the story of rachel hoffman’s murder (which i somehow missed when it broke back in may) is getting a lot of attention right now, largely because of an ABC broadast that aired last friday. i read about the case today in a short, heartbreaking article by paul armentano on alternet.
cliff notes: busted by the tallahassee police for possession of a little baggie of pot, rachel was coerced into turning police informant and sent to buy cocaine, ecstasy and a handgun from some known drug and weapons dealers.
rachel in her favorite hat
they take a 23-year-old pothead kid and send her into a park at night to buy a gun? a fucking GUN? what do guns have to do with smoking a couple joints with your friends? in the sixties, it was understood that these worlds rarely intersect. what happened? has everyone in law enforcement lost their sense of perspective as well as their minds?
you can see the chief of the tallahassee PD on the 20/20 special report talking about doing his job by “taking these people off the street” and the people he’s talking about are people like RACHEL. a weepy hippy-dippy college kid, getting ready to go to chef school. she’s in the same category, apparently, as the scumbags she was supposed to buy the coke and the pills and the gun from.
the cops hand her $13,000 cash and send her out alone after the bad guys. yet the police chief displays no remorse whatsoever when discussing the fiasco that ended with rachel’s murder. not only was this a stupid thing to do, this was — by the police own’s guidelines — against the law: probationers are not permitted to associate with known drug dealers. additionally, all informant operations are supposed to be cleared through the local D.A. not only wasn’t this done, the TPD cops insisted rachel keep their deal to herself. they knew an operation like this would never be approved.
rachel hoffman is not the only casualty of the this country’s rabid and misguided war on drugs (more appropriately called “drug prohibition“). check out becky c’s “recovering lawyer” blog for a short list of other, similar murders.
the case is in the news again because her killers go before a florida grand jury this week.
but those are just the guys who pulled the trigger. rachel hoffman was murdered by the callous, narrow-minded decision-makers at tallahassee PD, and they — from their unremorseful chief down to every last cop who “managed” rachel in their botched operation — should be standing trial right beside the thugs.
it was the cops who set rachel up, and it’s the cops who should take the fall for the crime.
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I didn’t invent this term, but I like to think of it as “the war on *some* drugs”; I don’t see anybody making any war on any pharmaceutical companies. Not counting class action suits, which mainly benefit trial lawyers.
What a sweet-looking girl.
A real tragedy. That chief should be sent to prison for life. Did you see that Barney Frank and other politicians on both sides of the aisle are introducing to try and decriminalize small amounts of pot? They did this in the UK and now the conservatives are sweeping back into power trying to reverse it.
decriminalization — of all recreational drugs — is the only way. it was a well known fact that, during Prohibition, people who’d never been drinkers started going to the speakeasies. there’s something sexy and alluring about the underground. and then all that black market money. an irresistible combination and recipe for trouble.
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