{news} NYPD busts for pot puffing show racism, study asserts

[clifford thornton]

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                        NYPD busts for pot puffing show racism, study asserts 
                       

                       
                        BY ERNIE NASPRETTO
                        DAILY NEWS POLICE BUREAU 
                       
                        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. 

                        Originally published on August 8, 2006 
                       
                 
           
     

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