Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration is on course to equal the number of petty weed arrests as Bloomberg’s. According to a new report by the Drug Policy Alliance, by this time last year, the NYPD had made 20,080 arrests for pot possession as opposed to 19,684 in 2014 — a difference of just 396.
That difference comes from a smaller amount of arrests in January and February, however analysts say that wasn’t due to a shift in policy, it’s because New York received more snow in one year than they have since 1870. That amount of snow meant fewer people on the street to harass. Since then, arrests have been up.
Though stop-and-frisk searches are decreasing, the racial disparity continues with 87% of searches being performed on blacks and Latinos. It’s no coincidence that 86% of pot busts are minorities despite the fact that more young white males smoke weed than any other demographic and despite claims by the former mayor that the latter are stopped “too much.”
(Photo: @Don Goofy)
