Black people make up 12 percent of the population but 32 percent of marijuana arrests.
Tag: racial disparity
“The data thus suggest that, although overall search rates dropped in Washington and Colorado, black and Hispanic drivers still faced discrimination in search decisions.”
African Americans in the city of Buffalo (population 257,000) are disproportionately arrested for low-level marijuana possession offenses, according to an analysis of arrest data by the advocacy group Partnership for the Public Good. “[T]he disparities in the number of marijuana possession arrests cannot be explained by a higher use among black or Hispanic people,” authors concluded. “Legalizing marijuana would reduce low-level drug arrests by ten percent, and help reduce racial disparities in overall arrest numbers.”
African Americans in Virginia are arrested for violating marijuana possession laws at more than three times the rates of whites and this disparity is rising, according to an analysis of statewide arrest data by Virginia Commonwealth University’s Capital News Service. Researchers reviewed 160,000 state and local arrest records from the years 2010 through 2016. They found that blacks were 2.9 times as likely as whites to be arrested for possessing marijuana in 2010, but 3.2 times as likely to be arrested by 2016.
In an interview earlier this week with National Public Radio, US Attorney General Eric Holder…
[Editor’s note: This post is excerpted from this week’s forthcoming NORML weekly media advisory. To…
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, by most all accounts, is one of the most fascinating political characters…
In the New York Times today they of course attack the groups involved in bringing to the public’s attention the department’s overly aggressive and expensive enforcement of what are supposed to be decriminalized cannabis laws, and then make the amazing claim that there were not 350,000 cannabis-related arrests from 1997-2006, but a mere 8,770.