Pubdate: Wed, 06 Jun 2012
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2012 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Jim Dwyer

ALTERING A LAW THE POLICE USE PROLIFICALLY

On Tuesday afternoon, a 51-year-old black man was led into Manhattan 
Criminal Court to be arraigned on a charge that he broke a law that 
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has enforced with more vigor than any 
other: the possession of less than an ounce of pot.

The day before, the police said, the man was seen walking along 
Second Avenue in East Harlem "publicly displaying" his little bag of weed.

The man, whose identity is of no public interest, may be at the 
trailing edge of an era in which blacks and Latinos get in more 
trouble for having marijuana than do whites who have just as much.

This week, the governor and the speaker of the Assembly said they 
supported a change in the law so that publicly possessing small 
quantities of pot would no longer be a misdemeanor. "This is 
primarily a young-person problem, about 60 percent," Gov. Andrew M. 
Cuomo said on Monday. "And primarily, overwhelmingly, a problem for 
the black and brown community, 94 percent of the convictions."

In a startling turnaround, both Mayor Bloomberg and Police 
Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said that they supported the change in the law.

Under Mr. Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly, no other prohibition has 
been so vigorously enforced. About 400,000 people have been arrested 
over the last 10 years for breaking New York State Penal Law 221.10, 
which makes it a misdemeanor to openly possess or burn less than an 
ounce of pot.

For the last four years, I have asked the mayor's office and the 
police commissioner why there has been an explosion of marijuana 
arrests among black and Latinos. Officials in those offices 
consistently, and ardently, defended the arrests as vital to public safety.

In 2008, a police spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said there was no 
reliable basis to claim that whites used pot as much as blacks and 
Latinos, and accused the New York Civil Liberties Union, which had 
issued a report on the subject, of smearing the department while 
acting as a front for a marijuana-legalization group. Taking care of 
little crimes, including pot possession, "helped drive crime down," 
Mr. Browne said.

In 2009, John Feinblatt, a mayoral aide, said, "This continued focus 
on low-level offending has been part of the city's effective 
crime-reduction strategy, which has resulted in a 35 percent decrease 
in crime since 2001."

Last year, another aide, Frank Barry, said, "Marijuana arrests can be 
an effective tool for suppressing the expansion of street-level drug 
markets and the corresponding violence."

What changed?

At the state level, Mr. Cuomo won passage of legislation to expand 
collection of DNA to include people charged with misdemeanors. He 
agreed, in exchange for the support of Democrats in the Assembly, to 
exempt people facing a first arrest in minor marijuana cases.

He also privately promised to fix a few lines in the laws governing 
marijuana possession, the changes he proposed this week. Currently, 
having a small quantity of pot is not a crime if it is not visible; 
it is merely a violation, like a traffic summons. However, if the pot 
is openly displayed, it is a misdemeanor. So, people ordered to turn 
out their pockets by a police officer are displaying marijuana, a misdemeanor.

Those misdemeanor charges, Mr. Cuomo said, were an "aggravated 
complication" of searches conducted in New York City. Last year, 
about 700,000 people were stopped, questioned, and in many cases, 
searched; most of those people were black and Latino.

Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Kelly are under pressure over that practice, 
noted Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil 
Liberties Union. A federal judge ruled last month that thousands of 
searches did not appear to be constitutional. The Legal Aid Society 
plans to sue the city over the marijuana arrests, said Steven Banks, 
the attorney in chief for the society, which provides many of the 
defense lawyers in New York's criminal courts. The main police union, 
the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, has said there are quotas for 
the number of stops, although the Police Department calls them 
performance goals.

Hakeem Jeffries, an assemblyman from Brooklyn, had urged the reforms 
proposed this week, which need the support of the State Senate to 
become law. "The possession of small quantities of marijuana is 
either a crime, or it's not," Mr. Jeffries said. "It cannot be 
criminal behavior for one group of people and socially acceptable 
behavior for another group of people, where the dividing line is race."
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