Report: 400,000 weed arrests...

Finally a report documenting what we've all known about for years: The absurd flood of weed cases, many of which are charged as misdemeanors rather than violations because the cops coaxed someone into giving up the joint rather than discovering it during a search.

What's the real problem with hundreds of thousands of people getting busted for weed? The fact that enforcement is racially disproportionate. As my dear friend Robin Steinberg, the executive director of Bronx Defenders, put it in Newsday...



'The real issue here is that massive numbers of police officers are being deployed in communities of color -- poor communities of color -- and are staying outside schools waiting for kids to walk home, to go to the bodega, to go to their friend's houses, and then searching them,' she said.

'Those same police forces are not being deployed on the Upper East Side of Manhattan waiting outside privileged, overwhelmingly white private schools to search their backpacks go through their children's pants.'"

As I've often said, if we policed the upper east side like we police the Bronx, there'd be a revolution in NYC inside of a month.