You call this easing off?
Arrests for pot possession jumped by 30% in the first half of the year, even though Police Commissioner Bill Bratton had promised his cops were going to ease up on marijuana collars, a police watchdog group said Tuesday.
About 90% of the arrests took place in communities of color, according to the Police Reform Organizing Project, refuting another of Bratton’s claims that cops were targeting behavior, not neighborhoods.
“While Mayor de Blasio, NYPD Commissioner Bratton and other city officials have made widely publicized pronouncements about reducing punitive sanctions for marijuana infractions, the data present a different story,” said Robert Gangi, director of PROP, whom Bratton lambasted in a recent edition of NY1’s “Inside City Hall” as a member of the city’s “radical fringe.”
“Moreover, though research and experience demonstrate that white people use and sell marijuana in proportions and numbers equal to or greater than African-Americans and Latinos, 90% of NYPD arrests for marijuana offenses in 2016 have involved New Yorkers of color,” Gangi said in a statement. “It’s time for the hypocrisy to stop and for our City's leaders to end these blatantly racist practices.”
According to figures obtained by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice, the NYPD made 9,331 marijuana arrests for the first six months of 2016 — 2,095 more than in the same time period in 2015.
The number contradicts claims made by Bratton in 2014, who said people caught with less than 25 grams of marijuana would no longer be arrested.
Anyone caught smoking on the street, however, would still wind up in jail, Bratton cautioned.
Marijuana arrests are down 40% since the reforms were instituted in 2014, a NYPD spokesman said, referring to a City Hall study.
He added Gangi’s claims on marijuana arrests “lack any factual basis.”
Yet there has been an uptick in such arrests this year — from 5,539 as of May 31, 2015 to 7,257 this year — a jump of about 30%, according to City Hall statistics.
PROP’s claims the NYPD continues to target minority communities is also wrong, the department spokesman said.
“We fight crime where we find it,” he said. “Any other characterization is Gangi's failed attempt to garner headlines and gin up fear. We will continue fighting crime — and we are proud of our record making this the safest big city in America.”
Gangi insisted the numbers are correct.
“Our analysis is based entirely on the NYPD's own numbers,” he said. “(Their) statement is correct, though, in saying that we seek to ‘garner headlines’ because that strategy is an effective way to expose to the wider public the Department's harshly discriminatory practices that every day abuse the rights and compromise the well-being of low-income New Yorkers of color (and) to put an end to those tactics."
On Thursday, Bratton questioned Gangi’s methods — and his facts — on NY1.
"You've got one character, Robert Gangi, who claims to head some type of activist group that sits in the courtrooms all month long and counts how many minorities come through versus whites in the process," Bratton said. "Who is Robert Gangi, who does he represent? Is he appointed by anybody?
Does he speak for anybody other than himself?"
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