Summary

“The Worst Thing To Hit Us Since Slavery” – Crack and the Advent of Warrior Policing, 1988 – 92. The author begins this chapter with a description of a school he co-founded in the early 2000’s (The Maya Angelou Public Charter School) with the intention of educating troubled, at risk, young African-Americans and giving them opportunities to improve themselves and their lives. He also describes how those students were regularly stopped, searched, and harassed by police officers engaged in the fight against drugs in that neighborhood. This, the author suggests, was the consequence of circumstances that began years earlier.

“For decades,” the author writes, “D.C. and the nation had been consumed by a drug war … and the police, accordingly, had been trained to act like warriors” (154). That war, the author goes on to say, started in the 1960’s against heroin; continued in the 1970’s against...