'Just too high'

From its glamorization on TV to a major push toward its legalization in California next year, marijuana is enjoying the spotlight in pop culture. But in the shadows of that glow, African Americans using the oft-maligned weed are at far greater risk of arrest than their white counterparts, the Pasadena Weekly has learned.

For the past five years, Pasadena police officers have arrested African Americans on marijuana charges at rates wildly disproportionate to Pasadena’s demographics, according to a review by the Weekly of nearly four decades worth of arrest data.

Between 2004 and 2008, blacks accounted for more than half of all marijuana arrests — three times the number of whites and almost twice the number of Latinos — though blacks make up only 14 percent of the city’s population.

What’s more alarming is that African Americans were arrested on felony marijuana charges in Pasadena at far higher percentages than any other ethnic group, having been charged with more than half of all felony marijuana arrests since 2004, though nearly 90 percent of the marijuana-related offenses during that period were misdemeanors.

Perhaps even more perplexing is the scant difference in reported marijuana use rates between blacks, Latinos and whites, leading Pasadena’s African-American community leaders and drug policy reform advocates to ponder whether racial bias has worked its way into enforcement of marijuana laws here and across the nation.

The disparity seems even larger, considering that in 1980, whites accounted for 36 percent of Pasadena’s weed arrests, a figure that fell to roughly 15 percent in the past five years.

Pasadena is far from alone in this phenomenon. An equal disparity exists in marijuana arrests nationwide, where blacks make up about 30 percent of marijuana arrests but comprise less than 15 percent of the population.

Joe Brown, president of the NAACP Pasadena Branch, said he was in “disbelief” this disparity existed in a so-called progressive city where police officials have worked to improve relations between the department and minority communities over the past decade. “This leads me to believe that there may be a lot of targeting in African-American communities,” Brown said. “That’s just too high.”

The Weekly’s findings underscore growing concern over a startling surge in the number of marijuana arrests made here and nationwide within the past 15 years, given the growing acceptance of the drug in American culture — especially in California — and the continuing debate over the most effective use of police resources in minority communities struggling to escape years-long cycles of crime, violence and economic disadvantage.

Racist or baseless?
Pasadena Police Chief Bernard Melekian insists his 240 officers are not targeting minorities and refuted data suggesting as much.

“I personally don’t think it means very much at all, because marijuana enforcement is not one of our priorities,” said Melekian, who leaves his post in November for a position with the US Department of Justice. “Have we made a concerted effort to focus on any particular group? No. Our priority is and has been for more than a decade reducing violence.”

But the sheer volume of misdemeanor arrests, coupled with the fact that arrestees are black in more than half of marijuana cases, led Pasadena City Councilman Chris Holden to wonder what tactics police are using to catch so many more blacks possessing the herb. “The question is, how is it leading to arrest?” asked Holden, whose district includes the largely minority communities of Northwest Pasadena.

Academics and policy groups have wrestled with that same question since the disparity emerged following a series of studies earlier this decade.

“The single biggest contributor is the geographic decision about where law enforcement chooses to carry out the war on drugs,” said Ryan King, a Sentencing Project policy analyst who studied decades worth of marijuana arrest data for a landmark report in 2005.

Police patrols tend to focus on economically disadvantaged minority neighborhoods where crime is more likely to occur. Even if officers aren’t specifically hunting for someone with marijuana there, an increased number of police stops and searches in those neighborhoods can produce a racial disparity in who is being arrested for the drug, said Harry Levine, a sociology professor at Queen’s College in New York who has specialized in the nexus of society, drugs, policing and public policy for 20 years.

“What you have here is racism without the racists,” Levine said.

While short on explanations, Melekian did offer one theory: The department’s multi-year homicide and violence crackdown, Operation Safe City, may have had an impact as officers swarmed the city’s poorest and most crime-infested neighborhoods to root out gangs. “So it is entirely possible that more people were stopped and that marijuana was found on those folks,” Melekian said.

Matter of perception

Minorities in Pasadena have long believed that police are targeting them, and the data the Weekly uncovered only adds to those concerns, Brown said. “When we started looking at the data, it led us to believe that there is a certain amount of truth to this,” Brown said of the findings.

The specter of racial profiling has loomed over Pasadena police for years, despite recent inroads the department has made in minority communities. Ironically, it took a 2006 study juxtaposing officer and residents’ generally glowing opinions of Pasadena’s policing to show just how fractured perceptions of an acclaimed department can be when race is the tipping point. That study revealed that more than half of African Americans and 45 percent of Latinos believed Pasadena police engaged in racial profiling and stopped people without good reason.

Brown said the data only fuels those suspicions and will force talks between the community and police officials. “We’ve got to roll up our sleeves right now and go to work,” Brown said. “We’ve got problems, and we’ve got to speak to these problems.”

Melekian denies any race is being targeted and said his officers concentrate on cocaine, crack and heroin sales, not marijuana. Still, the chief said he couldn’t explain why marijuana arrests have skyrocketed under his 13-year tenure, much less the racial disparity those arrests produced. But he questioned whether the hundreds of medical marijuana dispensaries that have cropped up in recent years may be partly to blame.

When presented with the data, most departments deny the racial disparity is any of their doing, Levine said.

Marijuana mathematics

Crime in the Crown City has been on a precipitous slide in recent years, with violent crime falling nearly 20 percent and property crimes down 4 percent between 2007 and 2008, following a similar trend in California and the rest of the nation. In fact, murders in Pasadena dropped 75 percent between 1996 and 2008.

Yet marijuana arrests here have steadily and dramatically increased over most of that same time frame, reaching a zenith in 2007 with 707 arrests — a 300-percent increase since 1995 and the highest figure in the 33 years since the California Legislature made possession of less than an ounce a misdemeanor punishable by a fine, instead of a felony with requisite jail time.

Marijuana possession arrests in California have soared from 21,000 in 1990 to 61,000 in 2008, a population-adjusted leap of 127 percent, according to the San Francisco-based Center on Criminal and Juvenile Justice.

Melekian said he questioned the veracity of the California Attorney General’s Office’s statistics showing disproportionate numbers of arrests along racial lines. Before commenting further, the chief said he would have to conduct a further review of the statistics, which the Weekly immediately provided. Differences between the way the state and the FBI record and classify arrest data could produce irregularities, he said. However, Christine Gasparac, spokeswoman for the state Attorney General’s Office, insists the data — which the Pasadena Police Department provides to the state each year — is identical, since the state has long modeled its data collection after the FBI’s system specifically to prevent such irregularities.

Adding to the disparity is federally collected data showing only minute differences in marijuana use between Latino, black and white users in the 18-to-25 age group, who make up the majority of both marijuana users and arrests. In that age group, 19.6 percent of whites, 16.2 percent of blacks and 11.1 percent of Latinos reported using marijuana in the past 30 days, according to a 2004 Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration survey, which relies on data collected in 2002 and 2003. The 2008 survey of users 12 and older found that 8.3 percent of blacks, 6.2 percent of whites and 4.2 percent of Latinos reported using the drug in the past month — figures that still fail to account for the disparity.

The bigger problem

Councilman Holden believes the racial disparity in marijuana arrests is related to stark inequities in the demographics of California’s prison population, 70 percent of which consists of Latino and black inmates.

“Invariably, it seems to be leading to a path for some who end up in the criminal justice system and they can’t get out. That’s the problem and we need to figure out a way to fix it,” said Holden, suggesting the NAACP and similar civil rights groups would have to lead the charge.

However, the racial differences do not surprise Deputy Public Defender John Love, who supervises public defenders representing defendants in misdemeanor cases at the Pasadena courthouse. The disproportion in the prisons creates an equally skewed percentage of minority probationers and parolees on the streets and subject to random police searches as a condition of their release, fostering a vicious cycle that sends many back into the penal system, Love said.

In California, marijuana has penetrated society and achieved a level of acceptance and normality that is not true almost anywhere else in America, Levine said. But beneath that tolerant zeitgeist is an unseen world in which minorities suffer the consequences of marijuana use at inexcusably higher rates, Levine said.

“Unless people like you and me make noise and talk about who is getting arrested, nothing is going to happen,” Levine said.