Marijuana Arrest Disparities Tied To Neighbors' Complaints: NYPD

NEW YORK, NY — Blame it on the neighbors. Cops continued to arrest more black and Latino New Yorkers for marijuana possession last year because the most complaints about people smoking pot came from neighborhoods of color, a top NYPD official told the City Council Monday.

African-American and Latino people accounted for 86 percent of the roughly 17,500 marijuana arrests recorded last year, Councilman Donovan Richards (D-Queens) said. That's despite those groups accounting for just 53 percent of the city's population and statistics showing all ethnic groups use the drug at similar rates.

Precincts in predominantly black and Latino areas such as East Harlem, Washington Heights, the South Bronx and Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn recorded the highest numbers of arrests, Dermot Shea, the NYPD's chief of crime control strategies, said Monday at a joint hearing of two Council committees.

Those neighborhoods also made the largest numbers of complaints about people smoking marijuana to 911 and 311 and at community meetings, Shea said, arguing that cops are tackling the crime where they hear it's most prevalent.

"We are being responsive to complaints that are coming to us and it would be negligent for us to ignore those complaints," Shea said at a Council committee hearing on the city's enforcement of marijuana laws.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and then-Police Commissioner Bill Bratton moved to decriminalize marijuana in 2014, ordering cops to give criminal summonses to anyone found with less than 25 grams of the drug instead of arresting the person.

But the grace doesn't apply in certain circumstances like when someone is "burning" pot in public, which is the basis for about 90 percent of marijuana arrests, Shea said.

Racial disparities in arrests have continued despite de Blasio's stated desire to eliminate them and the Brooklyn and Manhattan district attorneys' promises of leniency for low-level marijuana charges.

NYPD officials said it's difficult to calculate the exact number of complaints from people who smell the drug because they're entered using different spellings of "marijuana," or other names such as "weed" or "pot." But there was a clear increase "across the board" in calls about pot to both 911 and 311 last year, said Oleg Chernyavsky, the NYPD's director of legislative affairs.

City lawmakers were skeptical that neighbors' complaints alone were driving arrests in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods. Richards and Councilman Rory Lancman (D-Queens) said they wouldn't buy the claim without specific numbers on 911 and 311 calls.

"I refuse to believe that in New York City, a city of eight and a half million people, that the only individuals who are calling 911 or 311 around this issue are people in communities of color," Richards said.

Shea said the NYPD has worked to reduce marijuana arrests since de Blasio's 2014 decriminalization move. The number fell from about 26,000 that year to about 16,000 in 2015, Shea said, but it's risen slightly since then.

Lawmakers and advocates said police are maintaining racial disparities by targeting black and brown neighborhoods more aggressively than white neighborhoods. Shea denied that such practices exist.

"It’s obvious that on a precinct-by-precinct basis commanders are making a decision about what to enforce more strictly and how to do that," Lancman said.

Police and prosecutors should go further to resolve racial disparities, some advocates and public defenders argued — the NYPD should stop making arrests on low-level marijuana charges and district attorneys should not prosecute them at all.

The debate comes as state lawmakers consider Gov. Andrew Cuomo's proposal for a study of the statewide legalization of marijuana.

The City Council is considering a bill that would require the NYPD to issue quarterly reports on marijuana arrests and summonses. Chernyavsky said the department will work with lawmakers on the bill in the name of transparency.

"We’re probably the most transparent we’ve ever been as a department, as an administration and we look forward to working with you in furtherance of transparency going forward," Chernyavsky said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story contained incorrect language in a quote by Councilman Donovan Richards.

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