NYC Orders Cops to End Fraudulent, Racially-Biased Arrests Based on Manipulation of "Display" of Marijuana

by Rob Harris

The case against a New York City police officer charged with falsely arresting a black man on Staten Island in April has given new attention to the call for a federal civil rights inquiry into the Police Department’s controversial stop, question and frisk policy.

At a news conference across the plaza from police headquarters in Lower Manhattan, public officials said that the case against the officer, Michael Daragjati, was emblematic of a police culture that disregarded the civil rights of young black and Hispanic men.

“He is not a bad apple,” said State Senator Eric Adams of Brooklyn, referring to Officer Daragjati. “We have an entire bad tree in the New York City Police Department that supports and condones the illegal stop, search and frisk of innocent New Yorkers.”

Senator Adams, a retired New York City police captain, said that he, along with other with other city leaders, had sent a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. three months ago requesting a federal investigation, but had heard no official reply.

Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, said that even though white New Yorkers were mostly unaffected by the department’s reliance on stop and frisk interactions, they have a responsibility to speak out.

“We can no longer ignore this as people who look like me.” Mr. Stringer said. “The city must come together on this issue, we must demand reform and it can’t just be the African-American and Latino brothers and sisters in this city.”

Nahal Zamani, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, suggested that not only did the stop, question and frisk policy violate the civil rights of New Yorkers, it also interfered with the ability of the police to fight crime.

“The policy contributes to mistrust and doubts of New Yorkers of communities of color that are already scarred by incidents of brutality, profiling and other major incidents of concern,” Ms. Zamani said.

Copyright 2011 The New York Times

by Harry Levine

Ed.’s note: As first reported by WNYC’s Ailsa Chang on September 23, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly issued an internal memo earlier that week aimed at clarifying the department’s approach to marijuana arrests. In the memo, Kelly states that when detained (as in a stop-and-frisk incident), suspects should not be “requested or compelled” by a police officer to produce a “public display” of marijuana (i.e. by pulling it out of their pockets), the action that provides grounds for an arrest. According to most estimates, more than two-thirds of marijuana arrests in recent years have resulted from such coercion.

Even if the memo does in fact produce a shift in the NYPD’s approach to marijuana arrests, several questions remain, including: What was the rationale behind the de facto policy? Why were young black and Latino males disproportionately targeted? And given the impacts an arrest record can have on an individual’s life, what can be done to redress the policy’s detrimental effects? In a memo to the New York State Senate this past June, Queens College sociologist Harry Levine outlined the scope of the problems.

—T. Hamm

Since 1977 and the passage of the Marijuana Reform Act, under New York State Law, carrying a small amount of marijuana in a pocket, backpack, or purse has been a violation (like a traffic violation), not a crime.

Nonetheless, in the 15 years from 1996 to 2010, the New York Police Department made 536,320 lowest level marijuana possession arrests under NY State Law 221.10. In the previous 15 years, from 1981 to 1995, the New York Police Department made only 33,770 of these arrests. The number of marijuana arrests from 1996 to 2010 is nearly 16 times the number of arrests in the previous period.1

In recent years, the number of marijuana possession arrests has grown ever larger. The arrests have nearly doubled since 2005, and in 2010 reached 50,383. Preliminary data from the first quarter of 2011 show that this year the NYPD is on track to make an even higher number of possession arrests.

In 2010, nearly 55,000 people were arrested for lowest-level marijuana possession in New York State and over 50,000 of those arrests were in New York City. Because of this historic increase in the number of arrests, it is appropriate to call this a marijuana arrest epidemic, and to describe what the NYPD has been doing as engaging in a marijuana arrest crusade.

These marijuana possession arrests cost the taxpayers of New York a great deal of money. These arrests, jailings, and prosecutions currently cost $1,500 to $2,000 or more per arrest. In recent years this amounts to $75 million or more a year. In 2010, when the NYPD made over 50,000 of these low-level marijuana arrests, New York City likely spent upwards of $100 million dollars arresting mainly young people, overwhelmingly blacks and Latinos, simply for possessing small amounts of marijuana. In the last 15 years, New York City has likely spent over a billion dollars making these arrests.

The marijuana possession arrests constitute an enormous drain on the resources of the police, courts, jails, prosecutors, legal aid services, and public defender attorneys. More people are now arrested for lowest-level marijuana possession than for any other single crime in New York City. In 2010, one out of every seven arrests in all of New York City was for marijuana possession. The arrests target young people. In 2010, 23 percent of the 50,300 people arrested for lowest-level marijuana possession were teenagers; 56 percent were under 25 years of age; and 68 percent were under 30 years of age.

The arrests target people who have never been convicted or even arrested before. Of the 50,300 people arrested in 2010, 30 percent had never been arrested before; another 40 percent had never been convicted of or plead guilty to anything, not even a misdemeanor. Mostly the charges were dismissed or dropped. In other words, 70 percent of the people arrested had never been convicted of any crime whatsoever. Another 11 percent had a previous conviction for a misdemeanor. Only 19 percent of the people arrested for marijuana possession had been previously convicted of a felony, mostly a low-level felony for nonviolent drug offenses such as selling small amounts of marijuana.

The youngest people, the majority of those arrested for marijuana, are the least likely to have criminal convictions. In 2010, 46 percent of the teenagers (ages 16 to 19) arrested for marijuana possession had never been arrested before for anything. Another 48 percent of the teenagers had never been convicted of even one misdemeanor. In 2010, 32 percent of the young people aged 20 to 24 had never been arrested before for anything, and another 45 percent had never been convicted of even one misdemeanor. The arrests are not capturing career criminals; they are ensnaring young people, overwhelmingly without any criminal convictions. For many of the young people, this is their first arrest.

The NYPD’s focus on arresting young people who have no criminal records simply to charge them with possession of small amounts of marijuana violates the intent of New York State Law. The introduction to The Marijuana Reform Act of 1977 as passed by the New York State Senate and Assembly, and signed by Governor Carey, says:

The legislature finds that arrests, criminal prosecutions, and criminal penalties are inappropriate for people who possess small quantities of marijuana for personal use. Every year, this process needlessly scars thousands of lives and wastes millions of dollars in law enforcement resources, while detracting from the prosecution of serious crimes.

The arrests unjustly target young African-Americans and Latinos and their neighborhoods. United States government surveys consistently find that young whites use marijuana at higher rates than young blacks and Latinos. But for many years, New York City has arrested African-Americans at seven times the rate of whites, and Latinos at nearly four times the rate of whites. From 1996 through 2010, blacks were 54 percent of the people arrested, but only 25 percent of the population; Latinos were 33 percent of the people arrested, but only 27 percent of the population; whites (non-Hispanic) were only 12 percent of the arrests, but constitute 35 percent of the population. For the last 15 years, 87 percent of the people arrested for marijuana possession have been blacks and Latinos, who use marijuana at lower rates than young whites.

The narcotics and patrol police making these arrests target primarily black and Latino precincts, which are disproportionately low-income neighborhoods. Included with this memo is a graph showing the marijuana possession arrests in 15 precincts with the lowest rates of marijuana arrests in New York City, and 15 other precincts with the highest rates of marijuana possession arrests in the city. This is new data and analysis, never before presented. The population of police precincts varies, so the number of arrests is less useful and accurate than the rate of arrests per hundred thousand residents. We averaged arrests for three years, from 2008 to 2010, to show this is not a one-year fluke but a consistent pattern.

The rates of arrest in the precincts with the lowest rates range from 16 to 130 a year per 100,000 residents. The rates of arrest in the precincts with the highest rates range from 995 to 2,507 a year. The average rate of arrests in the highest rate precincts is 1,473, and in the lowest it is only 79 a year. The average rate in the 15 neighborhoods with the highest rates is 18.6 times higher than in the 15 neighborhoods with the lowest rates. People in the targeted neighborhoods have over 18 times the chances of getting arrested for possessing marijuana. But even these figures do not fully reveal the disparities in marijuana arrest rates among the various neighborhoods of New York.

The 19th Precinct on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg lives, has the lowest rate of marijuana arrests in the city: a mere 16 arrests a year per hundred thousand residents. This is a wealthy and overwhelmingly white neighborhood: blacks and Latinos make up only 8 percent of the precinct’s population.

On the other end of the continuum are the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Ocean Hill-Brownsville and East New York (Precincts 73 and 75), the Manhattan neighborhoods of East Harlem and Washington Heights (Precincts 25 and 33), and the neighborhood of University Heights and Fordham in the Bronx (Precinct 44). The marijuana possession arrest rates in these precincts range from 100 times the rate of Bloomberg’s neighborhood to an astonishing 155 times the rate in Ocean-Hill Brownsville. The population in these precincts averages over 90 percent African-American and Latino.

The consequences of these arrests for the young people targeted are substantial and potentially life-long. Everyone arrested is handcuffed, taken to a police station, finger-printed, photographed, and now even their eyes are electronically scanned. Their personal information is sent to the FBI, and then to other public and private criminal records databases. These records are permanent and effectively cannot be expunged.

Twenty years ago, misdemeanor arrest and conviction records were papers kept in court storerooms and warehouses, often impossible to locate. Now they are computerized and instantly searchable on the Internet for $20 to $40 through commercial criminal record database services. A simple Google search for the phrase “criminal database” or “criminal records” produces numerous links to firms, some claiming that their searches are better than the others. Some offer “50 state searches” for as low as $12.95.

Employers, landlords, credit agencies, licensing boards for nurses and beauticians, schools, and banks now routinely search these databases for background checks on applicants. A simple arrest for marijuana possession can show up on criminal databases as a “drug arrest” without specifying the substance, the charge, or even if the person was convicted. Employers and landlords, faced with an abundance of applicants, often eliminate those with criminal arrest records, especially for drugs. Nurses, security guards, and others licensed by the state can lose their licenses and their jobs from just one misdemeanor marijuana arrest.

For legal immigrants, two guilty pleas to misdemeanor marijuana possession can lead to deportation, and one guilty plea can bar someone from ever returning to the United States. Family court can remove children from a home because a parent is convicted or even just arrested for marijuana possession. A person cannot be considered for public housing with an “open criminal case,” including the typical probation for a first-time arrest for possessing small amounts of marijuana.

In short, for those concerned with the heavy policing of young people for simple possession of marijuana, for those concerned about the substantial racial disparities in the large number of marijuana possession arrests, and for those concerned with the substantial costs and consequences of making and processing all these arrests, there is much that can be reformed.

1. Editor’s note: Under the 1977 act, it is still illegal to smoke marijuana in public, or to have it “in public view.” In Stop and Frisk and other encounters with the NYPD, when a detained suspect pulls pot from his or her pocket, that action meets the latter criteria for arrest.

About the Author

HARRY LEVINE is Professor of Sociology at Queens College. For more details on pot arrests in New York City and across the nation, visit the website he (along with Loren Siegel) created:
http://www.marijuana-arrests.com/

Copyright 2005-2011 The Brooklyn Rail
http://www.brooklynrail.org

by Kate Zawidzki

Last month, I had the pleasure of attending the CATO Institute’s “Ending the Global War on Drugs” conference. The event featured a number of prominent scholars and international leaders who spoke about the impact of the U.S.-led drug war, both here and abroad. One of my favorite speakers of the day was Dr. Harry Levine, professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Dr. Levine has been researching the history and sociology of alcohol and drug policies for thirty years, and most recently has been working on the Marijuana Arrest Research Project, which collects and analyzes data on the immense number of marijuana possession arrests that the NYPD has made since 1996. (It should be noted here that possession of small amounts of marijuana has been decriminalized in the state of New York since 1977 — making it a violation, rather than a crime, so long as the marijuana is not in public view.) According to Levine, in New York City, misdemeanor marijuana possession accounts for more arrests than for any other crime, and because of the recent increase in the number of arrests, “it is appropriate to call this a marijuana arrest epidemic, and to describe what the NYPD has been doing as engaging in a marijuana arrest crusade.”

Dr. Levine’s lecture focused on the how and why of these marijuana possession arrests, explaining the various ways in which such arrests benefit police departments. In sum, police departments are pressured to show productivity, and these kinds of arrests are relatively safe and easy, involving “clean,” high-quality arrestees. Moreover, these arrests provide good training for rookies, deliver overtime pay for cops, allow supervisors to account for their underlings, and act as a net to get as many people into the system as possible, all at a cost borne entirely by the victims — the arrestees.

The federal government, according to Dr. Levine, actively supports these practices through the grant funding it provides to police departments. If departments receive these funds, they must justify how the money is spent, and what better, easier way to do that than with hordes of marijuana possession arrests? In short, this amounts to what LEAP board member (and fellow speaker at the conference) Leigh Maddox described as the “prostitution of the police peacekeeping mission for federal drug arrest dollars.” Dr. Levine suggests changing police productivity measures so as not to include small-time marijuana possession arrests. The punch line, Levine contends, is that rather than ending marijuana prohibition to put an end to marijuana arrests, it’s the inverse – by removing incentives for marijuana arrests we can move closer to ending marijuana prohibition.

But the answer of how to transform this tangled web of power, profit, incentive, and corruption remains unanswered. Sadly, such change is unlikely to be initiated by truth-telling law enforcement officers, or at least, active-duty ones. Last week, the New York Times reported on the consequences faced by two law enforcement officers who dared to express dissent with current drug policies. Both Bryan Gonzalez, a Border Patrol agent in New Mexico, and Joe Miller, a probation officer in Arizona, were fired from their positions — Gonzalez for questioning the war on drugs (specifically, the war on marijuana), Miller for expressing support for the decriminalization of marijuana. Fortunately, organizations like LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) provide a forum for current and former members of law enforcement to express their frustrations with the harms and futility of our present drug policies and to support a system of drug regulation rather than prohibition. Unfortunately, many active-duty law enforcement members are reluctant or unwilling to speak out, and with good reason, in light of the sanctions faced by Gonzalez and Miller noted above.

On a positive note, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that low-level marijuana possession arrests have fallen 13 percent in New York City since a September directive issued from Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly cautioning officers to lay off the wrongful arrests of those possessing a small amount of marijuana concealed from public view. Hey … at least it’s something.

http://www.mpp.org/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 14, 2011
10:33 AM

CONTACT: Marijuana Policy Project

Morgan Fox, communications manager (202) 905-2031 or mfox@mpp.org
Teen Marijuana Use Continues to Rise Despite High Arrest Rates
Government Study, Comparing Rates of Marijuana and Alcohol Use, Suggests That Regulation Is More Effective Means of Reducing Teen Use

WASHINGTON - December 14 - Marijuana use by 8th, 10th and 12th grade students increased again in 2011, with more American teenagers now using marijuana for the fourth year in a row, according to numbers released today by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan as part of the annual Monitoring the Future survey. In 2011, a lightly larger percent of high school seniors used marijuana in the last 30 days, while slightly less had used alcohol. Marijuana use continues to rise among youth despite the continued policy of arresting nearly a million people every year for marijuana violations.

“This report, once again, clearly demonstrates that our nation’s policymakers have their heads buried in the sand when it comes to addressing teen marijuana use,” said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project. “Political leaders have for decades refused to regulate marijuana in order to keep it out of the hands of drug dealers who aren’t required to check customer ID and have no qualms about selling marijuana to young people. The continued decline in teen tobacco and alcohol use is proof that sensible regulations, coupled with honest, and science-based public education can be effective in keeping substances away from young people. It’s time we acknowledge that our current marijuana laws have utterly failed to accomplish one of their primary objectives – to keep marijuana away from young people – and do the right thing by regulating marijuana, bringing its sale under the rule of law, and working to reduce the easy access to marijuana that our irrational system gives teenagers.”

Since the survey’s inception, overwhelming numbers of American teenagers have said marijuana was easy for them to obtain. According to the 2011 numbers, the use of alcohol – which is also regulated and sold by licensed merchants required to check customer ID – continued to decline among high school seniors, as did tobacco use.

“Arresting people for marijuana simply does not stop young people from using it, and it never will,” said Kampia. “It is time for a more sensible approach.”
###

With more than 26,000 members and 100,000 e-mail subscribers nationwide, the Marijuana Policy Project is the largest marijuana policy reform organization in the United States. MPP believes that the best way to minimize the harm associated with marijuana is to regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol. For more information, please visit http://MarijuanaPolicy.org.

Marijuana Policy Project Links:
http://www.mpp.org/

2011 New York City Marijuana Arrests Even Higher Than Previous Year
by Morgan Fox

Last September, after activists brought attention to the fact that New York City is the misdemeanor marijuana arrest capital of the United States despite marijuana being “decriminalized,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly directed the NYPD to respect the rules of “stop and frisk” and not charge those found with marijuana in their possession with a criminal charge unless the marijuana is in plain view or being smoked. New York cops have traditionally gotten around this rule by tricking people being frisked into exposing their marijuana. Research has shown that this ploy is used far more on minorities in New York City, despite higher use rates among whites.

Kelly’s statements were admirable and at first seemed to work. For the first several months, marijuana arrests in the city dropped.

According to the Drug Policy Alliance, however, the total number of marijuana arrests for 2011 is actually greater than the previous year!

How could this be? Was there an explosion in marijuana use in New York City in the last year that led to more arrests? Doubtful.

Did some members of the NYPD simply ignore the Commissioner and carry on with their illegal, racist enforcement tactics? Probably.

Let’s see what Commissioner Kelly had to say:

“The numbers are what they are, based on situations officers encounter in the street,” Kelly said at an unrelated press conference Wednesday. “It’s very difficult to quantify whether or not what’s happening [out there\],” he said.

The first sentence does not make a lot of sense and would require a massive increase in the number of people openly using marijuana to explain the arrest numbers.

The second sentence … isn’t even a sentence, much less a statement.

http://www.mpp.org/

by John Eligon

ALBANY — Black and Latino lawmakers, fed up over the frequency with which New York City police officers are stopping and frisking minority men, are battling what they say is a racial divide as they push legislation to rein in the practice.

The divide, they say, is largely informed by personal experience: many who object to the practice say that they have themselves been stopped by the police for reasons they believe were related to race.

Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat, recalled several occasions when, as a high school student walking home in Flatbush, he was stopped by the police, patted down, told to empty his pockets, produce identification and divulge his destination.

Assemblyman Karim Camara, a Democrat from Brooklyn, remembers greeting a woman who was walking down a street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, when, he said, officers in plain clothes approached him and demanded to know who he was, where he was going and whether he had any guns or drugs.

And when Senator Adriano Espaillat, a Manhattan Democrat, was just 14, he said, detectives threw him against a wall and patted him down in Washington Heights, in Manhattan, when he was on his way to buy a Dominican newspaper for his father.

The lawmakers say the racial imbalance with which stop-and-frisk is applied has a corollary effect: Many white legislators have remained silent on the issue, or have supported the police, revealing a racial gap over attitudes toward the practice.

“There is an ethnic divide on who’s being stopped and frisked, and there is an ethnic divide on who’s fighting against the policy,” said State Senator Eric L. Adams, a Democrat and a retired police captain from Brooklyn.

The lawmakers’ effort to set off a debate in Albany is taking place with an increased focus on the interplay between race and public safety. It was highlighted in New York by the fatal shooting last month of Ramarley Graham, 18, by a police officer in the Bronx, and nationally by the fatal shooting last month of Trayvon Martin, 17, by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida. The young men were unarmed.

“Both illustrate the perils of racial stereotyping when individuals are empowered with the capacity to make life and death decisions,” said Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat. He said the shootings had “further emboldened legislators to continue to fight to deal with the out-of-control stop-and-frisk practices.”

The split among Albany lawmakers over the stop-and-frisk issue reflects a divide among New York City voters: according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on March 13, 59 percent of white voters approve of it, and 27 percent of black voters do.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, facing increased complaints about the practice, has pushed back hard against critics. Last week, assailed by the City Council over the practice, Mr. Kelly said that the policy was an important policing tool intended to reduce the violence that has victimized blacks and Hispanics, and that, “What I haven’t heard is any solution to the violence problems in these communities.”

“People are upset about being stopped,” he continued, “yet what is the answer?”

According to the Police Department, 96 percent of shooting victims last year, and 90 percent of murder victims, were minorities.

“There’s more police assigned to a place like East New York than, say, a precinct in Riverdale,” said the Police Department spokesman, Paul J. Browne, “so the police are going to be in a position to observe suspicious behavior more frequently.”

The Police Department has said that it conducted a record 684,330 stops last year, and that 87 percent of those stopped were black or Hispanic. About 10 percent of the stops led to arrests or summonses and 1 percent to the recovery of a weapon, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has examined police data.

But the Police Department frames the numbers in a different way: last year, it said, it recovered 8,000 weapons, 800 of them handguns, via stops. And over the last decade, the number of murders has dropped by 51 percent, “in part because of stop, question and frisk,” Mr. Browne said.

Some white elected officials have strongly criticized the stop-and-frisk policy. They included the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, and the public advocate, Bill de Blasio, both of whom are likely candidates for mayor; and Brad Lander and Daniel Dromm, who are on the Council. Senator Michael Gianaris, a Democrat from Queens, has offered a bill that would make it illegal for the department to set a quota for the number of stops officers must make.

Mr. Stringer said it was important for elected officials “who look like me” to help broaden the coalition of New Yorkers fighting against stop-and-frisk.

But race continues to dominate discussion of the issue. Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright, a black Democrat from Harlem, is still smarting over a legislative debate he had in 2008 with Assemblyman David R. Townsend Jr., a white Republican from central New York, on a proposal to prohibit racial profiling. Mr. Townsend said part of good police work involved questioning people who seemed out of place in a particular neighborhood, regardless of their race.

“If you were spotted in an affluent section of Oneida County where we don’t have minority people living, and you were driving around through these houses, and I was a law enforcement officer and a highway patrol, I would stop you to say, No. 1: ‘Are you lost? Is there something we can help you with, or what are you doing here?’ ” Mr. Townsend said to Mr. Wright.

Two years ago, the Legislature passed a law requiring police officials in New York City to no longer store the names and addresses of people stopped but not charged. Gov. David A. Paterson, the state’s first African-American governor, signed the measure despite objections not only from city officials, but also, he said, from an all-white panel advising him on the issue.

In a recent interview, Mr. Paterson, a Democrat, said his views of the measure were informed by his own experience, which included being stopped three times by the police.

“It’s a feeling of being degraded,” he said. “I think that’s what people who it hasn’t happened to don’t understand.”

Now, Mr. Jeffries is sponsoring a bill that would make it a violation, not a crime, to possess small quantities of marijuana in public view. The bill, he said, would curb the tens of thousands of arrests each year that result when officers stop people and ask them to empty their pockets, leading to the revelation of small amounts of marijuana.

Mr. Wright has been urging passage of a bill that would prohibit police officers from stopping people based solely on their race or ethnicity. Mr. Parker is behind legislation to create the post of inspector general for the police.

And in the Council, Jumaane D. Williams has introduced bills that would require officers to inform people they stop that they can refuse to be searched and make mandatory and citywide a pilot program in which officers give those stopped a business card with a phone number, in case they want to lodge a complaint.

Mr. Williams has had his own run-ins with police. He said he was stopped in Brooklyn last year, after he had bought a BMW, by officers who said, “We want to make sure it’s yours.” And, in an episode that drew widespread publicity, he was detained by the police last year after an argument with officers over whether he was allowed to use a closed sidewalk during the West Indian American Day Parade.

“We know that the legislation is not going to stop stop-and-frisk,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is provide more accountability with the N.Y.P.D. and their practices and policies.”

Copyright 2012 The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/nyregion/fighting-stop-and-frisk-tacti...