Arresting Blacks for Marijuana in California: Possession Arrests in 25 Cities 2006-08 (part 1)

“It is long past time to end the failed war on drugs. Let us invest in people, not jails and prisons”
- Alice Huffman, President of NACCP of California

A recent report issued by the Drug Policy Alliance, and the California State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People under the umbrella organization titled the Marijuana Arrest Research Project, found a significant amount of data to support the claim that arrests and jail sentencing of minorities is greatly disproportionate to the arrest and incarceration of white defendants. Alice Huffman the president of the California branch of the NAACP uses a fitting quote by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King when he spoke against the United States involvement in the Vietnam War on April on 1967 “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere!” The report itself holds the state of California’s unequal enforcement of drug policies accountable; yet the gross inconsistency ends only at the Federal level.

California is a traditionally liberal state. In fact, the party Democrat has not lost the state during the Presidential Elections cycle since the 1988 campaign. Many California municipalities had decriminalized the possession of Cannabis as early as 1975; by 2010 the Governor of California had sign a bill decriminalizing all possession up to an ounce of marijuana. How is it that the state that embodies the humanity and progressive nature found within the United States, may also continue to brutally oppress its own citizenry in a methodical and racist manner?

The collective municipal police force(s) of California from 1990 to 2009 made over 850,000 arrests for possessing small amounts of marijuana. From 1991-2000 that was an average of 36,483.8 arrested citizens per year . In the new millennium the arrests rate for marijuana possession would nearly double from 1999-2008 averaging 50,748.3 arrests per year.

The irony of course rests squarely on the fact that two specific surveys conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services Office of Applied Studies from 2002 – 2007 highlight marijuana usage by White Americans as significantly higher than their Black and Latino American counterparts ages 12-25 <2002-2005> <2006 and 2007>.

There were twenty five specific cities noted in the report, containing roughly 10 million residents. Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, Fresno, and the other twenty one cities held nearly a quarter of California’s total population. Nearly a million of the cumulative cities population is African-American, roughly half of California’s black population.