A young black man was brutalized by police in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn on the night of March 4, after he was (supposedly) caught toking. The ugly incident was caught on video by a passer-by, and has gone viral. Amid public outrage, the New York Police Department has opened an investigation. But the affair opens fresh wounds over the seemingly intractable problem of racist pot enforcement in Gotham City.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the chilling video, the man is initially accosted by a plainclothes officer as he was leaving a park. The undercover cop does not seem to identify himself as a police officer, and repeatedly refuses to answer the man\u2019s questions about why he is being stopped and whether he is free to leave.<\/p>\n
The witness who took the video\u00a0stated on Twitter<\/a>: \u201cI\u2019m walking home from work and this undercover cop was holding this man. The guy asked for the cop to identify himself, he ignore that. He asked what crime he commit, he ignore that too. I pulled out my phone.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n At about 40 seconds into the video, close to a dozen uniformed officers swarm in, tackle the young man to the ground, and begin kicking and punching him, oblivious to his screams. \u201cHelp me!\u201d the man cries. \u201cI am not resisting!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The incident turned out to be all about cannabis. An NYPD spokesperson told\u00a0Gothamist<\/a>\u00a0the man was stopped because officers saw \u201ctwo males inside the park smoking a lit marijuana cigarette and as the officers approached the individuals they fled the location.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Police commissioner Dermot Shea told the\u00a0New York Post<\/a>\u00a0that the young man, identified as 20-year-old Fitzroy Gayle, faces several charges, including unlawful possession of marijuana and resisting arrest.<\/p>\n Two days later, Gayle (who had no prior arrests) and his mother spoke at a press conference organized by\u00a0National Action Network<\/a>, a citizens\u2019 group in New York that has often stood up for victims of police abuse.<\/p>\n \u201cAll I want is justice for my son, he was treated like less than an animal,\u201d Daphne Gayle, 58, said of her son Fitzroy, according to the\u00a0New York Post<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cSomething has to be changed, because there\u2019s something wrong,\u201d the mom said after meeting with a member of Mayor Bill de Blasio\u2019s administration in Manhattan. \u201cThis is a nightmare, we are all in a nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was absolutely not appropriate,\u201d said the witness who took the video, who declined to be named while speaking to Gothamist. \u201cIf [he] was allegedly smoking then why didn\u2019t the cop identify himself while he was wearing street clothes. Why did the cop not answer what crime he committed? And why did eight cops have to force him to the ground (while kneeing and stomping him)?\u201d<\/p>\n Gothamist also quoted several city activists who were aghast at the incident. Anthony Posada, supervising attorney of the\u00a0Community Justice Unit<\/a>\u00a0at the Legal Aid Society, said the brutality was a result of New York\u2019s failure to fully legalize cannabis.<\/p>\n \u201cIf cops can continue to use the odor or presence of marijuana as justification for stops, this is what happens: dehumanizing, aggressive policing tactics in which people\u2019s lives are at stake,\u201d Posada told Gothamist. \u201cThis young man is going to be scarred for life.\u201d<\/p>\n What\u2019s particularly frustrating about the affair for Big Apple activists is that under the new city policy, cops aren\u2019t even supposed to make pot arrests anymore.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n New York City had been the marijuana arrest capital of the nation under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and there have certainly been big improvements since then. The turning point year was 2014, when de Blasio took office and instructed the NYPD to issue summonses rather than make arrests for cannabis possession. That same year, the Brooklyn district attorney\u00a0announced a new policy<\/a>\u00a0of declining to prosecute small-scale cannabis offenses. This was hailed as a de facto decrminalization in the borough. The Manhattan DA\u00a0followed suit<\/a>\u00a0in 2018. And last year, de Blasio ordered the no-arrest policy to be\u00a0extended to public smoking<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Marijuana arrests in the city have been slashed nearly in half under the new policy. But arrests do continue under \u201ccarve-outs\u201d in the policy, such as if the suspect is deemed a nuisance, or has no ID, or is on parole. And the\u00a0racial disparity has continued too<\/a>. Upwards of 90% of those arrested for pot in the city continue to be black or Latino. The same disparity exists in summonses for marijuana possession.<\/p>\n The NYPD says in its defense that it is responding to complaints about public smoking, with arrests occurring in the neighborhoods where the complaints are lodged. But when the\u00a0Daily News crunched<\/a>\u00a0the NYPD\u2019s own stats on the question in February 2018, it found that was not true.<\/p>\n And abuses such as the one in Canarsie continue despite a federal monitor that has been appointed to oversee the NYPD, following a legal challenge over the controversial \u201cstop-and-frisk\u201d policy of the Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg administrations.<\/p>\n In August 2013, federal District Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan\u00a0ruled the stop-and-frisk policy unconstitutional<\/a>\u00a0and also noted the skewed racial disparity in the policy. Over the past decade, the NYPD had conducted about 5 million stop-and-frisks, with more than 80% of those targeted black or Latino.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Scheindlin appointed an attorney, Peter Zimroth, as a monitor over the NYPD\u2019s efforts to correct the practice. Zimroth has since been documenting the Department\u2019s progress, and filing\u00a0public reports<\/a>. But, as\u00a0Gothamist<\/a>\u00a0notes, he has not yet deemed the NYPD\u2019s practices in stopping suspects to be in compliance with the Constitution and the department is likely to be under the monitor\u2019s watch for years to come.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, have you ever been unfairly targeted by the police? <\/p>\n The post Brooklyn Brutality Re-Ignites Outrage Over Pot Policing in NYC<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
A young black man was brutalized by police in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn on the night of March 4, after he was (supposedly) caught toking. The ugly incident was caught on video by a passer-by, and has gone viral. Amid public outrage, the New York Police Department has openedContinue 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":[4256,50,208,593,1593,81,3516,1883],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41794"}],"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=41794"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41795,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41794\/revisions\/41795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Intractable Problem of Racist Pot Enforcement\u00a0<\/h4>\n
NYPD Still Under Federal Monitor\u00a0<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Brooklyn Brutality Re-Ignites Outrage Over Pot Policing in NYC<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"