More than just a feel-good program for the police and youth, however, law enforcement needed DARE—and not just for the purported goal of fighting drugs. DARE offered a means to burnish the public image of policing after years of aggressive and militarized policing associated with the drug war and high-profile episodes of police violence and profiling, such as the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles or the discriminatory targeting of the Central Park Five in New York. By using cops as teachers, DARE administrators and proponents hoped to humanize the police by transforming them into friends and mentors of the nation’s youth instead of a uniformed enemy. For DARE’s proponents, they insisted that kids took the police message to heart. As DARE America director Glenn Levant made clear, DARE’s success was evident during the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, when, instead of protesting, “we saw kids in DARE shirts walking the streets with their parents, hand-in-hand, as if to say, ‘I’m a good citizen, I’m not going to participate in the looting.’”
The underlying goal was to transform the image of the police in the minds of kids and to develop rapport with students so that they no longer viewed the police as threatening or the enforcers of drug laws. But DARE’s message about zero tolerance for drug use—and the legitimacy of police authority—sometimes led to dire consequences that ultimately revealed law enforcement’s quite broad power to punish. The most high-profile instances occurred when students told their DARE officers about their parents’ drug use, which occasionally led to the arrest of the child’s family members. For those students who took the DARE message to heart, they unwittingly became snitches, serving as the eyes and ears of the police and giving law enforcement additional avenues for surveilling and criminalizing community drug use.
DARE was not a benign program aimed only at preventing youth drug use. It was a police legitimacy project disguised as a wholesome civic education effort. Relying on the police to teach zero tolerance for drugs and respect for law and order accomplished political-cultural work for both policy makers and law enforcement who needed to retain public investment in law and order even amid credible allegations of police misconduct and terror. Similarly, DARE diverted attention from the violent reality of the drug war that threatened to undermine trust in the police and alienate constituencies who faced the brunt of such policing. Through softening and rehabilitating the image of police for impressionable youth and their families, DARE ultimately enabled the police to continue their aggressive tactics of mass arrest, punishment, and surveillance, especially for Black and Latinx youth. Far from an alternative to the violent and death-dealing war on drugs, DARE ensured that its punitive operations could continue apace.
