Sometimes it seems to me that the real reason that Mayor Bloomberg and his Police Commissioner have gotten into their unending multi-million dollar war with Critical Mass bicycle riders is that they hate being sassed by scruffy radicals. Other times it seems to me that the fault really belongs to two former officials of Mayor Koch's era, Stanley Brezenoff and Nat Leventhal who restructured how NYC evaluates agency productivity. Those two developed and polished the Mayor's Management Report (To see the current draft of the MMR for the Police Dept. click here.

As I read the data there, there are fewer arrests in many categories of offenses. How can the police show they are busy? Well, issuing 49 summonses and arresting three Critical Mass riders certainly gives their numbers a boost -- but so does narcotics enforcement. Misdemeanor narcotics arrests -- read pot -- are up very sharply. Is this the result of a pot wave or a need to boost productivity numbers? You may want to read Paul Armentano's article on Alternet a few days ago where he points out that marijuana arrests are vastly and disproportionately of people of color. NYC arrested more than 32,000 for pot in 2006, overwhelmingly minorities.

Citing a study of racial disparities in arrest and sentence, Armentano points out that "(o)f the more than 395,000 defendants busted in New York City since 1980 for puffing or possessing pot in public, nearly 336,000 of them (85 percent) were either African-American or Hispanic. By contrast, African-Americans and Hispanics together comprise approximately half of the city's population."

On the lighter side for all but the arrested, consider, as a goofy exercise in police power, this past weekend's pot bust of teachers at a concert. Not only did New York's finest get to arrest New York teachers but they got a headline too. Perhaps we need to rethink how we measure police productivity. Shall we place a bet on the race of the teachers?

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