JERONIMO YANEZ REMEMBERED smelling “the odor of burning marijuana” as he approached the white Oldsmobile sedan he had stopped near the intersection of Larpenteur Avenue and Fry Street in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. It was a little after 9 p.m. on a Wednesday in July 2016, and Yanez, who worked for the St. Anthony Police Department, had been assigned to patrol the streets of Lauderdale, a city just west of Falcon Heights.
The whiff of weed from the Oldsmobile, Yanez later said, figured in the threat he perceived from the car’s driver, a 32-year-old school cafeteria worker named Philando Castile. Yanez fatally shot Castile, who had a permit to carry a concealed weapon, a few seconds after learning that he had a gun in the car.
The marijuana that alarmed Yanez also figured in public comments about the shooting by Dana Loesch, a conservative radio host who at the time was a spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association (NRA). Castile’s death seemed to be a clear case of an innocent man who was killed for exercising his Second Amendment rights. But the NRA, which initially called the incident “troubling,” never took a position on whether the shooting was justified. Several journalists thought they had an explanation for the NRA’s reticence when Loesch brought up Castile’s marijuana use, which made it illegal for him to own a gun, let alone carry one in public.
Loesch rejected that interpretation of her comments. But it seemed plausible in light of the NRA’s longstanding support for the federal bans on gun possession by illegal drug users and people convicted of drug-related felonies. The organization’s enthusiasm for enforcing those restrictions illustrates a blind spot shared by many right-leaning critics of gun control, whose concerns about overcriminalization, law enforcement abuses, and violations of civil liberties usually do not extend to the war on drugs.
That inconsistency is the mirror image of attitudes among progressives, who readily recognize the injustice and racially disparate impact of drug laws while enthusiastically supporting gun laws with strikingly similar historical roots and contemporary consequences. In addition to overlooking their potential common ground, both sides tend to miss the perverse interaction between the twin crusades against guns and drugs, which combine to inflict double damage on people like Castile.
‘I WASN’T REACHING FOR IT’
“THE REASON I pulled you over,” Yanez told Castile, was that the car’s brake lights were not working properly. The top light was out, and the broken lens on the left light was covered with red tape.
Although Castile had no way of knowing it, that was not the real reason Yanez had pulled him over. The real reason was that Yanez thought Castile looked like a suspect in a recent armed robbery of a nearby convenience store. Surveillance video from the store showed two black men with handguns. One had shoulder-length dreadlocks, while the other had longer dreadlocks and was wearing glasses.
Castile likewise was a black man with dreadlocks and glasses. But at the time of the stop, Yanez told investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) the next day, he could not recall whether the robbers had “corn rows or dreadlocks or straight hair.”
