push to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana will put an end to New York's reefer madness

16:24 push to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana will put an end to New York's reefer madness 0 Comments

The NYPD would stop making tens of thousands of misdemeanor marijuana possession arrests a year under legislation proposed by Gov. Cuomo and backed by Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. While relaxing the penal law must be approached with caution, Cuomo’s bill recognizes both that the statute was never intended to promote wide -scale pot busts and that the arrests have done little to deter marijuana use. As an added benefit, lightening up on pot may well ease some of the increasing, wrongheaded and dangerous opposition to the NYPD’s stop, question and sometimes frisk program. It would be a major plus for cops and communities alike. In 1977, New York decriminalized possession of 25 grams or less of marijuana. Th law made a distinction between pot held in a pocket or bag, which was treated as a violation subject to a ticket, and pot held out in the open, which, along with smoking in public, was a misdemeanor punishable by up to three months in jail. Never did the framers of that legislation envision a widespread crackdown on pot exposed in public. But arrests climbed, with cops observing sales and public smoking and busting customers as an anti-crime initiative begun under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and intensified under Bloomberg and Kelly. Kelly also directed cops to stop and question individuals when there was reasonable suspicion of criminality and to frisk them if a weapon was likely present. In the course of some stops, police ordered individuals to empty their pockets, thereby forcing some to bring marijuana into view, thereby creating a misdemeanor offense. Acknowledging the unfairness of trapping people that way — cops made 5,000 stop-and-frisk-related busts last year — Kelly in September ordered the practice stopped. Cuomo’s bill would codify that change and eliminate many thousands of remaining annual possession arrests — while leaving smoking openly a misdemeanor. The city’s district attorneys support the change as a way to focus prosecutorial time and energy on more serious issues. The aggressive arrest policy ran tens of thousands of New Yorkers through the criminal justice system — 30% of whom last year had no prior criminal record. Though federal numbers show similar marijuana use across all races and ethnicities, 86% of those busted have been black or Latino. The reason: Cops are appropriately most active in the city’s least safe areas, which also happen to be its minority neighborhoods. Cuomo, Bloomberg and Kelly have smartly come together with leaders of minority communities who have objected to the police tactics. Democratic Speaker Sheldon Silver says the Assembly is onboard. Republicans in the state Senate should get with the program.