[E.O.M.S.]: Tyranny in NYC

Tuesday 14 June 2011

Tyranny in NYC

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been the focus of much public criticism in recent months. Elected officials and editorial writers have expressed concern and outrage over matters ranging from the city’s response to snow storms to the appointment of Cathie Black as the city’s Education Chancellor to the payroll scandal at the city’s Department of Employment. A policy area where the mayor has mainly escaped criticism and where it is long overdue is a truly objectionable practice of the Police Department, namely our city’s wasteful, ineffective, unjust, illegal and starkly racially biased arrest methods.
Wasteful
The vast majority of arrests in New York City are for low-level offenses, such as misdemeanors like possessing a small amount of marijuana or violations like selling umbrellas or flowers on the street without a license. By any criteria, almost none of these activities could be considered dangerous or predatory. At worst, most city residents would view them as public nuisances.
Police officers and other criminal justice personnel -- judges, court officers, district attorneys, public defenders and correction officers -- spend hours every day, if not their whole workday, processing these cases. And these law enforcement officials are preoccupied with these seemingly insignificant cases day after day, week after week, month after month and so on.

According to the Drug Policy Alliance, just one category of arrests -- for possessing, not selling, small amounts of marijuana -- costs New York City $75 million per year.

Ineffective

The aggressive arrest-driven policing applied in New York City aimed at minor offenses has effectively caught up hundreds of thousands, perhaps actually millions, of individuals in the criminal justice net in recent years. Last year, for example, the city’s police made over 370,000 arrests. Most of these arrests occurred in New York’s low-income communities of color -- for example, although the majority of people who use marijuana are white, 86 percent of the individuals arrested for marijuana possession last year were black or Latino...