Comment: Don't expect any real action on this re****t from the minority
members of the New York City Council, they are too busy solidifying
their next do-nothing jobs as soon as most lose office in January 2010
due to term limits.
Cardinal Egan should have excommunicated former Mayor Giuliani for
taking communion at St. Patrick's when Pope Benedict was there, after
Giuliani promised not to take communion in a NYC church after marrying
Donna Hanover outside the church. Giuliani's soon to be jailed
corrupt Police Commissioner Kerik put in efect the current NYPD policy
on arresting minorities for possessing small amounts of pot, a policy
that has cost the NYC taxpapyers over a billion dollars so far for
worthless arrests that are made to me Copstat arrest quotas.
---
Apr 29, 2008 11:02 pm US/Eastern
NYCLU: City Now World's 'Marijuana Arrest Capital'
Re****t: Racial Profiling A Fact Of Life; NYPD Disagrees
http://wcbstv.com/local/nyc.marijuana.arrests.2.711645.html
NEW YORK (CBS/AP) -- Police busted nearly 400,000 people for carrying
small amounts of pot in the last decade, making New York City the
world leader in marijuana arrests, civil rights advocates said Tuesday
while unveiling a study criticizing the war on drugs.
Police officials -- who have long argued that the low level drug
arrests help drive down more serious crime -- countered by saying the
re****t's data was flawed and its findings misleading.
The study by Queens College sociologist Harry G. Levine, titled
"Marijuana Arrest Crusade," accused police of purposely singling out
minorities during the 10-year crackdown. It said that data provided by
stat Division of Criminal Justice Services showed that between 1997
and 2007, 52 percent of the suspects were black, 31 percent Hispanic
and only 15 percent white.
The findings are further proof that "racial profiling is a fact of
life on the streets of New York," Donna Lieberman, executive director
of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told a news conference at the
group's Manhattan headquarters.
Laws were revised in the late 1970s to largely decriminalize carrying
small, concealed stashes of marijuana, Levine said. But he claimed
police routinely "manufacture" arrests for possession in public view
-- still a misdemeanor -- by stopping young black men on the street
and goading them into emptying their pockets.
According to the study, arrests for marijuana possession began
skyrocketing in the late 1990s during the Giuliani administration -- a
trend that continued under Mayor Michael Bloomberg at an estimated
cost of between $50 and $90 million a year. There were 39,700 arrests
last year alone, according to the study.
The 2007 total makes the city "the marijuana arrest capital of the
world," Lieberman said. The study says New York deserves that title
because it devotes far more resources to arresting and jailing
marijuana offenders than other large cities in Europe and elsewhere.
It also cites a previous analysis of FBI data showing that five of the
top 10 counties with highest per-capita arrest rate were the five
boroughs.
Police disputed the study's finding that most of the misdemeanor
arrests involved suspects carrying only a few grams of marijuana
inside "blunts" or small plastic bags. Typically, they said, the
suspects were either smoking pot in public or carrying more weight:
Between about one and eight ounces.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne called Levine an "advocate for marijuana
legalization," and accused the NYCLU of using the sociologist "to
mislead the public with absurdly inflated numbers and false claims
about bias."
"If the NYCLU is for legalization, it should just say so without
resorting to smears," Browne said.
|
