The Drug Policy Alliance released its latest findings and calculated that the city is spending about $75 million a year to prosecute people for minor possession of pot. Curiously, many of these small time offenders, who happen to be black and Latino, should be given desk appearance tickets, per state law, but that rarely happens.
Instead, the NYPD has been sneakily deploying underhanded tactics—that some might call illegal—to get around this, further sucking up valuable resources.
The group writes:
In New York State, possessing less than an ounce of marijuana is not a crime for which someone can be arrested and fingerprinted. It is only a crime if the marijuana is openly displayed or smoked, which was not the case for most people arrested. Therefore, in order to make these possession arrests, the police usually had to trick or intimate young people into revealing their marijuana, or search the person’s pockets and possessions, often illegally.
I live in the middle of Brighton Beach and Coney Island and here everyone gets searched almost every other day for no reason at all. We would be sitting on the benches talking with nothing illegal on us and detectives always pull up right in front of us and search us every time. A lot of people in the neighborhood get arrested for pot, almost everyone for holding less than a gram.
I do think its illegal for them to come search us randomly, once they came to the school yard and lined about 25 people against the fence, no one got arrested though.. It got really annoying already, getting searched by cops isn't fun =/
I’m viewing this on my new iPad. Man, this thing looks awesome. Yours is the very first blog I’ve ever surfed to using the iPad. At least it’s iPad-friendly! Great work.