A WNYC analysis of police data shows blacks and Hispanics still make up the majority of those arrested for marijuana possession, even in precincts that are mostly populated by whites and other racial groups.
Len Rodberg, a retired Queens College professor, said he wasn't surprised because the data mirrored a similar study last year commissioned by the Drug Policy Alliance.
"There are neighborhoods where the black or Hispanic population is 10 or 20 percent but they are 80 to 90 percent of the arrests," he said.
Rodberg runs the Infoshare website, which analyzes U.S. Census data by precinct. His organization provided data for the Drug Policy Alliance study in 2017 and for WNYC this month.
"There's a lot of variation from precinct to precinct which probably has to do with the personnel and how they run that precinct," Rodberg said. He added, there "doesn't seem to be a department-wide or citywide policy," to reduce the disparities and the number of arrests for marijuana possession.
Low-level marijuana arrests by the NYPD for possession and smoking in 2017 remained at around 17,000 citywide, and about 86 percent of those arrested were black or Hispanic.
Police insist their arrests are driven by complaints to 311 and 911, despite great skepticism.
In the West Village's 6th precinct, almost 70 percent of those arrested in 2017 were black or Hispanic, even though they make up less than 10 percent of the population combined. In Forest Hills, the two people arrested were black and Hispanic. Together those groups comprise just under 20 percent of the precinct's population, according to Infoshare.
We found arrests could spike or decline precipitously from one year to the next depending on the precinct, regardless of racial composition. In the Upper East Side's 19th precinct, there were only 15 arrests for pot possession in 2016 but 63 in 2017.
In 2016, 7 of the 15 people arrested in the 19th precinct were white and in 2017, police data showed 22 were white.
Across town, in West Harlem's 30th precinct, 677 people were arrested in 2016 for possessing or smoking pot. But only 90 were arrested in 2017. Likewise, in Harlem North (32nd precinct), there were 646 arrests in 2016 compared to 292 in 2017.
But in Brooklyn's 70th precinct, which includes Kensington, police arrested 427 people in 2017 — more than double the total in 2016.
So far there's been no reply from the NYPD about the 2017 figures.
Critics have used marijuana arrest data to call for legalizing the drug, an issue that is now emerging in this year's Democratic primary for governor. When presented with the latest analysis, the Drug Policy Alliance's New York's deputy state director Melissa Moore said, "It's clear that police enforcement targets people of color, especially Black and Latinx people, everywhere in New York City."
"The systemic nature of the problem is clear when reviewing data showing that even in predominantly white neighborhoods enforcement is targeted at people of color," she added.
With analysis by WNYC Data News intern Huilan Zhan