Pubdate: Mon, 10 Nov 2014
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2014 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Joseph Goldstein
Page: A1

IN CITY, MARIJUANA MAY MEAN TICKET, NOT ARREST

The New York Police Department, which has been arresting tens of 
thousands of people a year for low-level marijuana possession, is 
poised to stop making such arrests and to issue tickets instead, 
according to law enforcement officials.

People found with small amounts of marijuana would be issued court 
summonses and be allowed to continue on their way without being 
handcuffed and taken to station houses for fingerprinting.

The change would remake the way the police in New York City handle 
the most common drug offenses and would represent Mayor Bill de 
Blasio's most significant effort since taking office to address the 
enduring effects of the department's excessive stop-and-frisk practices.

Curbing arrests for small-scale marijuana possession has become a 
cause for criminal justice reform advocates, and this year, the new 
Brooklyn district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, said he would stop 
prosecuting such cases. But his announcement did not go over well 
with Mr. de Blasio and his police commissioner, William J. Bratton, 
who vowed to continue making low-level marijuana arrests.

Now, the de Blasio administration is publicly embracing the notion 
that such small-scale possession merits different treatment. And with 
the changes, City Hall is moving to retake control of a politically 
potent issue that has enormous resonance in the black and Latino 
communities, where a vast majority of small-scale marijuana arrests 
have taken place.

In the first eight months of the year, blacks and Hispanics 
represented 86 percent of those arrested for marijuana possession in 
the city, according to a study written in part by Harry G. Levine, a 
sociology professor at Queens College who is a director of the 
Marijuana Arrest Research Project.

Many details of the changes planned by the de Blasio administration 
are still being discussed at City Hall, and many questions remain 
unanswered. Under the new policy, for example, will the 25 grams or 
less that constitutes misdemeanor possession under state law be the 
threshold below which a summons is issued? Will a lit marijuana 
cigarette be treated differently from a packet of unsmoked cannabis? 
Other key questions, such as the cost of the fines or whether a 
criminal record would typically result from a summons, may not be up 
to City Hall.

A clearer picture is expected to emerge this week, as Mr. de Blasio 
prepares for his first meeting with the city's five district 
attorneys. A spokeswoman for the mayor, Marti Adams, declined to 
comment on the proposed policy change, although officials in two of 
the district attorney's offices confirmed that the de Blasio 
administration was working on a new policy for how the police handle 
marijuana cases.

In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Thompson expressed concern about the 
mayor's plan, calling it an end-run around the district attorneys 
that could end up hurting some of the very people the changes are 
supposed to help.

Since July, the Brooklyn district attorney's office has dismissed 849 
misdemeanor marijuana cases involving police arrests, or about 34 
percent of the total 2,526 such cases in Brooklyn.

Under the proposed changes, it appears that instead of being 
arrested, those given a ticket for marijuana will be told to appear 
in a courtroom. But the new policy could push prosecutors out of the 
process, because summonses issued without an accompanying arrest 
generally do not receive prosecutorial review.

"In order to give the public confidence in the fairness of the 
criminal justice system, these cases should be subject to 
prosecutorial review," Mr. Thompson said. "By allowing these cases to 
avoid early review, by issuing a summons, there is a serious concern 
that many summonses will be issued without the safeguards currently 
in place. These cases will move forward even when due process 
violations might have occurred."

Another possible effect of the new policy would be that many of the 
tickets later convert into arrest warrants if the person misses a 
court date, he said. There are currently about 1.2 million active 
warrants in New York relating to missed court dates and unpaid fines 
for misdemeanors and noncriminal violations. In 2013, people failed 
to pay or show up to court about a quarter of the time for the 
329,198 summons cases on the dockets of the city's lowest level 
criminal courts, according to court statistics.

Under the current practice, more than half of those arrested for 
marijuana were released a couple of hours after being brought to a 
station house, according to 2012 data gathered by the Criminal 
Justice Agency, a nonprofit that assists with bail determinations. 
They were fingerprinted, checked for warrants and issued a ticket 
demanding their appearance in court six to eight weeks later. The 
remainder of those arrested for marijuana possession were "put 
through the system," meaning they were held for up to 24 hours before 
being arraigned before a judge.

In New York, the debate over marijuana arrests has been less about 
drug decriminalization than it has been about the aggressive 
stop-and-frisk tactics that came to define the Police Department's 
crime-fighting strategies. During the Bloomberg administration, the 
police arrested as many as 50,000 people a year on minor marijuana 
charges, meaning that some years, approximately one in eight arrests 
made by the police was for marijuana. In some cases, arrests were 
made after officers stopped people under dubious circumstances and 
instructed them to remove any contraband from their pockets.

In 1977, the Legislature in New York moved to decriminalize 
possession of small amounts of marijuana that were not in public 
view. That meant that carrying a small bag of marijuana hidden in a 
pocket was supposed to be a ticket-eligible violation that did not 
amount to a crime. But since the mid-1990s, the police have routinely 
arrested people they found with marijuana and charged them with a 
misdemeanor, even though it was only supposed to apply to marijuana 
that was burning or discovered in "public view." In 2011, the police 
commissioner at the time, Raymond W. Kelly, issued an unusual order 
reminding officers that the misdemeanor was not the appropriate 
charge in many cases.

In 2013, the police still arrested more than 28,000 people for 
marijuana possession, and in 2014, the arrests were occurring at a 
similar pace, Professor Levine said.

While campaigning for mayor, Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, emphatically 
criticized the department's marijuana arrest practices. His populist 
outrage against heavy-handed policing in minority neighborhoods 
helped propel him into City Hall. But since becoming mayor in 
January, he has exerted little pressure on the department, instead 
often deferring to Commissioner Bratton, who has made a national 
reputation for aggressive street policing combined with an ability to 
soothe the often-inflamed relations between big-city police 
departments and the minority neighborhoods they serve.

Yet Mr. de Blasio now finds himself under increasing pressure to 
deliver on his platform of police reform. That pressure began in July 
after a black Staten Island man died after a police officer put him 
in a chokehold while trying to arrest him for selling untaxed 
cigarettes. Since then, the departures of the department's top 
Hispanic official and its highest-ranking black officer have led a 
number of minority lawmakers and City Hall allies to begin to 
question Mr. de Blasio's oversight of the police.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom