A SMELL OF POT AND PRIVILEGE IN THE CITY

The Bloomberg administration has quietly been fixing up its sons and
daughters with cool summer internships, as reported Tuesday in The
New York Times. Which is probably fine: It is hard to see nepotism as
much of a sin when it is really just another chapter of Darwinism,
the drive possessed by all creatures to finagle a better future for
their offspring.

No matter how much Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg preached about
meritocracy, no one expected that the laws of nature would be
repealed when he was elected.

Sure enough, a Freedom of Information Act request showed that tucked
among hundreds of summer interns picked through a competitive process
were dozens of the children of City Hall insiders or of Mr.
Bloomberg's friends. They reflected the mayor's social and political
circles: mostly white, many quite wealthy, coming from private high
schools and Ivy League colleges.

In short, these are not residents of Stop and Frisk New York.

Mayor Bloomberg promised to lead a government that looked like the
city; in reality, he leads one that looks like his mirror, an
administration in which key managers are overwhelmingly white and
male. It is one thing if this means the annual crop of interns is
heavily salted with young Bloombergians.

It is quite another when those managers are shaping policies that
wind up leading to the deprivation of liberty of people who do not
look like them.

Among the biggest but least discussed expansions of government power
under Mr. Bloomberg has been the explosive increase in arrests for
displaying or burning marijuana.

No city in the world arrests more of its citizens for using pot than
New York, according to statistics compiled by Harry G. Levine, a
Queens College sociologist.

Nearly nine out of ten people charged with violating the law are
black or Latino, although national surveys have shown that whites are
the heaviest users of pot. Mr. Bloomberg himself acknowledged in 2001
that he had used it, and enjoyed it.

On the Upper East Side of Manhattan where the mayor lives, an average
of 20 people for every 100,000 residents were arrested on the
lowest-level misdemeanor pot charge in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

During those same years, the marijuana arrest rate in Brownsville,
Brooklyn, was 3,109 for every 100,000 residents.

That means the chances of getting arrested on pot charges in
Brownsville -- and nothing else -- were 150 times greater than on the
Upper East Side of Manhattan.

No doubt this is, in large part, a consequence of the stop-and-frisk
practices of the Police Department, which Mr. Bloomberg and his aides
say have been an important tool in bringing down crime.

Nowhere in the city is that tactic used more heavily than in
Brownsville. On average, the police conducted one stop and frisk a
year for every one of the 14,000 people who live there, an analysis
by The New York Times found. More than 99 percent of the people were
not arrested or charged with any wrongdoing.

Brownsville has the highest marijuana arrest rate in the city. The
top 10 precincts for marijuana arrests averaged 2,150 for every
100,000 residents; the populations in those precincts are generally
90 percent or more nonwhite.

Mr. Bloomberg's neighborhood has the lowest rate of marijuana
arrests; the 10 precincts with the lowest rates averaged 67 arrests
per 100,000 residents. The population in most of those neighborhoods
was 80 percent white.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Bloomberg talked about proposals that would
allow marijuana to be distributed for putatively medical purposes.

He said it was a Trojan horse for complete legalization.

"I mean, the idea of medical marijuana, we all know what that means:
It means everybody is going to qualify," he said. "The worst thing is
the hypocrisy of saying it's medical marijuana. If you want to
legalize it, let's have that debate, but that's what you're really
talking about. It has nothing to do with medicine."

In truth, in New York, the debate was over before it began.

For blacks and Latinos, it is very, very illegal.

But not in Mr. Bloomberg's neighborhood.