With drugs having, for the most part, moved off the streets and crime having reached lows not seen in this city since the early 1960s, it might be logical to think that mass NYPD drug arrests—like the nodding heroin addicts, skeletal crackheads and full-scale street-level enforcement operations—are also a thing of the past.
In fact, that is far from the case. Despite the extraordinarily low crime levels and the near total absence of drugs from the city’s public discourse these days, nearly a quarter of a million people in New York City have been arrested for drugs over the past two years.
This surge in drug arrests is unlike police operations of the past. Operation Pressure Point and the creation of TNT were highly publicized efforts amid rising violent crime to, at the very least, present the appearance of action being taken, but the latest surges in New York’s war on drugs have been waged in near silence amid an era of record low criminality. And where in the 1980s and 1990s the underlying objective was to stop the pushers of highly debilitating heroin or take down violent crack gangs, drug policing in New York over most the first decade of the new millennium has targeted people who use marijuana.
To some extent, that recent focus reflects a long-term trend in how the city has policed drugs.
The first year Ed Koch was mayor, 1978, saw 18,000 drug arrests—about as many as cops had averaged during the term of his predecessor, Abe Beame. But by Koch’s 12th and final year in office, 1989, the number of drug arrests had quintupled, to 94,000. Koch’s tenure is recalled as a time when a heroin “epidemic” gave way to a cocaine “epidemic,” which eventually morphed into the ultimate “epidemic” of our time, that of crack. That led Mayor David Dinkins to promise an even tougher approach on drug crime. During Dinkins’ one term in City Hall, cops made fewer overall narcotics arrests but more arrests for top-level drug charges than under any mayor before or since.
But six months after he moved into Gracie Mansion, Dinkins was forever—and some think unfairly—stamped as soft on crime by the unforgettable New York Post headline “Dave, Do Something!” as homicides hit a record 2,262 in 1990. Crime began to fall during the remainder of Dinkins’ term, as his administration implemented the Safe Street, Safe City program to increase the manpower of the NYPD. But the 1993 election ushered in a drastically different strategy for fighting crime in general and the war on drugs in particular.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s drug strategy resulted in approximately 886,000 people being arrested for drugs during the eight years he was in charge, an astounding average of nearly 111,000 per year, or more than 300 a day. The cornerstone of that drug policy was the use of sweeps that focused on street-level users, which was consistent with Giuliani’s belief in the “broken windows” theory—that if the police ignore smaller crimes, it leads people to commit bigger ones down the road. A full third of those drug offenders arrested during Giuliani’s years as mayor (almost 295,000 people) were charged with the lowest-level narcotics crime, criminal possession of a controlled substance in the seventh degree, a misdemeanor, for having very small amounts of drugs. And during Giuliani’s second term, the NYPD began mass arrests of marijuana users, nabbing some 160,000 for the lowest-level marijuana crime—criminal possession in the fifth degree, also a misdemeanor.
