I<\/span>n a sometimes heated session, New York\u2019s\u00a0City Council held a hearing on Feb. 26 to discuss new statistics showing that, despite a significant drop in cannabis arrests, the overwhelming majority of those busted remain black and Latino.<\/p>\n There were about 17,500 cannabis possession arrests in New York last year. This arrest count shows a 40 percent drop since 2013, after Mayor\u00a0Bill de Blasio\u00a0ordered in 2014 that most of those caught possessing marijuana<\/a>\u00a0would get a court summons instead of going to jail. But of those arrested for cannabis in 2017, a full 86 percent were black or Latino. According to 2015 census data<\/a>, just over 50 percent of the city\u2019s population is black or Latino. Studies show<\/a> that white people consume cannabis at the same rate as black people, so the disparity cannot be explained by different usage rates.<\/p>\n \u201cThe racial disparities have not changed one bit, and arrests are still too common in communities of color,\u201d said Councilman\u00a0Donovan Richards, chair of the public safety committee, according to the Daily News\u00a0story<\/a> on the hearings.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the administration is serious about changing this disparity, we\u2019re not seeing it,\u201d Richards said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The NYPD representative on hand said he was sympathetic to the council\u2019s concerns. \u201cClearly that\u2019s troubling, and it should be troubling to anyone, including me,\u201d said\u00a0Dermot Shea, the department\u2019s chief of crime control strategies.<\/p>\n But Shea quickly tried to portray objective policing, saying cops are just responding to 911 and 311 calls about public pot smoking.\u00a0\u201cWhere the arrests are made, I believe, are where the complaints are,\u201d Shea said, according to the Daily News.<\/p>\n This was met with incredulity by some councilmembers. \u201cI refuse to believe that in New York City<\/a>, a city of eight and a half million [people], that the only individuals calling 911 or 311 on this issue are people in communities of color,\u201d said Richards, a Queens Democrat. \u201cYou can walk around City Hall these days, and walk through the park and you will smell marijuana being burned.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, when the\u00a0Daily News crunched the numbers<\/a>\u00a0in a follow-up story, they found that Shea\u2019s claim didn\u2019t add up. According to the NYPD\u2019s own statistics handed over after the hearing, of the five neighborhoods with the most cannabis arrests in 2016, only one ranked in the top five for 911 complaints about public cannabis smoking. In 2017, two of the top five neighborhoods for cannabis arrests were also in the top five for 911 calls \u2014 but the remaining three were not.<\/p>\n Public defenders also questioned Shea\u2019s portrayal at the hearing,\u00a0WNYC Radio\u00a0reported<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019ve represented hundreds of people accused of marijuana possession, and I cannot recall ever seeing any indication that even one was prompted by a 911 complaint,\u201d said Catherine Gonzalez, a staff attorney with\u00a0Brooklyn Defender Services<\/a>. \u201cNYPD\u2019s racially biased marijuana arrests are a matter of policy choice and the city should not defend this practice, but end it.\u201d<\/p>\n The loophole that cops are using to arrest people after Mayor de Blasio\u2019s 2014 policy change? Cannabis\u00a0in public view<\/em>\u00a0remains an offense that can get you arrested \u2014 and suspects are basically coerced into revealing their herb when stopped by police and told to empty their pockets, according to an NYPD internal memo<\/a>.<\/p>\n Efforts in New York\u2019s statehouse to overhaul the cannabis laws, and specifically to address the apparent racist policing, have\u00a0won the support of the City Council \u2014 but have yet to win approval from a necessary majority in the state assembly.<\/p>\n In a\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0last November analyzing the problem, the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP<\/a>), an advocacy group based in the city, wrote: \u201cWhile Mayor de Blasio has made widely publicized pronouncements about ending punitive sanctions for marijuana infractions, the data presented by his own police department belie those claims & tell a very different story. Arrests for marijuana remain in the thousands every year & are the 4th most common NYPD arrest.\u201d<\/p>\n And PROP stated that this blatant racial disparity in cannabis arrests continues despite the fact that \u201cresearch and experience demonstrate that white people use and sell marijuana in proportions and numbers equal to or greater than African-Americans & Latinos.\u201d<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong> what should be done about racially biased cannabis policing?<\/p>\n The post NYPD Under Fire For Continuing Racial Disparity in Pot Arrests<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Despite repeated pledges by the New York Police Department and Mayor Bill de Blasio\u00a0to lift the police pressure on cannabis, and especially to address the long-standing racial disparity in pot busts, nothing much seems to be changing in New York. In a sometimes heated session, New York\u2019s\u00a0City Council held aContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,80,208,593,2176,81,3516,319],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24108"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24109,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24108\/revisions\/24109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: NYPD Under Fire For Continuing Racial Disparity in Pot Arrests<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"