Walter In Denver

Sheriff Masters

I was just mentioning him the other day. He has a book out this week, The New Prohibition: Voices of Dissent Challenge the Drug War.

A very pleasant surprise, popular Denver weekly Westword features a story about the good sheriff and his book as the cover story of the latest edition. It's a mostly glowing account of his career and reformation from a militant drug warrior to one of the drug war's primary critics. I can understand the tone of the article - I've met Bill Masters a few times and I don't think one can help but be impressed with his honesty and good will. He strikes me as honest to a fault and willing to risk his own career for a greater cause.

The Westword article, written by Alan Prendergast, is a must read for anyone with the slightest interest in the issue. Or any issue.

A few excerpts:

Masters says he's only doing what every police official should do: let the public know his limitations. To illustrate this, he recounts a story from early in his career, when he was Telluride's town marshal and the city fathers came up with a complicated plan for plowing the streets that required motorists to move their cars to various locations depending on the day of the month. "I told the town board, 'We can make this happen,'" he recalls. "But in those days, most people in Telluride didn't know what month it was, much less what day. We started giving out 400 parking tickets a month, in a town of maybe 400 cars. We were towing dozens of cars a day.

"People didn't take it out on the people who passed the law; they took it out on the enforcement people. We had our cars vandalized. People were up in arms over this stupid parking regulation. Eventually they changed the law. I should have realized that a good peace officer would have gone to the town board and said, 'This isn't going to work.' We're the ones out on the street. We can tell you what can work and can't work. Too often we say, 'We can do it; just give us more money and manpower and jails.' Just to increase our own bureaucracy, we gladly sign on."
[...]
Two other items stand out.

One is a snapshot of several kilos of cocaine piled in a chair, a souvenir from a sprawling conspiracy case Masters investigated decades ago. The picture was taken in Colombia; the sheriff came across it while serving a search warrant in Telluride, but only a fraction of the dope was ever seized.

The second is a battered copy of the state statutes from 1908, found in a forgotten crevice when workers were remodeling Telluride's old jail. The book occupies a lonely space on a shelf above thirteen volumes of the current Colorado Revised Statutes. The juxtaposition makes for a useful visual aid whenever Masters launches into one of his favorite topics, the relentless expansion of government over the past century. God gave Moses ten laws, he notes; the state legislature has given the citizens of Colorado more than 30,000.

"When you get to that number, lawlessness becomes commonplace," he says. "We have to triage all this. Which ones do we pick that we're really serious about?"
[...]
The true turning point for Masters came in the course of a subsequent, even more emotional murder investigation. Buffy Rice Donohue, an eighteen-year-old girl fighting a cocaine problem, had disappeared from Montrose in 1993; her skeletal remains were found in San Miguel County eighteen months later. Through physical evidence and witness interviews, Masters built what he calls a "great case" against David Middleton, an ex-cop from Miami with a history of sexual violence. But by that point, Middleton was on his way to death row in Nevada for the brutal rape and murders of two other women, and the Montrose district attorney refused to take the case.

"It would have been a lot of work, and the county couldn't afford it," Masters says. "I gave the district attorney's office $50,000 in drug-seizure money, no strings attached, just because I wanted him to think about prosecuting this case. He spent it on something else."

In 1997, Masters attended a summit at the FBI training academy in Quantico, Virginia, that allowed investigators from different jurisdictions to compare notes on Middleton's cross-country rampage of rape and murder. The sheriff was disappointed to discover that the bureau's famed team of serial-killer trackers and profilers, celebrated in books and movies, consisted of a few agents and clerks, loaded down with more files than they could possibly manage. He took some comfort in seeing all the young faces around the building, bright-eyed agents in training who, Masters hoped, might someday catch violent men like Middleton before their assaults turned deadly. Then it was explained to him who all those young people really were.

"They weren't FBI agents at all," Masters says darkly. "They were DEA agents, more fodder for the drug war. We'd spent days going over all these pictures of murdered girls, all these unsolved cases. And I'm thinking, 'What do people really worry about? The people smoking pot in their basements, or some weirdo kidnapping your daughter?' Statistically, of course, that's not much of a possibility, but that's still more of a concern of mine than all the potheads put together."
[...]
But Masters insists that the drug war is primarily focused on locking up American citizens -- and, in the process, squandering resources and manpower that could be better devoted to homeland-security interests.

"A quarter of the FBI case filings in the year before 9/11 were drug cases," he says. "Who was looking after the terrorists? Nobody. We have 10,000 DEA agents. Is it more important to prevent the next terrorist attack or to bust Cheech for having a bong? In the year before 9/11, we arrested almost 750,000 people for possession of marijuana -- and one foreign terrorist."

He shakes his head in disgust. "You'd think real conservatives would be looking at what works, what's the best result you can get for the money," he says.

There's much, much more in the article, all worthwhile.

I don't pretend that much of the material on this blog is all that important, but this is. My copy of the book should be here soon.

Posted by Walter at May 21, 2004 10:09 PM