Buzz About NYC Mayor's Move to Reduce Marijuana Arrests Is Way Overblown

[Jabberwocky]

February 15, 2013 |

On Thursday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a new policy for marijuana arrests in his State of the City address. Beginning next month, people found possessing marijuana will receive desk appearance tickets (DATs) instead of 24 hours in the central booking jail. While this is welcome news, it's not what it may seem.

News sources including Reuters, Associated Press and New York Magazine reported on the proposed change in marijuana arrest policy and even headlined it. The New York Daily News said it will "end the NYPD practice of locking up people who are busted with small amounts of marijuana." Some may conclude that now police will just give out paper tickets. That is not accurate.

Issuance of a DAT involves a full custodial arrest, handcuffs and a trip to the police station in a squad car, van or wagon. Sometimes the arrestees, who are mostly teenagers and young adults, are driven around for hours while the officers look for others to arrest.

At the police station the arrestees, 87% of them black and Latino, are fingerprinted, photographed and locked up in the precinct's holding pens. Their fingerprints and other data are sent to the state and FBI to be cross-checked for arrest warrants, as well as checked for local NYC warrants.

The most common arrest warrant is not for a crime, it's for having failed to pay the fine for a violation such as riding a bike on the sidewalk, possessing an unsealed alcohol container, or sitting on a park bench after hours. The NYPD gives out 600,000 of these summonses a year, primarily in the city's black and Latino precincts.

Ironically, people with no warrants, and who have never been arrested before, are often held longer than those with previous arrests because it takes longer to check the fingerprints and photographs of those without criminal records. The young people are locked up at the police station for at least two hours, and then, if there are no other offenses, are charged with criminal possession of marijuana and released with the mandatory court appearance ticket (DAT).

The obvious question is: why are these people being arrested and detained at all? They could be given non-criminal summonses on the street charging them with possession of small amounts of marijuana. This would save far more police time and public resources, and save the targeted young people from a stigmatizing criminal arrest record for drug possession.

As New York Governor Andrew Cuomo put it in his State of the State address in January, "These arrests stigmatize, they criminalize, they create a permanent record. It's not fair, it's not right, it must end." Gov. Cuomo has proposed changing state law just to stop the NYPD's marijuana arrests.

It is worth remembering that most of Bloomberg's hundreds of thousands of marijuana possession arrests over the last 10 years were the result of stop-and-frisks in which police either illegally searched people by reaching into their pockets and belongings, or ordered them to empty their pockets (which is probably also illegal).

Middle-class and upper-class whites in New York City are rarely stopped and searched by the police, and therefore rarely arrested or even ticketed for marijuana possession. Yet young whites use marijuana at higher rates than young blacks and Latinos.

It's time for everyone in the city to be covered by the same marijuana possession policy long enjoyed by middle- and upper-class white New Yorkers: no arrests, no tickets and no fines.
See more stories tagged with:
marijuana [3],
arrest [4],
new york city [5],
michael bloomberg [6],
stop and frisk [7]
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/buzz-about-nyc-mayors-move-reduce-marijuana-arrests-way-overblown

Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/harry-g-levine-0
[3] http://www.alternet.org/tags/marijuana
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/arrest-0
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/new-york-city
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/michael-bloomberg-0
[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/stop-and-frisk
[8] http://www.alternet.org/+new_src+

http://www.alternet.org/print/buzz-about-nyc-mayors-move-reduce-marijuana-arrests-way-overblown

 

[23536]

Middle-class and upper-class whites in New York City are rarely stopped and searched by the police, and therefore rarely arrested or even ticketed for marijuana possession. Yet young whites use marijuana at higher rates than young blacks and Latinos.

Just wanted to say, being white is fucking great!

I'm kidding of course: being white is a cop magnet if you're buying drugs in a non-white neighborhood.

 

[matt2012]

yeah but you are going to get probation instead of 3-5 if you are caught.

 

[AlphaMethylPhenyl]

pretty much

NYCs marijuana laws still reek (no pun intended)

 

[Jabberwocky]

Just wanted to say, being white is fucking great!

I'm kidding of course: being white is a cop magnet if you're buying drugs in a non-white neighborhood.

I can totally relate. Only problem is that a lot of the runners/dealers at open air markets I was knew to or even in private once or twice liked to try and get me scared and vulnerable by telling me I looked like a narc/snitch and that others had said that about be as well. Total bs, never met even any half legit companero who didn't appreciate my college id, white skin, clean record, straight-laced appearance. But yea, I put this phenomenon down to white privilege.

Once I was at the package store buying a pack of cigarettes. When I asked for a pack of menthol cigarettes, the fellow behind me in line exclaimed, "Since when do white boys buy newports?" I responded, in kind, with "Who you call'n white?" Sometimes I throw the word "niggah" in before white, problem is I honestly don't remember saying that (and probably didn't). Anyways, continuing to climb too far down yet another tangential line of thought...

I had the honor (although it was pathetic no one had done so by 2008) of conducting the first major research focused exploring racial disparity, at first among specifically the state's incarcerated population, with drug policy and law enforcement in Connecticut. Looking back, it never ceases to amaze me what a wonderful opportunity not to mention formative experience that project served to be.

Disparity:
White and non-white populations use drugs at approximately the same levels (from US censuses). The non-white population in a state like CT is, or was five years ago, something like ~35% of the overall population, whites making up the vast majority. Yet the non-white population incarcerated for drug crimes is 75% of those incarcerated in the state. Why the disparity?

Vulnerability to Drug Law Enforcement:
In CT something like 90% of non-whites live in major urban areas, with the poorer the city the higher percentage of residents are non-white. Most arrest for drug crimes take place in urban areas, where open air market type dealing is relatively common and drug markets are more vulnerable to drug law enforcement. In rural and suburban areas drug markets are more friend to friend, intimate, and thus harder for law enforcement to penetrate than a guy selling bundles on a busy street corner.

Mandatory Minimums:
Furthermore, the vast majority of schools, preschools, playgrounds, public housing/projects, etc are located in the states most urban areas. By law, these public spaces are "protected" by Drug-Free Zoning laws. Carrying mandatory minimum sentencing "guidelines," if one violates a drug law in any area demarcated as a "drug-free" zone, such as a block away from a public school, these laws were supposed to deter and thus prevent children and other "vulnerable" populations from violence related to drug markets and related activity - although it will be later established they serve literally no purpose whatsoever other than the following: Since CT's most urban areas have the highest concentrations of drug-free zones, they are blanketed in drug-free zones. If one gets caught violating a drug law in a drug free zone they get mandatory minimums added to their sentence. The vast majority of non-white residents live in these same most urban areas. Punishments for the same crimes thus affect white and non-white populations differently based on simply where one lives (if you live in one of the states most urban areas, as something like 90% of the state's non-white population does, you're kinda fucked cause these areas - New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, etc - are completely blanketed in drug-free zones, given proliferation of public housing and schools; suburban areas have fewer schools, public housing projects and playgrounds, with most of the landscape taken up by small businesses/outlets/housing, and thus you're much more likely to avoid getting busted in a drug free zone in a suburban or rural area than urban).

And none of that even begins to get at other most systemic problems related to race, let alone racism/bigotry/racial profiling. Those are just a few points I remembered off the top of my head from that project I did. Kinda begins to explain how arbitrary our criminal justice system is in America (or, rather, not necessarily arbitrary as white supremacist, largely concerned with maintaining and expanding white privilege - here is where race traitor and noel come in to play ).