Pubdate: Fri, 23 Nov 2012
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2012 The New York Times Company
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298

AN INEFFECTIVE WAY TO FIGHT CRIME

More than a year has passed since Commissioner Raymond Kelly of the
New York Police Department issued a memorandum ordering officers to
follow a 1977 state law that bars them from arresting people with
small amounts of marijuana unless the drug is being publicly
displayed. Even so, a lawsuit filed by the Legal Aid Society in June
and pending in state court makes the case that the police are still
arresting people illegally in clear violation of both the
commissioner's directive and the state law. More than 50,000
possession arrests were made last year.

Law enforcement officers have often described these arrests as a way
of reining in criminals whose other, more serious activities present a
danger to the public. But state statistics show that of the nearly
12,000 teenagers arrested last year, nearly 94 percent had no prior
convictions and nearly half had never been arrested.

Now a new study by Human Rights Watch further debunks the main premise
of New York City's "broken windows" law enforcement campaign, which
holds that clamping down on small offenses like simple marijuana
possession prevents serious crime and gets hard-core criminals off the
streets.

The study tracked about 30,000 people arrested for marijuana
possession in 2003-4 - none of whom had prior convictions - for
periods of six-and-a-half to eight-and-a-half years. The study found
that about only 1,000 of them had a subsequent violent felony
conviction. Some had misdemeanor or felony drug convictions, but more
than 90 percent of the study group had no felony convictions
whatsoever. The report concluded that the Police Department was
sweeping "large numbers of people into New York City's criminal
justice system - particularly young people of color - who do not
subsequently engage in violent crime." This wastes millions of dollars
and unfairly puts people through the criminal system.

In 1990, fewer than 1,000 people were arrested for minor possession.
The 1977 law was intended to stop police officers from jailing young
people for tiny amounts of marijuana and to allow prosecutors to focus
on more serious crimes. It made possession of 25 grams or less of
marijuana a violation and punishable by a $100 fine for the first
offense. To discourage open use of the drug, however, lawmakers made
public display a misdemeanor punishable by up to three months in jail
and a fine of $500.

In the past decade, civil rights lawyers have complained that police
officers were arresting and charging people with public display of the
drug, even though officers had found the contraband while rifling
people's pockets or after tricking them into exposing it.

Those arrested for minor possession - even if their cases are
eventually dismissed - can endure grave collateral consequences. They
can lose job opportunities, access to housing and can be turned away
when applying for military service. About 80 percent of those arrested
are black or Hispanic. This has led the legal scholars Amanda Geller
and Jeffrey Fagan to label the city's marijuana campaign "a racial
tax" because it takes a heavy toll on minorities, while bringing
little or nothing in the way of crime reduction.

The Legislature could go a long way toward ending unfair prosecutions
by adopting Gov. Andrew Cuomo's proposal to make public display of a
small amount of marijuana a violation, unless the person was smoking
the drug in public.
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