If you’re black and you smoke pot, get arrested
I'm not as think as you stoned I am
(Title sung to the tune of “If you’re happy and you know it…” What? It’s 11:00pm. Buzz off.)
While much of the news media and indeed the blawgosphere has been preoccupied with the news that NYC isn’t really a big, bad and dangerous place, curious little attention has been paid to another story out of New York: that under Mayor Bloomberg, drugs arrests have spiked and that blacks are 7 times more likely to be arrested for drug offenses than whites.
Thanks to Matt at Change.org (a blog you should be following if you aren’t already), we learn that a new study (and a related NYT article) has been published analyzing the incidence of drug related arrests in the Big Joint:
In 2008 alone, more than 40,000 people were arrested in New York for low-level marijuana offenses — and 87 percent of them were black of Latino. When you consider that white people are more likely to use pot than African Americans, the problem here becomes even clearer.
Put another way: 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. In other words, in one year, 2008, Bloomberg made more pot arrests than in 18 years of Koch, Dinkins and Giuliani combined.
Think about that for a New York minute. And then think about the fact that of those 40,000 odd people, 34,800 odd were black or hispanic.
The Mayor’s office defends this tactic, of course, as a variation of the “broken windows” theory and points to a 35% reduction in crime since 2001. What this position ignores, however, is that the arrests are severely racially skewed. What they’re policing are black and hispanic neighborhoods and people in those neighborhoods, not drug users. The downside of such a tactic is that it forces minorities to have a disproportionately greater amount of contact with the criminal justice system, it reinforces stereotypes and long-held notions about the relationships between minority communities and the police and of course, those ever growing arrest and conviction records.
[Of course, this is not the only area in which the law enforcement and criminal justice system exhibits racial disparity.]
One of us must be misunderstanding the graph in Matt’s post. The way I see it, since it says those are yearly averages, I think the “more than the previous 18 years combined” number you come up with is wrong.
For example, Guliani’s average arrest rate of under 25K per year, times 2 (and he was mayor for
is more than Bloomberg’s biggest year of 40K arrests.
The relevant stats are on page 3 of the study.
Koch + Dinkins + Guiliani = 39,893
Bloomberg = 40,383
It is skewed by the fact that in the first 2 years of Rudy, the numbers were 3K and 5K ish respectively.
Hadn’t clicked on the study for the first comment, which is one reason I allowed for being wrong. Having said that, and looked at the study – well, skimmed the damn thing – I’m still confused.
I agree that the chart on page 3 supports the statement I took issue with. May be somehow related to the small print disclaimer at the bottom of p3, “This table shows the lowest level misdemeanor marijuana arrests and charges”. I suppose that only including the lowest level could skew things, or they are drawing distinctions between arrests vs. arrests + non-arrest charges but… that same disclaimer is on the chart on Matt’s blog.
The averages, which belie the conclusion, seem likely to be the truer measure. Check out the chart on page 1. It shows more arrests in 2000, just 1 year of Guliani, than in 2008. Different chart but same thing on page 5, except there it’s even more obvious that there are more (more of what? are we comparing apples to apples? I’m not sure) in 2001 alone and 2002 alone than in 2008 alone.
As far as the skewing for Rudy’s first years, that doesn’t make any mathematical difference. (This part I’m sure of.) If the average for Rudy’s years is X over 8 years, it makes no difference to the total number of Rudy’s arrests whether they were all spread out evenly, at exactly 24,487 arrests each year – an unlikely prospect to be sure – or whether there were 0 arrests for the first 7 years and then all of the arrests (185,896) in the eighth – which would be even less likely, of course. The total number of Rudy arrests over his time as mayor is the average arrests per year times the number of years. So something is screwy.
I’m still probably missing something. But my bet is that to make the 2008 > the previous 18 years stat that they are somehow using the lies, damned lies and statistics version of the word “statistics”. Either that, or I’m drinking and commenting.
wait, what?
Rudy’s first two years were 94 and 95. So from 78-95 < 2008.
That makes perfect sense.
I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
Uh, I’m a fn mo – ron lol. Misread it somehow as the 18 years before Bloomberg. And I haven’t even finished my first beer, so I can’t really blame it on that.
You could’ve just said 4th beer and we would have understood. Lol.