Lohraff, he finds this disturbing but he says there’s not a lot he can do about it. He is essentially running a fire department.  “We respond to our clientele, which is the citizens of Chicago. Most of our complaints come from the black community—somebody who can't wash his car or let his kids go outside and play because of the gunfire.  We have no open air drug markets that are manned by white people and we have probably a hundred of them that are manned by blacks.”

In other words, white crack dealers don’t stand on street corners. They deal behind closed doors over the kitchen table, or the bar, or the office, or the conference table. As one young sorority girl-turned-dealer said, “You wouldn’t believe the customers I had. Doctors, lawyers, business executives—all of them were white.”^[6] But since this kind of terrain is inaccessible to guys in squad cars, the practical effect is for white middle- and upper-class crack users to pursue their habit unmolested while the inner-city dealers are harvested like wheat through a combine.

It would be nice to think that this racial tilt in drug enforcement was unique to the Windy City, but a glance at the headlines anywhere reveals that the Chicago experience permeates the criminal justice system. The overall U.S. numbers are astounding. While the National Institute on Drug Abuse says that far and away the vast majority of crack users are white—96 percent of the crack defendants in federal court are black or Hispanic. The U.S. District Court for Southern California has not prosecuted a single white person for crack in over five years. In 1992 there were no Federal prosecutions of whites for crack dealing in Chicago, or in Denver, Miami, Dallas or Boston. The states prosecute an occasional white crack dealer but the record there is better by only a point or two. California’s numbers for this period were identical to the federal docket—only 4 percent of the defendants were white.^[7]

Mike Hoke was born and raised down on Chicago’s South Shore and he doesn’t need a University of Chicago economist to tell him what’s going on here. “When I grew up we had all these