There is no lack of things to find abhorrent with New York City’s stop and frisk policy, which is on target to nail more than 700,000 people this year, having fallen just shy last year.  The program has police officers deciding that someone needs to be tossed, and so they stop ’em and do what needs to be done, whether it’s throwing them against a wall, or putting their face into the asphalt with a boot on their neck or just the old friendly surround ’em and make them empty their pockets.  All for fun.

The argument for it is that you find stuff this way, which only makes sense since it allows police to pluck any person off the street and see the things they couldn’t otherwise see. The thing Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says they really want to find is guns, but they don’t find too many.  Mayor Bloomberg says this proves it’s a great idea, since people don’t carry guns for fear of being rousted for nothing, just as it was argued that it’s a great idea when they find one and take it off the street.

The trick has always been to keep stop and frisk in neighborhoods where black and Hispanics live, because white folks would get really upset for being tossed without reason.  Black and Hispanic politicians know all about it, but keep their heads low so they get invited to white folks’ cocktail parties where party donors and political club brokers hang out. It’s a great system all around, provided you aren’t one of the 700,000 who get tossed.

Though they may not find many guns, they do tend to find a lot of people walking around with small, personal use quantities of pot.  This isn’t a crime in New York, until the police make them empty their pockets, at which point it the pot is publicly displayed and criminal.  It doesn’t make much sense logically or legally, but these low level busts go through the system so quickly and painlessly that nobody bothers with them, especially the judges who have the authority to dismiss them.  That would piss off the Mayor, District Attorney and Police Commissioner, and they wouldn’t get invited to the cocktail parties either. We elect judges in New York, you know.

But Governor Andrew Cuomo feels the pain.  From the New York Times :

The governor will call for the decriminalization of possession of small amounts of marijuana in public view, administration officials said. Advocates of such a change say the offense has ensnared tens of thousands of young black and Latino men who are stopped by the New York City police for other reasons but after being instructed to empty their pockets, find themselves charged with a crime.

Reducing the impact of the Bloomberg administration’s stop-and-frisk policy has been a top priority of lawmakers from minority neighborhoods, who have urged Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, to pay more attention to the needs of their communities. The lawmakers argue that young men found with small amounts of marijuana are being needlessly funneled into the criminal justice system and have difficulty finding jobs as a result.

The wording is careful, so if you missed it, here’s the important detail: Cuomo wants to “reduce the impact” of stop and frisk by decriminalizing possess of small amounts in “public view.”  This is going to really upset things in the City, as it accounts for about 50,684 arrests last year, which proves what a great job the cops are doing and how society was  saved from rapes and murders by law enforcement diligence.

But Cuomo is the governor, and he can throw his own cocktail parties.

That it never made any sense for judges at arraignment to entertain the charge of unlawful possession of marihuana (because we spell it different in New York) when the only reason a joint saw daylight is official compulsion doesn’t mean we don’t need a new law.  After all, if the judges won’t do anything to stop the wheels of justice from grinding, it’s appropriate for the other branches to step in and do their job for them. 

Yet, what will this do for the nearly 700,000 people forced up against the wall?  Impact is one problem. The fact that the New York City Police Department has openly and flagrantly chosen to ignore DeBour (that’s the New York flavor of Terry v. Ohio) doesn’t seem to trouble anyone, Cuomo included.

This presents problems all around, however. How will cops make their numbers?  What will cops do to push up their overtime hours before retirement?  How will courts keep busy enough to justify giving judges raises?  How will institutional defenders and 18b lawyers make a living?  What if it turns out there just isn’t that much crime to be had if the police played by the rules, and all these parts of the finely honed machine of the criminal justice system had to find something else to do?

But let’s not rush to ridiculous conclusions.  Though Governor Cuomo may throw a roadblock up in front of New York police, don’t underestimate their ability to come up with an alternative plan to keep the holding cells full and the wheels moving.  They’ve done it before. They did it again. They aren’t called New York’s Finest for nothing.

They’ll come up with some way to keep those numbers climbing. They always do.

Update:  Apparently, Bloomberg and Kelly have hopped aboard:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly both expressed support for Cuomo’s plan Monday.  Last September, Kelly issued a department-wide directive to stop arresting people for possessing small amounts of marijuana, unless the drug was displayed in plain view.  But arrest rates did not drop significantly, according to drug policy analysts.

Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement on Monday morning that Cuomo’s measure “strikes the right balance by ensuring that the NYPD will continue to have the tools it needs to maintain public safety — including making arrests for selling or smoking marijuana.”…

So the arrest rate continues, as does the pleasant scene of young men being thrown against the wall for a quick search, as the right balance has been struck.  There is now nothing to stop them from reaching 700,000 this year, How long before it’s one million New Yorkers per year under the “right balance”?