Minorities Targeted for Pot Arrests in NYC
The Big apple Times put Big apple City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on the recent seat, accusing him of stacking his administration’s summer internships with wealthy, white relatives of City Hall insiders. A result of, those on the path toward shaping city policy are overwhelmingly homogeneous.
According to the Times, this can be a symptom of a larger problem in Big apple – minorities are much more prone to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites. Here is due, in large part, to the stop-and-frisk policy of the NYPD backed by Bloomberg.
Mayor Bloomberg himself has admitted to smoking marijuana, but only 20 people for every 100,000 residents of his neighborhood – the Upper East Side of Manhattan – were arrested on pot charges over the past three years. That neighborhood is primarily white.
The Times compares those numbers to the arrest rate in Brownsville, Brooklyn where 3,109 people were arrested on pot charges for every 100,000 residents over an analogous time frame. Brownsville residents were 150 times prone to get arrested on marijuana charges. Brownsville residents are overwhelmingly nonwhite.
The top ten precincts for pot arrests were in neighborhoods where the population is frequently 90 percent or more nonwhite.
More @ nytimes.com