 Indeed, those who profit from this carceral political economics recognize the centrality of current drug policy and laws to their corporate success. Thus, for example, in a 2010 report to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, the country’s “largest owner and operator of privatized correctional and detention facilities” highlighted changes to current drug law as one of the primary risks to its growth and profit.37 This recognition and concern is not surprising since in the last thirty years (or, as we will see shortly, since the militarization and law enforcement aspects of the drug war have become fully knotted) the prison population in the United States has increased by 500 percent, and stop-and-frisk and other forms of drug war surveillance have been key factors in these skyrocketing numbers. Thus, for example, in 1980, a total of 41,000 drug offenders were in all state and federal prisons and local jails, while in 2011 this total stood at 501,500.38
If we follow the assemblic relations of the drug war from these situated manifestations of stop-and-frisk through the hyperaggressive act depicted by Bud of “both cops pull[ing] their guns and aim[ing] them at me,” we are able to disclose how such policing that takes the form of intense violence, intrusive surveillance, and excessive incarceration are in fact intertwined with another aspect of this assemblage. That is, the global militarism aspect. The link between these localized police tactics and global militarism is the militarization of the police. Although police militarization had already slowly started to occur in the 1960s in response to increased civil unrest and urban rioting, it finally emerged as the phenomenon it is today in the 1980s as just one part of what at the time was called a “total war” against drugs. From the 1981 Congressional Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act; to the 1986 National Security Decision Directive 221 that not only instructed the U.S. military to further assist law enforcement agencies but also mandated that it train and help foreign militaries carry out antidrug operations;39 to the 1988 bill authorizing the National Guard to assist local police in drug interdictions; to the 1989 policy that established regional task forces within the Pentagon to work closely with local police in antidrug efforts; to “the 1033 program” of the National Defense Authorization Security Act of 1997, which established the Law Enforcement Support Program to more easily transfer military equipment to local police—all of this resulted in the close cooperation between the military and the police, including the training of the latter by the former, and thus the militarization of police equipment and tactics.40 As was recently revealed by the events in Ferguson, Missouri, American local police are now armed with machine guns, tanks, and military-style surveillance equipment
