On its surface, the announcement will receive a great reception from marijuana and anti-stop & frisk advocates, as it could signify the end of a blight of phony excuses to toss young black and Hispanic males against walls for fun.  From the venerable tabloid, the New York Post:

The NYPD has killed the marijuana “buy-and-bust.”

The head of each borough’s narcotics unit was summoned to 1 Police Plaza last week and told, “The powers that be don’t want to see any more of these [pot] arrests,” sources said.

It seems wrong that they refer to “buy-and-bust,” the purchase of marijuana from a street dealer and subsequent arrest.  It would seem more likely that the Post just used the wrong language, because “buy-and-bust” sounds cooler and they aren’t going to let factual information stand in the way of cool words.

Nobody has argued that the NYPD should not arrest drug dealers.  On the other hand, arresting people on the street for non-criminal possession of marijuana (or marihuana as New York law calls it), based on the premise that when officers pull a nickel bag out of a kid’s pocket, it’s magically becomes “in public view” such that it becomes a misdemeanor rather than an infraction.  But that wouldn’t have anything to do with buy-and-bust, and everybody loves alliteration.

So time to throw a party?  Not quite yet.

The crime-fighting staple that often led to gun seizures and arrests on outstanding warrants was axed in a desperate attempt by the de Blasio administration to regain dwindling support from minorities, sources told The Post.

As was recently noted, the number of pot busts under de Blasio isn’t much different than under Bloomberg.  No boss, old boss, same, etc.  Apparently, that’s not making his constituency call for a statue in his honor.

Blacks and Hispanics have accounted for 86 percent of low-level pot busts this year, and the rate of minority drug arrests is on pace to potentially exceed the numbers under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

But advocates of ending stop & frisk and phony pot misdemeanors might argue that anything that ends the blight is a good thing, and indeed, the outcome is certainly welcome.  But that would be predicated upon a principled stance, that stop & frisk is a blatantly unconstitutional tactic, where police roust young black and Hispanic males for no reason, or create misdemeanors by removing concealed pot and claiming, by their own actions, it’s now on public display.  These things are wrong, and they’re wrong for solid legal reasons.

On the other hand, pandering to a constituency is a different rationale entirely.

De Blasio is under increased pressure from leaders in minority communities. He promised last year on the campaign trail to curb pot busts, saying they have “disastrous consequences’’ on minority suspects and their relations with police.

The problem isn’t that this shift will end, at least to some extent, the “disastrous consequences” of Bloomberg’s policies, but that enforcing (or not) laws based on currying favor with core constituencies is a double-edged sword.  While de Blasio may be under pressure to curry favor with minorities, the next mayor may be a Giuliani, desperately seeking to prove his “tough on crime” chops by arresting as many people disinclined to vote for him as possible.  Or perhaps someone whose constituency is female, for whom tough on males will play well at the voting both.

The problem here is that de Blasio’s statistics up to now haven’t reflected any principled difference in NYPD enforcement, as reflected in the fact that the number of pot arrests under his administration, with his new police chief in tow, will meet or exceed that of his predecessor. Only in the face of political pressure is he seeing the light, and then, if the Post is to be believed, with a similarly unprincipled approach that varies from doing too much wrong to too little right.

That stop & frisk, as an unconstitutional tactic, must end is beyond question.  But de Blasio needs to accomplish the end of unconstitutional police conduct because it’s wrong, not because he wants minority voters to like him.