Report: NYPD Targets Blacks, Hispanics on Marijuana
The NYPD arrested more than 350,000 people for misdemeanor marijuana possession over the past decade — a tenfold increase achieved by systematically targeting young black and Hispanic men and stopping them without cause, a report released Tuesday charges.
The NYPD said the New York Civil Liberties Union, which released the report, is misleading the public "with absurdly inflated numbers and false claims about bias. "For example, between 2003 and 2006, overall marijuana arrests dipped by 25 percent compared with the previous four-year period, "a point missing from the report," said Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, the NYPD's top spokesman.
The 108-page report, "The Marijuana Arrest Crusade in New York City: Racial Bias in Police Policy 1997-2007," was written by Harry Levine, a sociologist at Queens College, and lawyer Deborah Patterson Small.
It shows that arrests for misdemeanor marijuana possession have gone up to 353,000 from 1997 through 2006, a more than tenfold increase from 1987 through 1996, when about 30,000 were arrested. From 1977 to 1986, 33,000 were arrested.
The report's authors, the NYCLU and other critics say that police are ignoring the state's 1977 decriminalization of possession of "personal use" marijuana. Legislation then made possession of up to 11/4 ounces of marijuana a violation — much like a traffic infraction — punishable by a fine.
Worse, the critics say, the NYPD too often engaged in a form of legal trickery, getting unwitting suspects to remove the marijuana from their pockets — thus bringing it into plain view and allowing police to make an arrest, file a misdemeanor charge and force the suspect to spend time in jail until arraignment. Concealed marijuana found by police would only lead to a violation instead of a misdemeanor charge, and the officer's search could be challenged.
Levine said that the arraignments take police off the street to file paperwork and make neighborhoods susceptible to more serious crimes. "It is counterproductive to good policing," he said.
The NYPD said it does not engage in racial profiling, and Browne reiterated that yesterday, accusing the authors of misinterpreting the data by comparing volunteered information about marijuana use to the number of street arrests.
But many high schoolers are being harassed, said Robin Steinberg, director of Bronx Defenders, which provides free legal representation.
"The real issue here is that massive numbers of police officers are being deployed in communities of color — poor communities of color — and are staying outside schools waiting for kids to walk home, to go to the bodega, to go to their friend's houses, and searching them," she said.
"Those same police forces are not being deployed on the Upper East Side of Manhattan waiting outside privileged, overwhelmingly white private schools to have their backpacks searched and their children's pants gone through."
