WHITES SMOKE POT, BUT BLACKS ARE ARRESTED

Outside a music club on Greenwich Street in SoHo, the bouncers smoke
joints as they check in the arriving customers. A young graphic
artist routinely strolls through Chelsea, joint in hand. And when a
publicist calls her supplier to order pot, she uses code words -- a
studio, a one-or two-bedroom -- to signal how much she wants.

New York City is now entering its 10th year of pouring tens of
millions of dollars into arresting people for the lowest-level
misdemeanor marijuana cases.

But the SoHo bouncers and the Chelsea graphic artist don't have much
to worry about, at least from the police: they are white. Even though
surveys show they are part of the demographic group that makes the
heaviest use of pot, white people in New York are the least likely to
be arrested for it.

Last year, black New Yorkers were seven times more likely than whites
to be arrested for marijuana possession and no more serious crime.
Latinos were four times more likely.

In 2001, during his first campaign for mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg
was asked by New York magazine if he had ever used marijuana. "You
bet I did," he replied. "And I enjoyed it."

Like most white New Yorkers, he stood almost no chance of being
locked up for his pot use, then being handcuffed, fingerprinted and
spending a night in Central Booking.

Mr. Bloomberg may have been the first major city candidate to
acknowledge using pot, but as mayor he has led a sweeping expansion
of arrests, according to a recent study by Harry G. Levine, a
sociology professor at Queens College.

During Mr. Bloomberg's first two terms in office, the lowest-level
marijuana arrests were up, on average, by 50 percent over when his
predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani, was in office. Last year, Professor
Levine said, the city made 40,300 such arrests -- about 12 percent of
arrests for all crimes. Of these, 87 percent were of blacks or Latinos.

In 2008, the police made more pot arrests "than in the 12 years of
Mayor Koch, plus the four years of Mayor Dinkins, plus the first two
years of Mayor Giuliani," Mr. Levine wrote. "In other words, in one
year, 2008, Bloomberg made more pot arrests than in 18 years of Koch,
Dinkins and Giuliani combined."

The mayor's office said on Tuesday that it could not estimate the
cost of such arrests. Mr. Levine, drawing on studies done in other
cities, estimated that they could range from $53 million to $88
million annually.

WHATEVER the precise costs, are all these marijuana arrests -- wildly
disproportionate in their racial impact, and consuming the energy of
thousands of police officers, the courts, prosecutors and defense
lawyers -- truly helping the city?

Mr. Bloomberg's chief criminal justice aide, John Feinblatt, declined
to discuss the city's approach to marijuana arrests, or the findings
of the study. But through a spokesman, he issued a statement
maintaining the pot arrests have helped drive down violent crime.

"Marijuana arrests -- which rarely lead to jail -- are concentrated
in neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of violent crime
because that's where the police focus their attention in order to
reduce victimization," Mr. Feinblatt said. "This continued focus on
low-level offending has been part of the city's effective
crime-reduction strategy, which has resulted in a 35 percent decrease
in crime since 2001."

In effect, Mr. Feinblatt was arguing a variation on the
"broken-windows" theory of crime-fighting -- that cracking down on
symptoms of public disorder helps head off more serious problems.

Mr. Levine argues that such arrests drain resources needed for
dealing with serious threats.

The possession of less than an ounce of marijuana was decriminalized
by the State Legislature in 1977, reduced to a violation, the
equivalent of a traffic ticket. "Burning" it or having it "open to
public view" is a misdemeanor.

The handful of white pot smokers who do get arrested can be found in
court on Mondays and Tuesdays, when they must answer tickets
typically issued for smoking pot in a park. The rest of the week is
taken up with blacks and Latinos, who are more likely to have spent a
night in jail before court, said Edward McCarthy, a lawyer for the
Legal Aid Society.

"Some of the police officers, who are at the start of their careers,
are apologetic when they make these arrests," Mr. McCarthy said.
"They say, 'if my lieutenant or sergeant weren't here, I'd let you go.'"