From Woodstock to New York City's stint as a focal point for the cannabis?fueled antiwar activism of the New Left, the aroma of burned reefer has long oft?floated in the breeze of the Empire State. Last week, though, legislators in Albany again failed to pass a meaningful cannabis decriminalization measure in their new budget, thereby continuing to indefinitely sustain the criminality of cannabis and its racially charged law enforcement.
Since Mayor Bloomberg first grasped the reins of the nation's largest police force in 2002, the New York Penal Code's lowest?level misdemeanor, the crime of publicly burning or displaying any amount of cannabis, has been charged more than any other. Over 440,000 otherwise innocent residents have been arrested on a low?level cannabis charge, and most years, despite the fact that white Americans, including New Yorkers, are more likely than their black and Latino counterparts to commit cannabis crimes, a whopping 85 to 90 percent of the city's cannabis arrests victimize black or Latino New Yorkers.
A recent New York Times article brought fame to Joseph Griffin, a Brooklynite who was just 18 years old when he was stopped and harassed by a gang of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers while walking home. Upon being illegally patted down during one of the nearly 2,000 "stop and frisk" encounters the NYPD conducts every day, one officer groped inside of Griffin's pocket to uncover a single blunt that Griffin had just purchased.
Griffin's case is emblematic of the way New York City handles cannabis and, moreover, the city's continued criminalization of black and brown bodies. New York's 1977 decriminalization of cannabis possession means that having a wee bit of those valuable flowers is only punishable as a misdemeanor if it comes into public view. But the NYPD skirts around that technicality by expansively utilizing "stop and frisk" tactics to locate and expose concealed cannabis. In 2011 alone, 87 percent of the record 685,724 stops NYPD officers made harassed blacks and Latinos, and even in precincts where blacks and Latinos comprised fewer than 14 percent of the population, they were still the subjects of roughly 70 percent of stops. That year, the NYPD conducted over 10,000 more stops against black men between the ages of 14 and 24 than there were living in the city.
There is now a class?action lawsuit against the city challenging "stop and frisk" and the tactic's corollaries: racial profiling and unreasonable searches and seizures. And there are now more NYPD officers than ever coming forward to explain the racialized nature of "stop and frisk," and, worse yet, summons and arrests quotas. On Thursday, thanks to a surreptitious recording of a conversation between a patrol officer and his commanding officer in a particularly busy Bronx precinct, the court heard the commanding officer urge our sneaky police hero to stop more of the "right people," who he identified as "male blacks 14 to 20, 21."
Perhaps even more shockingly, a 2009 audio recording of an NYPD precinct's roll call meeting suggested to the court that many of the city's cops are also operating under strict quotas for monthly summonses and arrests. The state outlawed those quotas in 2010, so now the precinct commanders and the NYPD's union work together to set and pressure officers into meeting "productivity goals," which become quotas when the officers are punished and retaliated against for failing to satisfy them. In the recording, a union delegate tells a room full of officers: "Twenty?and?one is what the union is backing up." An anonymous NYPD officer told the Nation: "[It] means 20 summonses and one arrest a month. It's a quota, and they agreed to it. It's crazy."
Since 2002, NYPD officers have spent over a million hours of their time merely arresting New Yorkers for marijuana misdemeanors. Those million hours could have been spent fighting violent crime, or at least crime with a victim, instead of conducting warrantless stop?and?frisks to look for flakes of cannabis in order to meet illegal quotas. Meanwhile, the arrests continue as you read this, resulting in more innocent lives run afoul by what many scholars call a modern version of Jim Crow.
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