End the Pot Arrests Now
Steve Bloom – Celebrity Stoner
At the Cannabis Peace Rally in New York's Foley Square on May 7 many issues were discussed during the day, but one stood way above the others in significance: The staggering number of marijuana users arrested each year in New York.
When David Dinkins was mayor in 1990, there were 891 pot arrests. Twenty years later, under Michael Bloomberg, that total had ballooned to more than 50,000. Last year, the high arrest total was only second to the 51,000 people arrested under Rudy Guiliani in 2000. Harry G. Levine, the Queens College professor who's done most of the number-crunching, has said: "Bloomberg inherited the problem and embraced it, and (Police Commissioner) Ray Kelly made it his own."
Growing up in New York in the '70s, it was pretty hard to get arrested for pot. The state legislature decriminalized possession of less than 25 grams in 1977. New York was a haven. But then came Guiliani - the pissed-off prosecutor with a hard-on for marijuana smokers. His so-called "quality of life" arrests focused on pandhandlers, squeegie men and weed smokers.
In Guiliani's first year as mayor (1994), there were 3,141 pot arrests. That number climbed considerably in his second term to a peak of 51,267 in 2000. Since Bloomberg took over Gracie Mansion in 2002, there have been more than 350,000 pot arrests - more than all of the marijuana arrests made during the three previous regimes (Ed Koch, Dinkins and Guiliani).
Despite decrim, most of the arrests are the result of stop-and-frisk activities by NYPD. The Drug Policy Alliance's executive director Ethan Nadelmann wrote about this policy last July:
"Often because, in the course of interacting with the police, individuals may be asked to empty their pockets, which results in the pot being 'open to public view' - which is, technically, a crime. And because blacks and Latinos are the ones most often stopped, they make up 87% of low-level marijuana arrests. These arrests produce permanent criminal records that disqualify people for jobs, housing, schooling and student loans.
"The NYPD arrests Latinos for marijuana possession at four times the rate of whites, and blacks at seven times the rate of whites. It's not that young black and brown men are more likely to smoke a joint in public; it's that they're much more likely than most other New Yorkers to be stopped and searched - and then arrested when the police find in their pockets what they'd also find in the pockets of hundreds of thousands of other New Yorkers, if they looked."
http://news.change.org/stories/why-new-york-city-is-the-marijuana-arrest-capital-of-the-world
While the vast proportion of arrestees are black and Hispanic, there are white-collar busts as well. Stand-up comedian Rob Cantrell, who performed at the rally, can attest to that. He was arrested with a violinist outside a club in the Lower East Side a few years ago. They'd stepped outside for a quick puff when undercovers snuck up on them. Next thing Rob and the violinist were in the Tombs prison. This policy clearly effects everyone who smokes pot in New York.
By comparison to other major cities, New York is truly the Marijuana Arrest Capitol of the U.S. In 2009, there were 6,402 in Philadelphia (compared to 46.487 in New York); in 2006. there were 1,757 in Boston (compared to 31,925 in New York).
Levine hopes the City Council will hold hearings. Perhaps it will take a new mayor and police chief to see a major change in the city's anti-pot policy (in his third term, Bloomberg has 30 more months or so left in office). But we can't wait until then. The stop-and-frisks and arrests must stop now. Fifty thousand are too many, one is too much.
