How a city works...

[tw]

Originally Posted by tw

Thank god for rock and roll.

Damn. They now want me to pay for my rock and roll. God has no mercy. No wonder he picked this pope.

[xoxoxoBruce]

How NYC works. 11 years, 440,000 pot busts, 1,000,000 police man hours.

[Lamplighter]

I am highly impressed by the sophisticated statistical method used to generate the 1,000,000 hours... NOT

<snip>
We multiplied 2.5 hours by the number of lowest level marijuana possession arrests
(charged under NYS Penal Law 221.10) for each year since 2002
when Mayor Bloomberg took office

... a bunch of statistical wonks !

But I agree with Governor Cuomo, as cited in that same report::

We agree with Governor Cuomo who said in his 2013 State of the State address:
"These arrests stigmatize, they criminalize, they create a permanent record.
It's not fair, it's not right, it must end, and it must end now."

On the other hand, Bloomberg's initiative "stop and frisk" initiative
has had other effects more beneficial to the community.

Staten Island live
Ken Paulsen
December 28, 2012

The murder rate -- 3.8 homicides per 100,000 population --
has dropped 19 percent compared to 2011,
and 35 percent since Bloomberg took office in 2002,
at a time when many observers felt that outgoing Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
helped push that rate as low as it could be.

[xoxoxoBruce]

It's easy to believe 2.5 hours per bust. First the cops usually work in pairs. Then those dangerous criminals have to be transported, booked, and housed until they can see the judge, all handled by cops.

And that doesn't even include the whippers, beaters, fingernail pullers, and gruel sloppers in the dungeons.

[glatt]

I thought it would be more than 2.5 hours. We toured our jail recently, and they made it sound like booking took a real long time.

[Lamplighter]

IMO, the intended message of that report-cover graph was that officer time was being wasted,
and made it too easy to assume marijuana possession cases were the only purpose.

There are other effects and implications to the "stop and frisk" initiative
... some positive and some negative.

The long term implications for someone found guilty of "possession"
are far out of proportion to the seriousness of their "crime".

At the same time, the"tan skin" profiling found up to now
in the "stop and frisk" has serious implications for civil rights.

[xoxoxoBruce]

That's not what the report says.

Members of the New York City Council and the New York State Legislature asked us to determine how many hours New York City police officers have spent making hundreds of thousands of lowest-level marijuana possession arrests. This is necessarily a range from lower to higher because the number of officers involved in a single arrest varies, and the time each
spends varies considerably.

Stop and frisk sometimes turns up pot, but this report is only concerned with the resulting bust, which would not have happened if they just sent the person on there way.