“The irony is, as crime has continued to fall, arrest numbers have continued to rise,” says Robin Steinberg, executive director of the Bronx Defenders, who reports that her organization has defended an increasing number of people in recent years who have been arrested for petty drug crimes. “What you’re seeing is policing of poor communities of color in New York City that targets misdemeanor and nonviolent crime.” She adds, “We see an infinitesimal number of cases where you would see any evidence that this person was a real dealer.”
Paul Browne, the NYPD spokesman, did not respond to requests for comment or to provide information about the department’s current policing strategy and philosophy. When stories were printed about Levine’s study in April 2008, Browne said that crime in the city had declined about 60 percent over the 19-year period that Levine cited. “Attention to marijuana and lower-level crime in general has helped drive crime down,” Browne contended. He also attacked Levine as being “an advocate for marijuana legalization” and a dupe of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which sponsored the study.
“Smoking marijuana in public does contribute to a sense of a neighborhood veering toward being out of control, where you have public disregard for the law,” says Heather MacDonald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “There is an argument for being concerned about open marijuana use.”
If Browne’s assertion is correct, however, that the mass marijuana arrests are a driving factor behind the decline in citywide crime, the NYPD and mayor have kept curiously quiet about it. All told, drug arrests have accounted for fully a third of the 2.1 million arrests made between 2002 and 2008. Yet no “attaboy” press conferences were called by the NYPD or mayor to talk about the strategy; no praise was given to the anti-narcotics units for their contribution to the overall crime reduction. In fact, on the NYPD’s CompStat sheets, which track the city’s crime rate, there are no categories showing any NYPD narcotics statistics, such as arrests or seizures, nor is the narcotics unit even mentioned on the NYPD’s official web-page. In his annual budget statement to the Council this year, Commissioner Kelly didn’t mention drugs.
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