Section 5. Notification of Federal and State Officials.
(b) This letter shall state, "The City of Little Rock, Arkansas, has passed an ordinance to de-prioritize adult marijuana offenses, where the marijuana is intended for personal use, and requests that the governments of the United States of America and the State of Arkansas take immediate steps to enact similar laws.
That's an excerpt from a proposed ordinance, up for a vote on May 18, 2021, which deems marijuana for personal use to be the lowest priority for law enforcement. It sounds good, but with all policy, the implementation and enforcement is key. Just because the council has deemed it the lowest law enforcement priority doesn't mean it will get treated as such. Does low priority mean if it's a slow day we can look for some pot busts?
When Seattle's City Attorney Pete Holmes announced in his first term that he supported legalizing cannabis, he made his argument based on the practicalities and costs of enforcement and the benefits of regulation that would come with legalization. What the didn't talk about in his Seattle Times op-ed was the discriminatory nature of enforcement. It was 2012, after all: a year before the formation of Black Lives Matter as a response to the murder of Trayvon Martin.
Even with the decriminalization of marijuana use and possession in Seattle, the victims and victors of this decision are still separated by race. Most Washington State cannabis businesses are white-owned and operated. Most of those that still have criminal residue as a result of a marijuana charge are Black, and while marijuana arrests dropped for most demographics, the relative disparities in application of the law increased for Black residents from 2.5 times that of whites to 5 times that of whites.
Over and over, we see that when policy is implemented its impact is uneven, with negative consequences for communities of color. To try to combat that, more local governments are using a racial equity lens to evaluate potential policies. But this implies that the tool being used is impartial and can somehow bring equity; if you have a homogenous work group using this tool, how effective can it be?
Look at the make-up of local government, and government in general, and it has yet to catch up with the demographics of the nation. It's easier to check this out than it was in the past because we can access pictures of government officials and staff on the web. If the demographic that has made discriminatory policies in the past is the same one that develops and applies the racial equity lens to policy, will the results be different? I'm skeptical; I'll say it.
Evaluating policy means understanding past impacts of policies, and many of us are late to this education because the continuum of racism and discrimination is generally not well contextualized by secondary schools, and one has to actively seek this information out. (Again, thank you Black Twitter--a great place for those who want to learn. Read, listen, and learn! Don't argue, white people!)
Data tell us only part of the story, and data have to be scrutinized too. Who compiled it? What were the questions? What wasn't included? Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein is a good place to start if you want to know what to consider when looking at data. Coded Bias by Shalini Kantayya has your back if you prefer visual learning. This is part of why qualitative data collection can be a better method for understanding community needs and policy impacts. Numbers--quantitative data--can tell us part of the story, but again the collection, participants, and people interpreting the numbers are just a few of the trouble spots with quantitative data.
End Rant: Back to Little Rock's proposed ordinance.
While the legislation seems fairly toothless (see implementation rant), the annual letter clause gave me hope that the intent and ultimate goal is decriminalization of marijuana, and thereby reduce impacts of the criminal legal system on communities of color.
If you buy books:
Please buy them from Uncle Bobbie's. It was founded by Marc Lamont Hill in 2017. He is an author and commentator. Here's a link to his books. I have read and can recommend his books We Still Here and Nobody.
Recommended books related to this post:
Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michele Alexander
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
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