The War on Drugs
This section explores how during the 70s and 80s in America, police brutality was in full swing based off of the recently introduced "war on drugs".
In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon formally launched the war on drugs to eradicate illicit drug use in the US. "If we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will surely in time destroy us," Nixon told Congress in 1971. "I am not prepared to accept this alternative."
Over the next couple decades, particularly under the Reagan administration, what followed was the escalation of global military and police efforts against drugs. But in that process, the drug war led to unintended consequences that have proliferated violence around the world and contributed to mass incarceration in the US, even if it has made drugs less accessible and reduced potential levels of drug abuse.
In the US, crack consumption is tied to income, and income is tied to race. So this arbitrary sentencing disparity has forced courts to punish black Americans much more harshly than white Americans for basically the exact same crime. As a result, tens of thousands of young men, most of whom are black, have been snatched up by law enforcement on low-level drug offenses and thrown into prison for mandatory terms that make a mockery of any sense of proportionately. This situation is so absurd that its sparked the formation of a reform coalition composed of the most unlikely of allies, including the Koch brothers, the NAACP, Newt Gingrich, the ACLU, Senator Rand Paul, and the Obama White House.