The New York Police Department, which has been arresting tens of thousands of people a year for low-level marijuana possession, is poised to stop making such arrests and to issue tickets instead, according to law enforcement officials.
People found with small amounts of marijuana would be issued court summonses and be allowed to continue on their way without being handcuffed and taken to station houses for fingerprinting
In New York, the debate over marijuana arrests has been less about drug decriminalization than it has been about the aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics that came to define the Police Department’s crime-fighting strategies. During the Bloomberg administration, the police arrested as many as 50,000 people a year on minor marijuana charges, meaning that some years, approximately one in eight arrests made by the police was for marijuana. In some cases, arrests were made after officers stopped people under dubious circumstances and instructed them to remove any contraband from their pockets.
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