NYPD's Marijuana Arrest Claims Don't Add Up, Figures Show

NEW YORK, NY — NYPD officials say complaints about people lighting up help drive big racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests, but the department's own figures tell a different story.

Of the five precincts where the most pot arrests occurred last year, only two were in the top five for 911 and 311 calls about the drug, according to numbers the NYPD provided to City Council.

The 25th Precinct in East Harlem saw 815 arrests for criminal possession of marijuana last year, more than any other precinct. But it ranked 29th for total 911 and 311 calls reporting marijuana with just 404 calls.

The 40th and 42nd precincts in the South Bronx respectively saw 708 and 548 pot arrests, the second- and fifth-most in the city. They ranked fourth and fifth for 911 and 311 calls, with 786 and 761 respectively.

That roughly lines up with their fourth- and fifth-place rankings for 911 and 311 calls, with 786 and 761 respectively.

But the 46th Precinct in the Central Bronx had the most calls reporting marijuana — 1,118 — but just 183 arrests. The 44th Precinct, also in the Bronx, ranked second for calls with 1,063, but sixth for arrests with 511.

Despite some overlap, the figures call into question the NYPD's claim that there's a strong correlation between where marijuana arrests occur and where people complain about the drug. City Council lawmakers on Monday said they didn't buy the explanation, given the fact black and Latino people accounted for 86 percent of last year's marijuana arrests.

"It does not add up," Councilman Donovan Richards (D-Queens) told the New York Daily News, which first reported on the numbers Tuesday. "Every community is calling about this issue, so why are black and brown communities the ones who are overly arrested?"

Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NYPD moved to decriminalize marijuana in 2014 by ordering cops to issue summonses to people caught with 25 grams or less of the drug rather than arrest them. But the grace doesn't apply in certain cases, such as when someone's caught burning pot in public. Police collared 17,509 people for criminal marijuana possession last year, down slighly from 17,672 in 2016.

In documents provided to the Council, the NYPD said the numbers of 911 and 311 complaints might be incomplete because they only include reports of "marijuana," "marihuana" or "weed." The tabulation doesn't include complaints about "smoking" or "drugs," or other "quality of life" complaints that could result in pot arrests, the department wrote.

"[T]he results serve as a baseline of marihuana related complaints, but do not represent the entire universe of such complaints in the city," the NYPD wrote.

The figures show an overall 12 percent increase in marijuana-related 911 calls and a 58 percent increase in 311 calls last year compared to 2016.

Police are obligated to respond to complaints about people smoking marijuana, Dermot Shea, the NYPD's chief of crime control strategies, said at a Council hearing Monday. The racial gap is "troubling," he said, but there's "no evidence to suggest that officers in white communities are enforcing the law any differently than they are in neighborhoods of color."

"I have the responsibility to be responsive to the woman walking into her building with her kids that has to walk by sometimes three people smoking marijuana and/or shooting dice or a number of other things," Shea said.

A spokesman for the NYPD, J. Peter Donald, defended Shea's explanation in an email to the Daily News, saying the paper's initial story on the complaint figures had "quite literally no basis in reality."

"Have you been to neighborhood meeting with a commanding officer of a precinct and heard the complaints? Or spent a couple minutes listening to the radio and hearing these calls come over the air for response by patrol officers to drug calls?" Donald wrote to the Daily News Wednesday.

(Lead image: Photo by UV70/Shutterstock)