NEW YORK TIMES: ….Mr. McNamara, who headed police departments in San Jose, Calif., from 1976 to 1991, and in Kansas City, Mo., for three years in the ’70s, was known for the farsighted policies he implemented and for his iconoclastic outspokenness on law enforcement topics, often decades ahead of the pack.
Since the 1980s, he had openly criticized the federal government’s war on drugs, which he said filled prisons and squandered resources without putting a dent in the drug problem. He opposed mandatory sentencing laws and supported legalizing marijuana when few in his position were doing so. And his condemnation of gun manufacturers in the 1980s for their production of assault weapons and armor-piercing bullets led the National Rifle Association to attack him personally in full-page ads in Time and in Newsweek…
A decade before the New York Police Department began experimenting with community policing in 1989, Mr. McNamara had tested those techniques in Kansas City and put them to use in San Jose. He trained San Jose officers in how to develop relationships with merchants, residents and community leaders in high-crime areas, promoting officers who accepted the changes and sidelining those who did not… (more)
EDITOR: Another leader of the opposition to the War on Drug passes to his reward. We served together on the board of the Drug Policy Foundation. When I last saw Joe, he was with the Hoover Foundation and writing crime novels in his spare time. ‘May his memory be for a blessing.’
