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More NYPD Racism

Posted by libhom Wednesday, April 30, 2008

The New York Civil Liberties Union has just released a report that exposes racist inconsistencies in the NYPD's draconian marijuana enforcement policies:

Between 1997 and 2007, police arrested and jailed about 205,000 blacks, 122,000 Latinos and 59,000 whites for possessing small amounts of marijuana. Blacks accounted for about 52 percent of the arrests, though they represented only 26 percent of the city’s population over that time span. Latinos accounted for 31 percent of the arrests but 27 percent of the population. Whites represented only 15 percent of those arrested, despite comprising 35 percent of the population.

Government surveys of high school seniors and young adults 18 to 25 consistently show that young whites use marijuana more often than young blacks and Latinos. The arrests also are heavily skewed by gender. About 91 percent of people arrested were male.

“The numbers speak for themselves,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU. “The NYPD routinely targets young men based on their skin color and where they live. Arresting and jailing thousands for marijuana possession does not create safer streets. It only fosters distrust between the police and community and strips hundreds of thousands of young New Yorkers of their dignity.”

The arrests, which cost taxpayers up to $90 million a year, are indicative of the NYPD’s broken windows approach to law enforcement, in which police focus on minor offenses as a method of reducing crime. This approach, also called quality of life policing, has caused a dramatic spike in stop-and-frisk encounters between police and city residents.

In 2007, the NYPD stopped nearly 469,000 New Yorkers. Eighty-eight percent were found completely innocent of any wrongdoing. The racial disparity in the stop-and-frisk encounters is almost identical to the disparity in marijuana arrests: Though they make up only a quarter of the city’s population, more than half of those stopped were black.

Read the NYCLU Press Release

Read the Full Report

4 comments

  1. Hrag Says:
  2. I don't know when people are going to wise up and demand a change to the drug laws in this country that are based on scientific facts and studies and not perceptions and fears.

     
  3. libhom Says:
  4. Repealing marijuana laws certainly would be a good thing. Laws which criminalize medical marijuana are downright reprehensible.

    However, I'm not convinced that this would be enough to solve the problem with the NYPD. I'm concerned that the NYPD would find something else to disproportionately enforce.

    The problem of systemic racism and corruption in the NYPD needs to be addressed.

     
  5. Unknown Says:
  6. CA has decriminalized medicinal cannabis...but we still have the friggin DEA raiding our stores and growers who are following to the letter, our state laws.

    The NYPD would still find some reason to disproportionately arrest people of color, even if all the cannabis laws changed tomorrow.

     
  7. GDAEman Says:
  8. ... and then there's Sean Bell... 50 shots.... and workplace raids by ICE. Gradually, we're becoming a militarized society... or should I say "police state."?

     

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