By Benjamin Mueller, Robert Gebeloff and Sahil Chinoy
They sit in courtroom pews, almost all
of them young black men, waiting their turn before a New York City judge
to face a charge that no longer exists in some states: possessing
marijuana. They tell of smoking in a housing project hallway, or of
being in a car with a friend who was smoking, or of lighting up a Black
& Mild cigar the police mistake for a blunt.
There
are many ways to be arrested on marijuana charges, but one pattern has
remained true through years of piecemeal policy changes in New York: The
primary targets are black and Hispanic people.
Across
the city, black people were arrested on low-level marijuana charges at
eight times the rate of white, non-Hispanic people over the past three
years, The New York Times found. Hispanic people were arrested at five
times the rate of white people. In Manhattan, the gap is even starker:
Black people there were arrested at 15 times the rate of white people.
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Source: The New York Times (via Empire Report New York)
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