Contemporary Issues in Modern Police Operations and the Policing

Drugs and Gangs
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Drugs and Gangs
Law enforcement in the United States is a dynamic sector and in most of the countries across the world. Ideally, there is a hefty economic mechanism that is geared toward ensuring that there are no drugs in the United States or accessible for any citizen. However, as the law enforcement comes up with various strategies to breakdown the criminal enterprises, the gangs come up with new strategies to beat the law enforcement agencies at their own game. One of the aspects that has to be considered about illegal drugs is that, this is organized crime. This means that most of the operations are well orchestrated with fluid structures and rules and in some of the cases they have police and other law enforcement agencies on their payroll. As such, they tend to outdo the law enforcement strategies at every other turn and they make the best of the situation when they are cornered relative to the fact that they have evolved over the years.
For the longest time, efforts such as the war on drugs have been skewed and have led to more devastating impacts on the society than they intended. Over the years the war on drugs has been one that has had equal parts success and equal parts failure ("A Brief History of the Drug War | Drug Policy Alliance", 2017). In some of the cases the failures have been on the highlights relative to the fact that, it has been quite biased, with some of the ethnic minorities feeling that they are being targeted. It is also important to point out that the element of fighting drugs and gangs is one that is highly dynamic. Drugs that are considered to be illegal today were at one point legal and those that that considered legal today are going to be considered illegal in the past. As such, as more information emerges and the society changes, there are chances there will be more changes in the fight against drugs.
‘Many currently illegal drugs, such as marijuana, opium, coca, and psychedelics have been used for thousands of years for both medical and spiritual purposes. So why are some drugs legal and other drugs illegal today? It's not based on any scientific assessment of the relative risks of these drugs – but it has everything to do with who is associated with these drugs. The first anti-opium laws in the 1870s were directed at Chinese immigrants. The first anti-cocaine laws in the early 1900s were directed at black men in the South. The first anti-marijuana laws, in the Midwest and the Southwest in the 1910s and 20s, were directed at Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans. Today, Latino and especially black communities are still subject to wildly disproportionate drug enforcement and sentencing practices.’ ("A Brief History of the Drug War | Drug Policy Alliance", 2017)
As the post above indicates, there are those dynamics that have been involved in the fight against drugs and the fight against gangs that have remained true. The people that are associated with the exercises and the drugs have been the key drivers of the historical fight against these elements. As such there is a historical aspect that has to be considered where the skew in the fight against the two aspects in the society is highly debatable and one t...