De Blasio Is Busting Just As Many Pot Smokers As Bloomberg Did

A month ago I
noted that, despite a big drop in stop-and-frisk encounters
during the first three months of Bill de Blasio’s tenure as mayor
of New York City, low-level pot busts were down just 8.5 percent
compared to the first quarter of 2013. Another month of data makes
De Blasio and his police commissioner, Bill Bratton, look even
worse on this front. According to the
latest numbers from the Marijuana Arrest Research Project
(MARP), New York cops busted an average of 80 pot smokers a day
during the first four months of this year, slightly higher than the
daily average of 78 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police
Commissioner Ray Kelly during the same period of last year. Now as
then, the arrestees are overwhelmingly (86 percent) black or
Latino, overwhelmingly (79 percent) between the ages of 16 and 34,
and overhelmingly (73 percent) first-time offenders. MARP
concludes that “marijuana arrest patterns in the first four months
of 2014 under de Blasio and Bratton are indistinguishable from
those of their predecessors in 2013.”

In 2013 there were a total of 28,644 minor possession
arrests, down 43 percent from the peak of 50,484 in
2011 but still above the historical norm. Given De Blasio’s
rhetoric about the “two New Yorks” and his criticism of racially
skewed law enforcement, his supporters could be forgiven for
expecting that downward trend to continue. Instead it seems to be
stalling, which is especially disturbing given that New York
supposedly decriminalized marijuana possession way back in 1977.
Since then possession of up to 25 grams (about nine-tenths of an
ounce) has been a citable offense unless the pot is publicly
displayed, which is a misdemeanor. It is hard to believe that cops
are catching 80 people a day brazenly smoking pot right in front of
them. It seems likely that,
as in the past, at least some of these busts occur after
marijuana is brought into public view through police intervention,
which means they are legally invalid. In any case, cops surely have
better things to do than bust pot smokers.

Two years ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo
recommended decriminalizing public display of marijuana to
address “gaping racial disparities” and “save thousands of New
Yorkers, particularly minority youth, from the unnecessary and
life-altering trauma of a criminal arrest” while avoiding
“countless man-hours wasted” on “what is clearly only a minor
offense.” He
reiterated his support for that reform in his 2013 State of the
State address. But a year later, after De Blasio was elected, Cuomo
decided such legislation was no longer necessary. “It’s not
timely in the way it was last year,” he
said in January. Evidently subjecting minority youth to
“the unnecessary and life-altering trauma of a criminal arrest” is
OK as long as a Democrat does it.