Marijuana Arrests in California Target Blacks and Latinos

[The Straight Story]

Marijuana Arrests in California Target Blacks and Latinos

California is not the place to be for Latinos and African-Americans who use marijuana. In city after city, these two minorities have been subject to disproportionately high levels of arrest and prosecution, according to studies produced by the Drug Policy Alliance, the California NAACP and the William C. Velasquez Institute.

From 2006-2008, blacks were arrested for marijuana possession in California’s 25 largest cities at four, five, six, seven and even 12 times the rate of whites. For Latinos, the arrest rate was twice to three times that of whites in California’s 33 largest cities.

In the city of Los Angeles, blacks were arrested for marijuana possession at seven times the rate of whites. In Pasadena, blacks make up 11% of the population, but 49% of the people arrested for possession of marijuana. In the state’s capital, Sacramento, blacks account for 14% of the population, but 51% marijuana arrests.

In San Jose, where Latinos are 31% of the population, they accounted for 54% of those arrested for having marijuana.

http://www.allgov.com/Controversies/ViewNews/Marijuana_Arrests_in_California_Target_Blacks_and_Latinos_101102

[Unvanguard]

1. Water is wet, the sun will rise tomorrow, and Meg Whitman is going to lose. n/t

[Jackpine Radical]

2. And Prop 19 will carry.

[Unvanguard]

3. Less sure of that one, but here's hoping. n/t

[Jackpine Radical]

7. Jeez, if that doesn't bring out the young progressive vote,

what the hell will?

The Rs have always been so clever, running anti-gay propositions etc. to boost their fundie turnout; I'm hoping Prop 19 reverses that effect.

[bullwinkle428]

4. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

[Name removed]

5. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[marmar]

6. Ever watch 'Cops'? .... White guys caught with weed are given a stern warning and let go.....

..... you know, just kids making mistakes.

Blacks and Latinos? In the back seat of the cruiser once they smell the weed.

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

9. NYT: Arrest rates are the same for Blacks and whites stopped and frisked in NYC. But Blacks

Blacks and Latinos are NINE TIMES more likely to be stopped and frisked.
In 2009, the NYPD stopped and frisked 53,000 whites and 490,000 Blacks and Latinos.

This story IMO shows that marijuana drug busts are so alarmingly high for minorities in
large cities because the police are alarmingly likely to be going through their pockets for no valid reason.

From http://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/new-york-be-black-or-latino-be-stopped-be-frisked :

"May 13th, 2010
Posted by Michael Cummings, New York Civil Liberties Union at 5:10pm
Racial Profiling In New York, Be Black (or Latino), Be Stopped, Be Frisked

The New York Times ran an article (at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/nyregion/13frisk.html ) today showing the alarming racial disparities in the New York Police Department's (NYPD) stop-and-frisk practices. ... For black and Latino New Yorkers, being stopped by the police for no discernable reason is a fact of life. Statistics tell the story: NYPD officers stopped nearly 490,000 blacks and Latinos last year, compared with 53,000 whites. In other words, blacks and Latino were nine times more likely to be stopped, questioned or frisked by the police than whites.

According to the Times article, arrest rates of blacks and whites stopped by police were nearly identical „ about 6 percent. Overall, NYPD officers stopped and interrogated at least 505,000 completely innocent people in 2009, the most ever since the department began collecting data on its troubling stop-and-frisk program.

What the article doesn't mention is that the NYPD keeps the personal information of every single innocent person it stops. Didn't do anything wrong? Just walking down the street while black? It doesn't matter „ your name is now in a sprawling police database. Essentially, the NYPD is compiling a massive database of law-abiding black and Latino New Yorkers, and has turned more than 1 million innocent New Yorkers into criminal suspects. ..."

[RainDog]

11. thanks for taking the trouble to get the data links

it's incredible to me to see that some people actually try to defend racism by claiming those who are its victims might bring it on themselves.

that's not exactly an enlightened pov.

there is a reason the NAACP and a major Hispanic organization has come out in support of Prop. 19 and it's not because they all want to indulge in some bud.

These arrests create a land mined playing field for minorities.

[Igel]

12. And yet the links deny the central claim of some posters.

Which is that blacks/Latinos are disproportionately charged and found guilty because the police may know whites use/possess marijuana but are allowed to walk.

At least in NYC, the stats cited just say that both whites and blacks are charged at similar rates once they're found to use/possess.

This pushes the argument from "among those who use/possess marijuana, whites are more likely to be allowed to walk and blacks more likely to be arrested" to "blacks are more likely to be frisked than whites." One possible reason is racism. However, the reasoning that gets you from "it's a possible way to account for the facts so it must be the reason to account for the facts" is known as "abductive reasoning." It's good for producing testable hypotheses; it sucks and producing valid conclusions. The conclusions *may* be valid--there's just no way of knowing from the logic.

In fact, the argument goes back to whether poor/minority areas have higher crime rates. Here progressives (and not a few conservatives) tend to diverge strongly among themselves and by context. When arrest stats are cited showing minorities have higher criminality, the response tends to be, "Well, poverty produces crime, minorities are more often poor than whites, so be more hands-on in promoting prosperity." When the correlation between higher crime rates and a higher police presence in a minority or poor community than in a white middle-class community is pointed out, the assumption is that the police are there because of the community's minority-majority status and this constitutes racism. Then the response is, "Police out now! Hands off!" In other words, "higher crime rate" has two completely different factors accounting for the same observation--something almost certainly false--even if both are ascribed to racism. The actual research muddies the water a great deal further.

Historical revisionism plays a large role, too. When Jesse Jackson said it was racist to allow black communities to suffer at the hands of crack dealers the laws were toughened and deal with an "epidemic". Coke and crack had different effects on families, income, social order, etc., etc., and it was deemed foolish not to treat them differently, esp. since they each had disparate impacts on different groups (coke didn't hurt the non-oppressed group much, crack hurt an oppressed group much). Disparate impact resulting from similar enforcement practices was prima facie evidence of racism. Now, a lot of people seem to believe that the laws were toughened in order to discriminate on the basis of race and hurt poor black neighborhoods because disparate impact resulting from dissimilar enforcement practices is taken as prima facie evidence of racism.

[NorthCarolina]

10. There's a surprise...not. eom