Pubdate: Wed, 22 Oct 2014
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2014 The New York Times Company
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Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Jim Dwyer

DESPITE DE BLASIO'S PROMISE, MARIJUANA ARRESTS PERSIST

With a summons for marijuana possession to settle, Anthony was 
waiting outside the courthouse in Kew Gardens, Queens, when the doors 
opened at 9 on Tuesday morning.

That summons had frozen his life since a police officer handed it to 
him on a Saturday evening in August. He immediately lost a job that 
he had held for seven years as a school bus driver. It had already 
cost him close to $7,000 in lost wages.

For this account, Anthony, 28, asked that only his first name be 
used, because he has never before had any trouble with the police, 
and wants to go back to work.

When Bill de Blasio was running for mayor last year, he noted that 
marijuana arrests, which fall most heavily on black and Latino males, 
"have disastrous consequences," and pledged to curtail the practice 
of ratcheting up what should be a minor violation of the law into a 
misdemeanor.

This week, a report showed that such arrests were continuing at about 
the same pace as last year; the de Blasio mayoralty had not 
appreciably changed the number of such cases. The Legal Aid Society 
has a roster of clients across the city who face misdemeanor charges 
for possession of minuscule amounts of pot because, it was charged, 
they were "openly displaying" it. About 75 percent of those charged 
had no prior criminal convictions, and more than 80 percent were 
black or Latino, according to the report, from the Marijuana Arrest 
Research Project and the Drug Policy Alliance.

The case of Anthony, a black man, is a powerful illustration of how 
disruptive such a charge can be. On Aug. 16, he said, he was getting 
a ride to his home in Jamaica, Queens, after a few hours in a park. 
"I wasn't even in the car 10 minutes," he said. "We got pulled over 
on Sutphin and Rockaway Boulevard. They said it was a brake light. 
Asked for the usual, license and registration. Mind you, I'm the 
passenger, I'm not thinking about it."

The driver was ordered out of the car and searched. Then Anthony was 
told to get out. A moment later, an officer rooted around in the car, 
he said, and both men were handcuffed.

"He said it was a weed pipe in the center console," Anthony said. "I 
said: 'Why am I getting arrested? I'm just the passenger.' "

Anyone in a car where contraband is found can be charged with 
possession, said Marquita Johnson, a staff attorney with the Legal 
Aid Society who is representing Anthony.

In a formal complaint, the officer said he "recovered a marijuana 
pipe containing marijuana residue from the center console of said vehicle."

Such a tiny amount of pot, if that's what was actually in the pipe, 
would normally be considered a violation. But it was elevated to a 
misdemeanor by the police officer's statement that the pipe was "in a 
public place open to public view."

Perhaps that is true, though one wonders why anyone, being pulled 
over by the police, would not close a center console if the pot pipe 
really had been visible. Anthony insisted that he would never have 
gotten in the car had he known it was there.

"I don't involve myself around that," he said. "I'm a working citizen."

The police officers issued the driver and Anthony desk appearance 
tickets, meaning they had to appear in court this week, more than two 
months after the stop.

"I come back to work that Monday, and they said, 'We got to let you 
go because you've been arrested and your fingerprints came back to us 
in Albany,' " Anthony said. "They knew the date, the time. They said, 
'We'll give you your job back once you prove your innocence.' "

Anthony puts his annual salary at about $40,000. By this week, when 
the case finally went to court, Anthony was out more than two months' 
pay. The driver showed up and, in a quick negotiation, pleaded guilty 
to a traffic violation and agreed to pay a fine of $180. Since 
Anthony was not behind the wheel, he could not make the same deal.

The district attorney's office offered to dismiss the case in a year 
if Anthony stayed out trouble. But that would mean a full year out of 
work. A new offer was made: dismissal after 90 days. That would still 
be an additional three months of out of work, on top of the two he 
had already lost. The case was adjourned.

Asked Tuesday about the marijuana arrests, a spokesman for the mayor 
offered statistics that showed a slight decrease, as opposed to the 
slight increase in the report.

But there was really no difference.

"I've worked all my life," Anthony said. "This is hard to get used to."

Correction: October 22, 2014

An earlier version of this column misstated the name of one of the 
organizations responsible for the report on marijuana arrests. It is 
the Drug Policy Alliance, not the Drug Police Alliance.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom