In a city in which it is not a crime to shoot Sean Bell fifty times or Amadou Diallo 41 times, where black and Hispanic young men are stopped and frisked vastly in excess of their proportion of the population, it should not be a surprise that blacks & Hispanics are arrested for marijuana possession vastly more than whites (even though marijuana use is equal across ethnic groups). The surprise, as I see it, is that decent people don’t spit at Mayor Bloomberg and his police Commissioner. How often will NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Misinformation, Paul Browne, say things like the NYPD doesn’t engage in racial profiling without his nose growing from Police Plaza to City Hall? (I hate it when Mayor Bloomberg’s race policies make me write as though I were Al Sharpton.)

Rocco Parascandola of Newsday reports on a study released by the New York Civil Liberties Union:

The NYPD arrested more than 350,000 people for misdemeanor marijuana possession over the past decade -- a tenfold increase achieved by systematically targeting young black and Hispanic men and stopping them without cause, a report released Tuesday charges NYCLU,

The NYCLU press release, is here It says:

The NYPD arrested and jailed nearly 400,000 people for possessing small amounts of marijuana between 1997 and 2007, a tenfold increase in marijuana arrests over the previous decade and a figure marked by startling racial and gender disparities, according to a report released Tuesday at the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The report, The Marijuana Arrest Crusade in New York City: Racial Bias in Police Policy 1997-2007, is the first ever in-depth study of misdemeanor marijuana arrests in New York City during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations…

"The numbers speak for themselves,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU. “The NYPD routinely targets young men based on their skin color and where they live. Arresting and jailing thousands for marijuana possession does not create safer streets. It only fosters distrust between the police and community and strips hundreds of thousands of young New Yorkers of their dignity.”

The arrests, which cost taxpayers up to $90 million a year*(but see below), are indicative of the NYPD’s broken windows approach to law enforcement, in which police focus on minor offenses as a method of reducing crime. This approach, also called quality of life policing, has caused a dramatic spike in stop-and-frisk encounters between police and city residents.

For myself, I think that there are two confounded issues here. Even if "quality of life" policing works, it would need to be employed in a racially neutral manner.

Read the report itself here – pdf, 106 pages, sorry .

Check out also Jim Dwyer’s column. Want even more? The NY Daily News, and City Room here. The prize for best headline goes to the Village Voice NYPD “Weeds” Out Blacks And Latinos . Gothamist's post is here .

The funny thing is that the data has been around for a while. See, for example, this 2005 presentation by study-author Levine, his 2007 testimony before an Assembly Committee , this paper by by Golob, Johnson & Dunlap presented at the Conference of the American Society of Criminology which noted that 82% of arrests were of blacks & Hispanics, and this report by the anti-anti-marijuana group NORML .

* I asked the NYCLU about the $90 million figure. It's a soft number. It comes from page 47 of the Levine report and it's a guesstimate of police and court time. Excluded from that number are incarceration costs. (Most NYPD arrests result in substantial overtime pay for the arresting officers, I do not think the overtime component is included in the $90 million figure.

Fuller disclosure: While I, personally, have inhaled, marijuana has never been my intoxicant of choice (My mother, however, loved it as a pain reducer, nausea diminisher and appetite enhancer). I do think that anti-marijuana enforcement is a massive boon-doggle diverting resources to police, courts and prisons from needed programs. It also, as I see it amounts to a substantial subsidy for the alcohol industry. – about which more later.