[Isobel] In Afghanistan, the U.S. spent billions
trying to eradicate the illegal drug trade.
The Taliban say they're gonna crack down
on the drug trade.
[person] speaking native language
[Isobel] The country at the moment is
in an economic crisis.
Do you feel angry
at the international community?
Do you feel like you've been abandoned?
[all praying]
dramatic music
[Vegas] Police use of force has
a long, contentious history in the U.S.
Is there a dynamic that makes it difficult
to report police misconduct?
It is bullshit. It's absolute crap.
[trainer] Give me your arm.
[officer] If I correct my partner,
he gets upset.
[Charmaine] The blue wall of silence
is tolerated from the top.
Step up and step in.
dramatic music
tense music
[siren wailing]
[Isobel] We're with a team right now that's heading out
on a night raid with the Taliban security forces.
We're heading to an area that is known
to have a lot of drug addicts.
What they're planning to do is to forcibly round them up
and take them to a hospital for treatment.
It's a lot of Taliban securing this area.
This is a big operation.
You got a lot of men. You got a lot of guns.
[soldier] speaking native language
[Isobel] Dr. Ahmad Zahir Sultani works
with the Taliban to round up hundreds of drug addicts
scattered across Kabul.
He runs the largest drug rehab center in the city,
but he's fighting an uphill battle.
Oh, wow, there's so many people down here.
[Ahmad] speaking native language
[addict] speaking native language
[Ahmad] speaking native language
[Isobel] They're using heroin and meth together?
[Isobel] What are you smoking?
[addict] speaking native language
-[Isobel] Heroin? -speaking native language
[both] speaking native language
[Isobel] He's an old patient?
[Isobel] Oh, wow. And he's using again?
[Isobel] He's relapsed.
No, how many people have already come to your clinic?
speaking native language
[soldier] speaking native language
- speaking native language -[Isobel] Whoa, whoa, whoa.
You can hear the Taliban going around
beating people, kicking them, tying their hands up,
and getting them on the bus.
[all] speaking native language
[Isobel] These users have a seemingly
endless supply of illicit drugs.
For decades, U.S. and NATO forces spent
billions of dollars
trying to eradicate opium in Afghanistan.
Nothing worked.
Instead, production has boomed.
In 2021, 438,000 acres of poppies were planted,
yielding enough opium to produce
up to 650 tons of heroin sold worldwide.
Throughout their insurgency,
the Taliban harnessed this trade
to finance their rise and eventual return to power.
[both] speaking native language
[Isobel] Now almost a year after the Taliban seized
control of the country,
they're eager to launder their reputation
and have recently banned the drug trade outright.
Addicts are increasingly being sent
to rehabilitation centers, or worse, prison.
[indistinct chatter]
percussive music
[Isobel] So we're just heading
towards Helmand Province right now.
This is where the majority
of Afghanistan's opium is grown.
And it's causing major issues for the population.
[vendor] speaking native language
So this looks like a pretty standard Afghan market.
You got bars of soap. You got a lot of vegetables.
You got a lot of livestock being sold.
And then here on the side of the road,
you got bags and bags full of opium
just being sold out in the open.
[vendor] speaking native language
[Isobel] What is this you're selling?
speaking native language
Can I have a look inside?
speaking native language [chuckles]
[Isobel] How much is this bag worth?
speaking native language
[Isobel] Who is it that's buying all this?
[vendor] speaking native language
The Taliban say they're gonna crack down on the drug trade.
Have you experienced that at all?
speaking native language
The economy is very, very difficult
right now in Afghanistan.
Are more people selling opium because of that?
speaking native language
[Isobel] Before the Taliban returned to power last year,
foreign aid made up 45% of Afghanistan's GDP.
Those funds have largely vanished,
while sanctions against the regime
for their human rights record have left
the country's banking sector crippled
and frozen billions of dollars' worth
of Afghanistan's assets abroad.
Left with few options,
farmers continue to sell their opium,
the deadly precursor to heroin.
soft music
[Isobel] So what are you doing?
[farmer] speaking native language
[Isobel] How can you tell that this is good or not?
[farmer] speaking native language
And what's it supposed to smell like?
'Cause it smells very strong.
[farmer] speaking native language
Is that what you use to treat your flu?
speaking native language
[Isobel] So is this ready to use now
or does it now get turned into something else?
[farmer] speaking native language
[Isobel] Over the last 20 years,
the Taliban have been in insurgency.
How much has the opium trade helped the Taliban survive?
[farmer] speaking native language
[Isobel] The Taliban now say
that growing and processing opium is un-Islamic.
But their recent crackdown on the trade could have
real impact on a desperately struggling economy.
In 2021, opiates accounted for $1.8 to $2.7 billion,
according to the UN's office on drugs and crime.
More than half the population doesn't have
enough food to eat,
with an estimated three million children
at risk of severe malnutrition.
Health clinics are overflowing
as mothers struggle to find the basic necessities
to keep their children alive.
-[baby screaming] -[indistinct chatter]
uneasy music
The situation inside the country's capital
is no different.
At this food distribution site
run by the World Food Program,
Afghans looking for something to eat
find themselves at odds with armed Taliban fighters.
This is really, really hectic here.
There's a huge, huge line of people waiting to get aid.
And then the Taliban soldiers are guarding the gates
to make sure that not too many people get in.
But people are really, really desperate for food here.
[all] speaking native language
[Isobel] The reality on the ground at the moment
is that any aid groups working here
are gonna have to cooperate with the Taliban.
What did you guys come here for today?
speaking native language
[Isobel] Do you feel angry
at the international community?
Do you feel like you've been abandoned?
speaking native language
[Isobel] This level of poverty makes it
nearly impossible for the country to wean itself
from dependence on opium production
as a source of income.
This also exacerbated an existing epidemic.
Around 10% of Afghanistan's population
struggle with addiction, according to the UN.
The Avicenna Medical Center is one
of the country's few remaining rehab facilities.
Here hundreds of drug addicts settle in
for a 45-day rehabilitation.
[indistinct radio chatter]
-speaking native language -[Isobel] So these guys are
just coming out of the buses.
Some of them are sweating. Some of them are shivering.
They look like they're in real, real states.
A lot of them are still using drugs.
They're being lined up here.
They say they're gonna search them
before stripping them, taking them inside,
and cleaning them up.
[soldier] speaking native language
[both] speaking native language
-[Isobel] It's what? -speaking native language
[Isobel] The treatment facilities are basic.
And the path to recovery is painful.
Users are stripped down and forced to go cold turkey.
You got a lot of people round in here.
Are you at full capacity?
speaking native language
I mean, you've been working in this hospital
for the last six years.
You've seen the numbers increasing.
Do you really believe that this new Taliban government
can reduce the numbers of addicts
and reduce the amount of drugs that are being produced here?
speaking native language
You really think that's gonna happen?
I mean, the economy is dependent to a point
on drugs.
speaking native language
[Isobel] Have you had any kind of treatment before?
have you been here before?
speaking native language
Do you think that when you leave
this place again af-- in 45 days' time,
that you'll head straight to the bridge again?
speaking native language
[Ahmad] speaking native language
[Isobel] Shortly after filming,
Dr. Sultani was fired from his long-standing position
and fled the country.
The Taliban are now in full control of the clinic,
where Sultani claims
the Taliban are physically abusing the addicts,
and where they now lack the knowledge
of trained professionals.
With the country's economy in freefall,
more and more Afghans are hitting rock bottom.
And many more will see
their loved ones succumb to addiction.
While the international community have largely turned
their back on Afghanistan,
our global drug markets are closely connected.
As the source of 80% of the world's opiates,
Afghanistan's current crisis
may well come back to haunt us.
dramatic music
This is, uh, our entrance to the north building.
[Vegas] Okay.
[Charmaine] These are holding cells...
-[Vegas] Right. -[Charmaine] And we're gonna go
through here. This is our intake area.
Anybody that's arrested in Hamilton County,
they come here.
-They all come through here. -To intake.
[Vegas] Charmaine McGuffey is the sheriff
of Hamilton County, Ohio.
In 2016, she was a major in the jail
when she witnessed an incident on closed-circuit camera.
Is this the cell
-where the incident happened? -[Charmaine] This is it.
This is the cell.
It was reported to me
that this guy had tripped and fell--
-and fell into the cell. -That was what they said?
-He tripped here... -Yeah.
-And then just sort of-- -They said he tripped and fell,
hit his head, and you know,
something about that just didn't sound right to me.
So I came in extra early Monday morning,
and as soon as I saw it, I absolutely knew.
I thought, "Oh, my God."
The officer grabbed him up.
This man was elderly.
And when the officer reached this point,
the officer simply threw him in this cell.
So he was thrown into this wall here?
-Yes. -Headfirst?
That's right, yes. Headfirst.
And he was bleeding profusely.
Took 16 staples to close his head.
[Vegas] She reported what she saw to the sheriff
but said nothing immediately happened
to the officer in question.
The idea of officers protecting each other
from reports of misconduct is known
as the blue wall of silence.
-[protester] Say his name! -[all] George Floyd.
-Say his name! -[all] George Floyd.
[Vegas] The blue wall of silence
was put under scrutiny after the murder
of George Floyd in 2020.
The officers at the scene did not pull
Derek Chauvin off of Floyd
and argued earlier this year
that they were not properly trained to intervene.
[Vegas] Since his death,
more cases have been publicized,
showing the uglier side of some police cultures.
Another case in Florida caught
national attention this year
when a sergeant was seen on video
choking a fellow officer after she pulled him away
from a suspect he was threatening.
[officer] Everybody turn off their [bleep] cameras.
[Vegas] A recent USA Today investigation found
more than 300 examples in the last decade
of police whistleblowers who experienced backlash
for speaking out against misconduct.
You know, I saw that officer kneeling
on George Floyd's neck,
and I saw those brand-new young officers there trying
to deal with the situation, I thought,
"I know exactly why they didn't intervene."
And that's a shame.
And I feel for them, I do.
What does this look like to be
a whistleblower in law enforcement?
Well, they did come for me, you know?
And they did it in such a way
that I wouldn't see them coming.
I didn't even get told that I was under investigation.
-Because I-- -You were retaliated against
-for... -Oh.
[Vegas] Basically blowing the whistles--
Absolutely. And I guarantee you,
there's a lot of men and women out there that can relate
to exactly what I went through.
[Vegas] McGuffey was investigated
by Internal Affairs for allegedly creating
a hostile work environment.
After the investigation,
she was offered a demotion.
She didn't accept it and was fired in 2017.
She then sued the department,
arguing that she was retaliated against
for reporting officer abuse
and discriminated against for being gay.
In 2020, she reached a settlement with the county.
And a U.S. district judge found that the investigation
into McGuffey may have been intended to justify
her demotion.
The county did not admit
to the wrong-doing alleged in the lawsuit.
That year, she ran against her former boss
and became sheriff.
[Charmaine] We do train camaraderie.
You have to have it.
But it cuts both ways, because you can have people
who can say, "Hey, if you do something wrong,
I'm gonna say I didn't see it."
What's happened recently in the media
with use of force, it's not gonna go away.
We're gonna step up into an arena now
where the game has changed.
[indistinct yelling]
[Vegas] Police use of force has
a long, contentious history in the U.S.
[all] No justice, no peace.
[Vegas] More people, especially Black men,
die from interaction with cops in the U.S.
than in any other Western country.
And the numbers haven't gone down
since George Floyd's death.
Since then, some officers are now trying
to dismantle the blue wall of silence.
But Daniel Hills,
president of the Cincinnati police union, argues
that it's the cops themselves who are under fire.
One of the things that's fundamental
is trust between police officers.
You need to know
that your fellow officer has your back, right?
But is there a dynamic there that makes it more difficult
to report any police misconduct among law enforcement?
So is this that "blue wall" bullshit?
-[chuckles] -Yes, this is
the blue wall bullshit.
It's bullshit. It's absolute crap.
Police officers are not going to put up
with somebody that's abusing somebody's rights,
abusing somebody physically, or anything like that.
There is no "blue wall of silence"
or anything like that.
The argument of the officers
who were there with Derek Chauvin that day
was that they didn't know how to step in.
Is that something that can be-- that can be taught
or that needs to be taught?
When you're looking at that situation--
that situation was so-- so much of an outlier,
that I don't think it would ever happen
in Cincinnati or most other agencies.
George Floyd wasn't the only instance
-of police brutality-- -Do you understand,
because we are filming everything...
-Mm-hmm. -You have a handful
of the worst things that happen with police officers
that get shown over, and over, and over again.
-[Vegas] Yeah. -And every piece of media
is out there waiting-- they can't wait to grab
that one where police officers fuck up.
-Yeah. -It's the police industry
that seems to be the most targeted.
[Vegas] Policing gets a lot of media focus.
But it's different from other professions
in that a so-called fuck up can look like
what happened to Breonna Taylor
or Philando Castille.
Disturbing new details
from the night Louisville police
shot and killed Breonna Taylor.
[reporter] Police targeted the home erroneously,
believing that it was being used by a drug dealer
to receive packages.
No matter how much you train folks,
are you going to have
a handful of things that are terrible?
Do you think that's something
that we need to look at
or is training in this country okay the way it is?
Training is everything, whether you're talking
about knowing how to speak to people
or knowing how to tactically approach a situation.
Some people would think
that if you get a lot of firearms training,
that you're more likely
-to use your weapon. -Yeah.
[Daniel] That's the exact opposite.
The more firearms training you have,
the less likely you are to have to use your weapon.
It's more likely to buy you time
to find a different way to resolve the situation.
[Vegas] Academy training for American cops is
21 weeks on average,
compared to three years in some European countries.
The biggest chunk of time is spent on firearms skills,
with 73 hours on average,
and 61 hours on defense tactics.
There are also around 18,000 individual departments
who all have their own way of training.
We're in St. Louis at the ILEETA conference,
which is the largest conference
for law enforcement trainers and instructors in the world.
But this year's conference was different,
with the demonstrations of 2020
hanging over the entire event.
[Jason] Folks, there's a problem in policing.
We've isolated ourselves from the people
in which we're supposed to be helping.
We, as a culture, have to take some of the blame.
[Vegas] Jason Mazeski is a researcher
at Columbia University who was a training instructor
with the NYPD, and led design
for the counter-terrorism unit's curriculum.
His course at ILEETA was focused
on what people expect of police today.
[Jason] How do we describe the role of police?
[person] The role of the police is to protect the community
from people that will harm it. Am I wrong?
[Jason] Well, I think that's your--
-that's your perspective. -[person chuckles]
Assumptions is how we operate.
Where do these assumptions come from?
[person] From our training.
We have to, in order to stay alive,
assume that everybody's gonna hurt me
until they prove different.
Law enforcement's a para-militaristic system,
so we look to the military for our training.
We're looking to create a behavior--
a certain behavior in the people
that come through the police department.
You're looking to mold them into one particular thing.
-[Jason] Exactly. -Okay.
You could use the term "indoctrination."
You bring a recruit in.
The recruit learns the necessary requirements.
And then they leave as a police officer.
This is self-defense, shooting, tactical ops--
Uh, recruits are used to going into scenario-based training.
And all the scenario-based training ends
in the use of force.
[trainer] I would like to say that we live in a world
where we would never have to strike an individual again.
I'm sorry, folks, that is just not the way it is.
Give me your arm. Give me your arm!
For years, we've added additional variables
to a police officer's job.
You know, he's a traffic enforcer,
he's a domestic violence expert.
He's a soldier as well.
[Jason] Exactly.
I think our training has to mirror
what we want policing to look like.
[Vegas] And to accomplish that,
many departments are trying to counterbalance
how much use of force dominates training.
More than 240 agencies have adopted a new program
that was developed at Georgetown University
after George Floyd's death.
[trainer] I was trained to be a warrior.
Policing's a very para-military organization.
And we trained that way for years.
I want to change our mindset from warrior to guardian.
[Vegas] ABLE, which stands
for Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement,
aims to address the blue wall of silence
within training by teaching cops
that intervening in cases of misconduct
is actually in their best interest.
The NYPD, Philadelphia police department,
and Charmaine McGuffey's department in Hamilton county
are now using ABLE.
The only way that we're gonna come
out of this national crisis
of negativity with the police
is for us to step up and step in.
This is absolutely a culture-change program.
I want us to redefine loyalty a little bit.
How about the integrity to tell someone
what they need to hear
instead of what they want to hear?
When I was FTO, if I correct my partner,
he gets upset.
He don't want to be corrected.
[trainer] Wait a minute, what are we loyal to?
At a drop of a hat, you'll go
right into gunfire with somebody,
but you won't turn and have a conversation with them
when they're about to make a mistake?
So now we're gonna get into some nuts and bolts here.
When and how do I intervene?
[indistinct shouting]
This was in the wake of George Floyd.
What'd you guys notice there?
[officer] Yeah, the other officer,
he grabbed the guy's knee first
and pulled it up off his neck.
He had it on his neck
and the other officer moved it.
[trainer] His partner just moved the leg.
They probably never had a conversation about it again.
[officer] Probably not.
[trainer] And there wasn't a single story to tell,
was there?
[Vegas] The vibe I got when we started,
there was a lot of this stuff, right?
You didn't seem-- you didn't seem super into it.
I'd say, yeah, absolutely.
[Vegas] Why?
Uh, just--I don't know, I just heard some stories
about this training and it was just a bunch of BS.
Is it still BS?
No, I don't. I think, honestly--
uh, I think it is something
that kind of opened my eyes up.
Back when a lot of us started, it used to be more hands-on.
Used to be more hands-on.
Yeah, where, you know, you hit somebody like that,
you snatch him up and, you know.
For a long time, we've only done
the bare minimum to maintain our certifications.
Because the first-- as soon as budget goes bad,
-first thing to go... -Cut the training.
[trainer] Is training. Mm-hmm.
-This'll be gone. -Hmm.
[Vegas] ABLE doesn't have concrete metrics
on whether it's working. And for now,
the police training model hasn't changed.
But some small steps are being taken
to make intervention a part
of what it means to be a police officer.
[Charmaine] Law enforcement is not an exact science.
We're dealing with human element, human nature.
And when we deal in those kinds of areas,
sometimes there can be gray.
But what we're asking officers to do is
take a stand on things that you see
that you think are wrong.
It's been a hard culture to change.
And, you know, the blue wall of silence
is tolerated from the top.
When you are the boss,
you are the person who determines
how well officers are treated who come forward.
Police agencies have been put on notice
that we need to start paying attention.
dramatic music