NYPD BUSTS FOR POT PUFFING SHOW RACISM, STUDY ASSERTS

The NYPD disproportionately targets poor, black and Hispanic
neighborhoods when enforcing marijuana smoking-in-public laws,
according to a hotly debated new study.

The results of the study, funded by the Marijuana Policy Project and
the National Institute on Drug Abuse, are published in the new issue
of Harm Reduction Journal, an open-access online journal published by
BioMed Central.

The NYPD says that this type of enforcement goes along with its focus
on where the heaviest crime patterns exist and is part of the
department's successful quality-of-life policing strategy.

But study author Dr. Andrew Golub of the National Development and
Research Institute in New York City contends that is not the case.

He says a review of arrests for smoking marijuana in public from 1992
to 2003 shows enforcement shifted dramatically from the lower half of
Manhattan and scattered broadly throughout the city in the early
'90s. The majority of that enforcement, he states, occurred in
high-poverty, minority communities in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens
by the late '90s.

Golub suggests that these arrests no longer serve the goals of
quality-of-life policing, but rather exacerbate race relations in New
York City.

"That's ridiculous," responded retired Detective George Repetti, who
served 15 years in the NYPD narcotics division. "Our enforcement is
based on crime trends, constant analysis of residual crime,
intelligence and citizen complaints. Race simply is not a factor."

Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, an NYPD spokesman, said the author
ignored the geographic distribution of crime.

"The study distorts reality to prop up a thinly disguised manifesto
for marijuana legalization," Browne charged. "More arrests of all
kinds take place in areas with more crime," he said.