Seattle Police issued 85 tickets for public marijuana use in the second half of 2014 — but only two in the East Precinct including Capitol Hill and the Central District. Meanwhile, males and blacks were disproportionately cited for public pot violations.
The statistics were discussed in a Monday morning City Council briefing with Chief Kathleen O’Toole as the department continues to study the public safety impact from I-502’s legalization of retail marijuana. The trends match the first half of 2014 when it was revealed that one downtown bicycle officer had written nearly 80% of Seattle’s pot citations.
The numbers area also important for advocates seeking to create new venues for people to consume marijuana. CHS has reported on the renter’s paradox under I-502 in which apartment dwellers may have nowhere to go to smoke pot due to lease restrictions.
Of the 85 tickets issued from July through December 2014, only two were handed out in the East Precinct — 94% of Seattle’s citations were handed out downtown.
The citation totals do not, however, include SPD traffic stops and contacts for suspected marijuana use. An SPD dispatch dataset shows five different marijuana related incidents handled in the East Precinct in the past week, each of them in the Pike/Pine core or near Cal Anderson, three initiated by a “suspicious stop” by the officer. None of the five, by the way, resulted in a citation.
Here are the other breakdowns for the 2014 dataset including the racial component showing 27% of citations were issued to African Americans.
The dataset also reveals one additional aspect of enforcing public marijuana consumption laws — only 9.4% of the 2014 tickets have been paid.
So what this tells me is:
1) I’ve chased away far more pot smokers in Cal Anderson Park who are puffing near the playground than the police; and
2) SPD is missing a HUGE money making opportunity.
I’d much have people smoking pot in Cal Anderson than people shooting up drugs and relieving themselves everywhere.
I’m glad to see East Precinct numbers low. We’ve got bigger issues to tackle then people smoking pot on the street.
Do we have statistics of what % of pot smokers are male/female, and black/white? Where are those? You also need to factor in WHERE the citation was written and what’s the makeup of the people around there.
I have no idea about black vs. white, but I’d be willing to bet a way higher % of pot smokers are men than women. If you don’t factor demographics and location into it, making a statement like “males and blacks were disproportionately cited” is pretty baseless.
I agree. It’s sometimes too easy to jump on the “disproportionality” bandwagon. I’m not so sure that a greater percentage of black people smoke pot, but I think there are probably a greater percentage of blacks hanging out in the downtown areas where the tickets were written, such as Victor Steinbruck Park, and that would explain the increased number of citations for blacks.
Even with legalization, African Americans are targeted well out of proportion. I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise.
Maybe I’m being daft here.. but not sure how African Americans are being targeted out of proportion? With 66% of citations going to white people.. There simply isn’t enough data to come to that conclusion, because you would need to know your starting base, which is all people that smoke pot. What % of them are white vs black vs hispanic, then you could look at this and come to some sort of conculsion on race driving the proportion of citations.
About 5% of Seattle’s population is African American, give or take. Drug use is no more prevalent among blacks than among whites. There have been many reports on this, google it.
This still proves nothing. You’d be assuming everyone smokes in the same proportion to their population, and that the makeup of every crowd in spots of the city where people might congregate and smoke pot in public also mirrors that breakdown. That’s not true either. It’s just a baseless statement.
This was the second result on a google search for “prevalence marijuana race.” Happy reading!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377408/
I believe the figure for blacks in Seattle is more like 8%.
The police have few tools to clear Cal Anderson Park of the meth and heroin addicted youth that use the park as their summer camp, garbage dump and toilet. I don’t understand why we as a neighborhood put up with this crap in our Central Park. It is not like this most places. I wish the police would use this law which is already on the books as a tool for addressing a large and growing public health and safety issue. Since the travellers are mostly spoiled white kids from the suburbs, it will help there stats. Maybe a little less tolerance for camping and doing drugs in the park all summer would encourage some of them to go back to live in mommy and daddy’s basement. The police don’t enforce the law because they know we will crucify them for it. Seattle is tolerant of the west coast traveller/gutter punk/hobo culture to a point of absurdity.
I see way more black youth smoking weed in public than I do white kids, especially downtown. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that is why they are disproportionately represented compared to their makeup of the total population.