Despite Promises, NYPD Still Arrests Tens Of Thousands For Low-Level Marijuana Possession

by Jake Offenhartz

Despite Mayor Bill de Blasio's repeated promises to end arrests for low-level marijuana possession, the NYPD is on track to arrest tens of thousands of pot-smoking New Yorkers this year, with enforcement once again overwhelmingly centered on minority communities.

New data from the Legal Aid Society, the city's primary public defender organization, shows just a 3.9 percent decrease in marijuana arrests since the beginning of 2016. Lawyers for the Legal Aid Society say that they've handled 5,934 marijuana cases involving misdemeanor charges and violations since the start of this year, compared to 6,180 during the same period in 2016.

The Legal Aid Society's figures track closely with overall NYPD arrest data, which showed 9,968 arrests for marijuana possession, down just 5 percent from the corresponding period last year.

"As New York City's primary public defender organization with operations in all five boroughs, our numbers speak for themselves," Legal Aid Society spokesperson Redmond Haskins told Gothamist.

"As long as City Hall enforces broken windows policing, these arrests will unfortunately continue to happen and disproportionately impact communities of color."

In response to the Legal Aid Society's comments, Austin Finan, a spokesman for Mayor de Blasio, claimed that the city's decriminalization push is working as planned, noting that arrests were down 5 percent year-to-date and summonses up 2 percent.

"Just as we said we would, this administration has led a dramatic shift away from unnecessary arrests for low-level marijuana offenses in favor of summonses," Finan said. "As a result, arrests for marijuana possession are down 37% — from almost 29,000 in 2013 to approximately 18,000 in 2016."

As a candidate, Mayor de Blasio railed against the "disastrous consequences" for low-level possession arrests, and pointed to "recent studies demonstrat[ing] clear racial bias in arrests." Within a year of his election, de Blasio joined then-Commissioner William Bratton in pledging that possession of less than 25 grams of marijuana would be treated like a ticket for loitering or speeding, rather than an arrest.

But while weed collars dropped in the first year following the policing shift, arrests climbed 30 percent during the six month period between 2015 and 2016, with white people making up less than 10 percent of arrests.

When asked why people of color continue to make up the majority of marijuana arrests, even as studies show that white people smoke weed as much if not more than blacks and Latinos, Finan told Gothamist that the "NYPD enforces against quality of life offenses where and when they observed, many of which are reported to police by members of the public." To illustrate his point, Finan emailed two maps showing "drug complaints" and "misdemeanor drug arrests" from 2014:


Finan did not respond to a follow-up question about whether the mayor sees the consequences of this enforcement as a problem.

The data comes one month after the release of a damning report by the Drug Policy Alliance, Unjust and Unconstitutional: 60,000 Jim Crow Marijuana Arrests in Mayor de Blasio's New York, which found that marijuana arrests under de Blasio have the same overwhelming racial disparities as those under Bloomberg. And while the number of arrests has decreased since de Blasio's election in 2013—the same year a federal judge ruled that the NYPD's use of stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional—the NYPD is still averaging 20,000 marijuana arrests yearly.

"It's essentially Jim Crow police enforcement," said Hary Levine, a Queens College professor and one of the authors of the report. "One set of laws for white people, one set of laws for people of color."