Pubdate: Wed, 21 Jul 2010
Source: New York Times (NY)
Column: About New York
Page: A19
Copyright: 2010 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Jim Dwyer

A SMELL OF POT AND PRIVILEGE IN THE CITY

The Bloomberg administration has quietly been fixing up its sons and 
daughters with cool summer internships, as reported Tuesday in The 
New York Times. Which is probably fine: It is hard to see nepotism as 
much of a sin when it is really just another chapter of Darwinism, 
the drive possessed by all creatures to finagle a better future for 
their offspring.

No matter how much Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg preached about 
meritocracy, no one expected that the laws of nature would be 
repealed when he was elected.

Sure enough, a Freedom of Information Act request showed that tucked 
among hundreds of summer interns picked through a competitive process 
were dozens of the children of City Hall insiders or of Mr. 
Bloomberg's friends. They reflected the mayor's social and political 
circles: mostly white, many quite wealthy, coming from private high 
schools and Ivy League colleges.

In short, these are not residents of Stop and Frisk New York.

Mayor Bloomberg promised to lead a government that looked like the 
city; in reality, he leads one that looks like his mirror, an 
administration in which key managers are overwhelmingly white and 
male. It is one thing if this means the annual crop of interns is 
heavily salted with young Bloombergians.

It is quite another when those managers are shaping policies that 
wind up leading to the deprivation of liberty of people who do not 
look like them.

Among the biggest but least discussed expansions of government power 
under Mr. Bloomberg has been the explosive increase in arrests for 
displaying or burning marijuana.

No city in the world arrests more of its citizens for using pot than 
New York, according to statistics compiled by Harry G. Levine, a 
Queens College sociologist.

Nearly nine out of ten people charged with violating the law are 
black or Latino, although national surveys have shown that whites are 
the heaviest users of pot. Mr. Bloomberg himself acknowledged in 2001 
that he had used it, and enjoyed it.

On the Upper East Side of Manhattan where the mayor lives, an average 
of 20 people for every 100,000 residents were arrested on the 
lowest-level misdemeanor pot charge in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

During those same years, the marijuana arrest rate in Brownsville, 
Brooklyn, was 3,109 for every 100,000 residents.

That means the chances of getting arrested on pot charges in 
Brownsville -- and nothing else -- were 150 times greater than on the 
Upper East Side of Manhattan.

No doubt this is, in large part, a consequence of the stop-and-frisk 
practices of the Police Department, which Mr. Bloomberg and his aides 
say have been an important tool in bringing down crime.

Nowhere in the city is that tactic used more heavily than in 
Brownsville. On average, the police conducted one stop and frisk a 
year for every one of the 14,000 people who live there, an analysis 
by The New York Times found. More than 99 percent of the people were 
not arrested or charged with any wrongdoing.

Brownsville has the highest marijuana arrest rate in the city. The 
top 10 precincts for marijuana arrests averaged 2,150 for every 
100,000 residents; the populations in those precincts are generally 
90 percent or more nonwhite.

Mr. Bloomberg's neighborhood has the lowest rate of marijuana 
arrests; the 10 precincts with the lowest rates averaged 67 arrests 
per 100,000 residents. The population in most of those neighborhoods 
was 80 percent white.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Bloomberg talked about proposals that would 
allow marijuana to be distributed for putatively medical purposes.

He said it was a Trojan horse for complete legalization.

"I mean, the idea of medical marijuana, we all know what that means: 
It means everybody is going to qualify," he said. "The worst thing is 
the hypocrisy of saying it's medical marijuana. If you want to 
legalize it, let's have that debate, but that's what you're really 
talking about. It has nothing to do with medicine."

In truth, in New York, the debate was over before it began.

For blacks and Latinos, it is very, very illegal.

But not in Mr. Bloomberg's neighborhood. 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake