New York mayor rethinks policy on marijuana possession

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 offences and would represent mayor Bill de Blasio’s most significant effort since taking office to address the enduring effects of the department’s 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 down well with 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 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 per cent 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 misdemeanour 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 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, 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 misdemeanour 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,” 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 about 1.2 million active warrants in New York relating to missed court dates and unpaid fines for misdemeanours and non-criminal 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 non-profit 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 decriminalisation than it has been about the aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics that came to define the Police Department's crime-fighting strategies. During the administration of previous mayor Michael Bloomberg, 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 state legislature moved to decriminalise 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 misdemeanour, 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 misdemeanour 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 are occurring at a similar pace, Levine said. While campaigning for mayor, de Blasio, a Democrat, emphatically criticised the Police Department’s marijuana arrest practices. His populist outrage against heavy-handed policing in minority neighbourhoods helped propel him into City Hall. But since becoming mayor in January, de Blasio has exerted little pressure on the department, instead often deferring to 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 neighbourhoods they serve.

Yet, 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 de Blasio’s oversight of the police.

(New York Times service)