Arresting Blacks for Marijuana in California: Possession Arrests in 25 Cities 2006-08 (part 4)

[note: the following is direct from the report]




Police departments deploy most patrol and narcotics police to certain neighborhoods, usually designated "high crime." These are sproportionately low-income, and disproportionately African American and Latino. It is in these neighborhoods where the police make most patrols, and where they stop and search the most vehicles and individuals, looking or "contraband" of any type in order to make an arrest. The item that people in any neighborhood are most likely to possess, which can get them arrested, is a small amount of marijuana. In short, the arrests are ethnically- and racially-biased mainly because the police are systematically "fishing" for arrests in only some neighborhoods, and methodically searching only some "fish." 6 This produces what has been termed "racism without racists."

In California, most people arrested for marijuana possession have been charged with violating section 11357 of the California Health and Safety Code, because they possessed less than an ounce of marijuana, typically much less. This is legally a crime and produces a criminal record or "rap sheet." Most people found by the police possessing small amounts of marijuana were given a court summons requiring them to appear before a judge at a specified date and time.

For those who failed to appear, the court issued an arrest warrant. When they were next stopped by the police for any reason, including a routine traffic stop, their names were searched in the criminal databases. When the "failure to appear" warrant showed up, they were handcuffed, arrested and jailed. When people with a summons appeared in court at the required date and time, they went before a judge. If they plead guilty – which happened in the vast majority of cases – they were ordered to pay a fine up to $100, plus court costs as high as $360.8 People unable to pay may have been given time to raise the money, but if they could not pay they were usually arrested, handcuffed, and jailed. In the low-income and heavily black and Latino district of Central Los Angeles, for example, people given a court appearance summons were ordered to appear at the Central Arraignment Court on Bauchet Street. The defendants often did not realize that they had been charged with a crime because the summons looks like a traffic ticket. They appeared before a judge who told them they had been charged with a misdemeanor, and that if they plead guilty they would be fined up to $100. The judges routinely recommended defendants waive their right to a trial. The vast majority of defendants wanted to be released and put this experience behind them. They accepted the judge’s recommendation and plead guilty. Most people found the money to pay the fine and court costs and gave it little thought until they applied for a job, apartment, student loan or school and were turned down because a criminal background check revealed that they had been convicted of a “drug crime.”

Twenty years ago, misdemeanor arrest and conviction records were papers kept in court storerooms and warehouses, often impossible to locate. Ten years ago they were computerized. Now they are instantly searchable on the Internet for $20 to $40 through commercial criminal-record database services. Employers, landlords, credit agencies, licensing boards for nurses and beauticians, schools, and banks now routinely search these databases for background checks on applicants. The stigma of a criminal record has created huge barriers to employment and education for hundreds of thousands of people in California.

At some arraignment courts, people are played a video tape that introduces the arraignment process and says they can have their conviction record "expunged.” Those who return to court to do so learn they have to file their own expungement petition with a $120 filing fee. Unless they speak to an attorney, most people are not told that, contrary to popular belief, an expungement does not erase a criminal record – it merely changes the finding of “guilty” to a “dismissal.” The criminal record simply states that the case was dismissed after conviction. So, although people can legally say that they have not been convicted of a crime, they still have a “rap sheet," and a simple background check will show they were arrested and convicted.

A criminal record lasts a lifetime. The explosive growth of criminal record databases, and the ease with which those databases can be accessed on the Internet, creates barriers to employment, housing and education for anyone simply arrested for drug possession. As a result, an arrest in California has serious consequences for anyone, including white, middle class, and especially young people. For young, low-income blacks and Latinos – who use marijuana less than young whites, and who already face numerous barriers and hurdles – a criminal record for the "drug crime" of marijuana possession can seriously harm their life chances. Some officials, such as U.S. Representatives Steve Cohen and Sheila Jackson Lee, have termed the stigmatizing effect of criminal records for marijuana possession a modern "scarlet letter." 10 These marijuana possession arrests, which target young, lowincome Californians, serve as a "head start" program for a lifetime of unemployment and poverty.

As this report was going to press in October 2010, California reduced the legal status of a marijuana possession arrest from a misdemeanor to an infraction, which is also a crime. This change will go into effect in 2011 and we have addressed some of what this means in a brief