NYPD mellows out
Ticket for tokers, not an arrest
Taking a toke will no longer get you tossed in the pokey.
Starting Sept. 1, cops will be handing out summonses to people they catch smoking marijuana instead of arresting them, officials announced Tuesday.
They said the shift — intended in part to address a disparity that has seen black and Hispanic New Yorkers account for more than 85 percent of marijuana arrests — could reduce the total number of pot-smoking busts in the city by as many as 10,000 a year.
“We remain focused on quality-of-life policing. This is about striking a balance,” Mayor de Blasio said at a press conference at the Thomas Jefferson Recreation Center in East Harlem.
“We are convinced after four years of sustained progress that we can do this in a way that will continue to enhance public safety.”
But some people won’t be get- ting a break: those on probation or parole, with an outstanding criminal warrant or a recent violent felony on their record.
Those who light up while driving, who create a nuisance by smoking in a public place like a subway car, or who can’t provide ID will also still be arrested.
Otherwise, officials said, the program is meant to give firsttime offenders a chance to avoid an arrest record.
Nearly 17,000 people were arrested for smoking pot in public in 2017, according to city data.
“The NYPD is not in the busi- ness of making criminals out of people with no prior arrest history,” said Police Commissioner James O’Neill. “We know that it’s not productive.”
The policy was revealed after a working group on marijuana enforcement studied the issue for more than a month, but it had been telegraphed publicly by de Blasio just days after the panel was formed.
While O’Neill opened the press conference by saying the working group examined why there’s a racial disparity in marijuana arrests, NYPD officials later admitted the review didn’t yield an answer.
City Council Public Safety Chair Donovan Richards (D-Queens) said, “Today marks the first step in rectifying decades of targeted enforcement of low-level marijuana offenses which were being carried out with nothing less than racial bias.”
But O’Neill, whose agency has argued that arrests are largely driven by complaints, disputed that bias was at play.
“I can tell you that the NYPD does not target anyone based on race or any other demographic,” he said.
Is that the reek of pot in the air — or hypocrisy? We ask because Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio are trying to have it both ways on marijuana. Cuomo plainly ordered his health commissioner, Howard Zucker, to issue a report calling for legalization. Zucker disclosed Monday that he’s about to recommend it, saying “new facts” show “the pros outweighed the cons.”
But he hasn’t released it yet — so Cuomo can insist he’s still waiting for it and so won’t try to get the Legislature to act on it this year.
After lawmakers go home this week, expect the report to land and Cuomo to embrace it — neatly removing an issue pushed by his challenger, Cynthia Nixon.
And never mind that this leaves the gov with the chance to discover yet more “new facts” and change his mind back after the September primary — or anytime before the Legislature comes back into session.
After all, just months ago he was still calling marijuana “a gateway drug.” And he took great care that New York’s medical-mari- juana law didn’t OK the smokable stuff.
De Blasio, meanwhile, joined Police Commissioner James O’Neill on Tuesday to announce that, starting in September, most New Yorkers caught smoking grass in public will get tickets, rather than face arrest. (Exceptions include those with a criminal record and immediate public-safety threats.)
Never mind that, as even the mayor’s office concedes, it’s “extremely rare” for anyone to be imprisoned for possession. Or that the mayor not long ago insisted such arrests were at “a normal level.”
No, this is meant to address the racial disparity in arrests — which, as we’ve long maintained, is caused by factors other than supposedly bigoted law enforcement.
Anyway, it won’t satisfy the critics. City Councilman Donovan Richards used the press conference to give another rant about the NYPD’s “sordid history of injustice” and its “strategies that perpetuate racial bias.”
City and state, New York plainly needs an honest conversation about marijuana laws. Too bad that’s the last thing the top politicians want to offer.