Unbreakable
Bluelighter
New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said something very interesting last week about Gov. Andrew Cuomo's efforts to decriminalize the public possession of marijuana. With respect to the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk practices, Bloomberg said that decriminalization would "certainly end some of the objections."
It's an odd turn of phrase, whether Bloomberg put much thought into it or not, to state that a measure would "end objections" as opposed to, say, fix problems.
However, in the case of the decriminalization proposal currently on the table in the New York state house, Bloomberg's comment may have been spot on; the proposal to decriminalize the public possession of small amounts of marijuana risks ending a number of objections to the NYPD's stop-and-frisk practices, without properly addressing the racist skew of the policing tactic and the damage it can wreak on the lives of those it targets (namely young black and Latino men in primarily poor neighborhoods). More troubling still, decriminalization as it is currently proposed could lead to even less transparency and accountability when it comes to NYPD practices.
Across the United States, marijuana policy reform is gaining momentum on state-level legislative agendas. In New York, where low-level marijuana arrests constitute one in every seven arrests made, the proposal to decriminalize public marijuana could lessen the harm done to the lives of those consistently stopped, frisked and deemed criminal by the NYPD. When you dig into the details, however, it seems that decriminalization could be little more than a Band-Aid over the bullet wound of racist police practices.
Cuomo's proposal responds to one of the major criticisms leveled against stop and frisks: that the NYPD quite literally forces individuals to commit criminal offenses relating to marijuana. Police officers regularly compel the subjects they stop (85 percent of whom are black or Latino) to empty their pockets. In New York, it is currently a violation, but not a crime, to possess a small amount of marijuana privately. If the drug is brought into public, however, this becomes a crime (a misdemeanor). So, when the police instruct subjects to empty their pockets during stops (or, as has often been reported) illegally reach into subjects' pockets to pull out small amounts of marijuana, the subject now faces criminal charges because police action has brought the drug into public.
As such, the decriminalization proposal, if passed, would stop the direct creation of criminals through stop-and-frisks as described above. The plan is to make the possession of less than 25 grams of marijuana in public a violation (as in the case of private possession) and no longer a misdemeanor, so no longer a criminal offense. Police would then issue a summons for the violation, but the subject would not face arrest, fingerprinting, photographing and the lifelong burden of criminal charges.
The NYPD made 50,864 low-level marijuana arrests in 2011: 82 percent of the arrestees were black or Latino. Were decriminalization to go through (which alone involves a long, difficult political battle), thousands of young black and Latino New Yorkers stopped by police might at least not face the immediate punishment of an arrest record for possessing a small amount of pot. This would take a significant punitive sting out of stop and frisk and its racist bent.
The key thing to understand about the proposed decriminalization is that it moves low-level marijuana possession from a misdemeanor to a violation. So, what happens with a violation? Harry G. Levine, professor of sociology at Queens College CUNY and long-term researcher into marijuana arrests, points out that violations are regularly mischaracterized by those with little experience of New York's penal system.
Source:
http://www.alternet.org/rights/155899/why_marijuana_decriminalization_won't_kill_nypd_discrimination
It's an odd turn of phrase, whether Bloomberg put much thought into it or not, to state that a measure would "end objections" as opposed to, say, fix problems.
However, in the case of the decriminalization proposal currently on the table in the New York state house, Bloomberg's comment may have been spot on; the proposal to decriminalize the public possession of small amounts of marijuana risks ending a number of objections to the NYPD's stop-and-frisk practices, without properly addressing the racist skew of the policing tactic and the damage it can wreak on the lives of those it targets (namely young black and Latino men in primarily poor neighborhoods). More troubling still, decriminalization as it is currently proposed could lead to even less transparency and accountability when it comes to NYPD practices.
Across the United States, marijuana policy reform is gaining momentum on state-level legislative agendas. In New York, where low-level marijuana arrests constitute one in every seven arrests made, the proposal to decriminalize public marijuana could lessen the harm done to the lives of those consistently stopped, frisked and deemed criminal by the NYPD. When you dig into the details, however, it seems that decriminalization could be little more than a Band-Aid over the bullet wound of racist police practices.
Cuomo's proposal responds to one of the major criticisms leveled against stop and frisks: that the NYPD quite literally forces individuals to commit criminal offenses relating to marijuana. Police officers regularly compel the subjects they stop (85 percent of whom are black or Latino) to empty their pockets. In New York, it is currently a violation, but not a crime, to possess a small amount of marijuana privately. If the drug is brought into public, however, this becomes a crime (a misdemeanor). So, when the police instruct subjects to empty their pockets during stops (or, as has often been reported) illegally reach into subjects' pockets to pull out small amounts of marijuana, the subject now faces criminal charges because police action has brought the drug into public.
As such, the decriminalization proposal, if passed, would stop the direct creation of criminals through stop-and-frisks as described above. The plan is to make the possession of less than 25 grams of marijuana in public a violation (as in the case of private possession) and no longer a misdemeanor, so no longer a criminal offense. Police would then issue a summons for the violation, but the subject would not face arrest, fingerprinting, photographing and the lifelong burden of criminal charges.
The NYPD made 50,864 low-level marijuana arrests in 2011: 82 percent of the arrestees were black or Latino. Were decriminalization to go through (which alone involves a long, difficult political battle), thousands of young black and Latino New Yorkers stopped by police might at least not face the immediate punishment of an arrest record for possessing a small amount of pot. This would take a significant punitive sting out of stop and frisk and its racist bent.
The key thing to understand about the proposed decriminalization is that it moves low-level marijuana possession from a misdemeanor to a violation. So, what happens with a violation? Harry G. Levine, professor of sociology at Queens College CUNY and long-term researcher into marijuana arrests, points out that violations are regularly mischaracterized by those with little experience of New York's penal system.
Source:
http://www.alternet.org/rights/155899/why_marijuana_decriminalization_won't_kill_nypd_discrimination
