By Phillip Smith on March 21, 2013

NEW YORK, NY — There has been a double-barreled challenge this week to the NYPD and its heavy-handed policing. On the one hand, the department and the city are being sued in federal court over their stop-and-frisk program, which is aimed predominantly at young men of color. On the other, the NYPD is facing the glare of publicity over a new report that contends it has wasted as much as a million man-hours over the past ten years arresting low-level marijuana offenders.

Under the stop-and-frisk program, which the city touts as a crime-fighting effort, more than 531,000 people were stopped last year and nearly five million in the past decade. Some were stopped only for questioning, some had their bags or backpacks searched, some were subjected to full pat-down searches. Only 10% of those stops resulted in arrests — including arrests for public marijuana possession after police tricked or intimidated people into pulling out their baggies (possession is otherwise decriminalized in the state) — and only a tiny number resulted in the seizure of weapons.

The massive number of annual stop-and-frisks, five times the number a couple of decades ago, raises questions itself. But who is being stopped-and-frisked is raising even more questions and concerns. While blacks make up a quarter of the city’s population, they accounted for 51% of all stop-and-frisk encounters, being stopped at a rate twice what would be expected with color-blind enforcement. Whites, on the other hand, make up 44% of the population, but accounted for only 11% of stop-and-frisk encounters.

Many of the stop-and-frisks are illegal and the enforcement is racially biased, argued attorneys in the class action lawsuit in federal court this week. In the case, which began Monday, attorneys for the plaintiffs — people who were subjected to stop-and-frisk searches — are seeking a court-appointed monitor to oversee changes in police practices.

They are not seeking to ban stop-and-frisk searches because they have been found legal. But US District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin, who has expressed deep concerns over the tactic in previous rulings, could order reforms. The trial could last for up to a month.

NYPD is doing illegal stops and must reform its practices, said Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Darius Charney, who is representing the plaintiffs. The stops are “arbitrary, unnecessary, and unconstitutional” and a “frightening and degrading experience” for “thousands, if not millions” of New Yorkers, Charney argued. He said plaintiffs will present “powerful testimonial and statistical evidence” that residents are stopped for no good reason.

On Monday, the first plaintiff witnesses took the stand. Devin Almonor, 16, the son of a police officer, testified that he was stopped when he was 13, handcuffed and thrown against an unmarked police car as he made his way home. David Floyd, now a 33-year-old medical student, testified that he was stopped twice without cause.

Attorneys for the city responded that in a city that large, large numbers of stop-and-frisks should not be unexpected and that the NYPD went where the crime was.

“The New York Police Department is fully committed to policing within the boundaries of the law,” said Heidi Grossman, an attorney for the city. “Crime is not distributed evenly across the city. Police are given an awesome responsibility, one of which is to bring crime down and keep people safe.”

Given those awesome responsibilities, a new report from the Drug Policy Alliance and the Marijuana Arrest Research Project is raising eyebrows. The report’s main finding is clear from its title: One Million Police Hours: Making 440,000 Marijuana Possession Arrests in New York City, 2002-2012. The report was authored by CUNY sociology professor Dr. Harry Levine, an expert on marijuana possession arrests, at the request of members of the city council and the state legislature.

While marijuana possession offenders typically faced only fines once they had their day in court, the report found that the arrests themselves inflicted immediate pain. Those 440,000 arrests resulted in five million hours of police custody, an average of more than 10 hours per person of being held in the city’s notorious holding cells, often overnight.

“We cannot afford to continue arresting tens of thousands of youth every year for low-level marijuana possession,” said Alfredo Carrasquillo, civil rights organizer with VOCAL-NY. “We can’t afford it in terms of the negative effect it has on the future prospects of our youth and we can’t afford in terms of police hours. It’s shocking that the same mayor who has been taking money away from youth programs and cutting other social services, is wasting tens of millions of dollars locking youth up through the NYPD’s marijuana arrests crusade. We need legislative action to fix this madness.”

“This report shows that people arrested for marijuana possession spend an average of 12-18 hours, just in police custody, and the vast majority of those arrested are young Black and Latino men from seven to ten neighborhoods in NYC,” said Chino Hardin, field coordinator and trainer with the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions. “This is not just a crisis, but a frontline civil rights issue facing urban communities of color in the 21st century. We are calling on Governor Cuomo to do the right thing, and exercise the moral and political will to address this injustice.”

While Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly last fall announced changes it how the NYPD processes marijuana arrests and the number of pot possession busts have begun to decline slightly, advocates are calling on the legislature and the governor to change the state’s 1977 decriminalization law to remove law enforcement’s “in public view” loophole, the provision NYPD has used to great effect.

“For years, New Yorkers from across the state have organized and marched and rallied, demanding an end to these outrageous arrests. And now we learn that the police have squandered one million hours to make racially biased, costly, and unlawful marijuana possession arrests. This is scandalous,” said Gabriel Sayegh, New York state director for the Drug Policy Alliance. “I’m sure we can all think of more effective things for the police to spend their time on — imagine if NYPD committed one million hours to working with communities to stop gun violence or to pursue unsolved serious crimes. We stand with the caucus and other leaders in Albany — both Democrats and Republicans — in demanding reform. The hour of change is upon us, and reform is long, long overdue.”

Whether it is the massive stop-and-frisk policing program or the practice of turning marijuana possession tickets into misdemeanor arrests complete with post-booking jail time and criminal records, NYPD is coming under increasing scrutiny and criticism.

Originally published Monday, March 4, 2013 at 11:08 AM

Washington state received so many bids for the new position of marijuana consultant that officials are delaying the announcement of a winner.
OLYMPIA, Wash. —
Washington state received so many bids for the new position of marijuana consultant that officials are delaying the announcement of a winner.

Liquor Control Board spokesman Mikhail Carpenter says there were 98 applications for the job, which entails advising the board on rules governing Washington’s new legal marijuana industry. The state’s voters last fall passed Initiative 502, which legalized up to an ounce of marijuana for adults over 21 and called for a system of state-licensed growers, processors and retailers.

The board had planned to announce the presumptive winning bid on Tuesday, but Carpenter says it’s taking a while to through the bids. The board says it doesn’t expect to announce the winner before March 13.

by Roxanne Wilson | 2/26/2013 @ 9:54AM

The federal government says there is no such thing as “medical” marijuana. Despite that, an increasing number of states have legalized the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, and a couple, so far, have okayed recreational use of marijuana for adults.

In the medical context, doctors often prescribe marijuana to manage chronic pain, and those patients must register in a confidential patient database. Registration triggers issuance of registry identification cards so recipients avoid criminal liability. Because many such patients are in the workforce, however, employers need to be aware of existing medical marijuana laws and pending legislation in each state where they employ workers.

The states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington currently legalize marijuana use for varying reasons. Washington and Colorado approved recreational marijuana use by adults, with regulations to monitor its possession, use and sale.

Expect more smoke. In 2013, Alabama, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, New Hampshire, Maryland, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and West Virginia introduced bills to make marijuana use lawful. On February 21 2013, for instance, Maryland Democratic Delegate Curt Anderson introduced a bill to legalize and tax marijuana use by “over 21” adults. The titles of several of these proposed bills contain words like “compassionate use” and “compassion and care” that reveal or suggest empathy for individuals with chronic pain who, with marijuana, want to function and work with less or no pain.

Some existing and pending state laws place specific restrictions on the management of employees who are registered medical marijuana users. In other states, however, regulations state that “their” laws do not deprive businesses from maintaining a drug-free workplace. Still other states have yet to address application of their marijuana laws to the workplace while their regulations remain embryonic.

In California, Colorado, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, businesses need not currently accommodate employees who legally use marijuana for medicinal purposes. Washington’s statute, for example, says that employers may establish drug-free work policies, and nothing in it requires accommodating the medical use of marijuana. Others are not so clear, forcing employers to develop what sometimes must be “best guess” workplace policies to comply with “fog-filled” laws.

Marijuana use laws in Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, and Rhode Island expressly forbid businesses from refusing to hire applicants and from disciplining and otherwise adversely affecting the employment of registered medical marijuana card holders based solely on that status. Arizona and Delaware extend that by forbidding businesses from refusing to hire applicants or disciplining employees on the basis of drug tests that reveal marijuana components or metabolites. There are exceptions to these rules where, for example, the employees are “impaired” by marijuana while on an employer’s property and/or during work hours. But in those states, employed medical marijuana card holders are not “impaired” simply because marijuana components or metabolites are “in” their systems. Even worse, there currently are no bright-line tests for marijuana “intoxication” comparable to those for alcohol intoxication. That means employers in disciplining “impaired” employees will have to rely on observations of an employee’s behavior to prove impairment and avoid liability if the employees file a charge or sue.

With the changing landscape of state regulation, businesses cannot rely on federal classification of marijuana as a Schedule I substance (meaning it has no currently accepted medical use and has high potential for abuse). Instead, the federal-state “tug of war” means that every employer must be on “high alert” to ever-broadening marijuana use state laws and regulations.

Employers also need to educate law-makers as to the practicalities of employing marijuana users so any legislation passed can and does avoid unintended, harsh, and perhaps dangerous workplace consequences. Here are examples of opportunities for workplace input. In Colorado, there is a task force to propose regulations for its new use laws. Massachusetts health officials held three public “listening sessions” during February to help draft the regulations for the medical marijuana law passed by voters in November 2012.

Employers also should ensure that their human resources professionals and management teams are knowledgeable about the marijuana laws in each state where they employ workers, including updating their policies.

As more and more states relax the use of marijuana, perhaps, in part, because tax revenues from the sale of marijuana can help solve budget woes, business owners will also need pain management.

*Barbra Diallo also contributed to the content of this article.