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Our @ACLU marijuana report was released today! One of the most important findings is that legalization alone is NOT enough. Here& #39;s a deep-dive into our recommended policing policy changes that must be implemented in order to end racially disparate police practices. /1
1. Police departments must end the enforcement of marijuana possession and distribution. Aggressive enforcement of low-level offenses, including MJ possession and distribution, funnels hundreds off thousands of people of color into the criminal legal system. /2
Therefore, law enforcement agencies must end enforcement of marijuana offenses as well as a range of other low-level offenses (EG "quality of life offenses") and work to address the underlying issues driving these offenses through non-punitive measures. /3
2. Police departments must end racial profiling. Police consistently stop, search, and arrest people of color without substantial evidence of wrongdoing, based on explicit and implicit biases. PD& #39;s must adopt model racial profiling policies that define racial profiling, /4
prohibit law enforcement from engaging in it, and make clear that it is unconstitutional under the fourth amendment. Courts and state legislatures should also raise the level of suspicion required to stop and detain a person. /5
3. PD& #39;s must end the practice of using raw numbers of stops, citations, summons, and arrests as a metric to measure productivity and effectiveness. These metrics do not properly measure public safety and health. The end result of this practice is over-policed communities /6
that are harmed by the routine presence and harassment of police; justified anger and frustration toward our criminal legal system; and a de-emphasis on true justice and healing, including restorative justice and trauma-informed responses to harms in communities. /7
Instead, police departments should rely on measurements such as community satisfaction with law enforcement; number of complaints filed against law enforcement; rate of racial disparities in arrests; and number of serious crimes solved. /8
4. PD& #39;s must develop systems for the routine collection of accurate data regarding a range of police practices. Police must collect stop, frisk, search, citation, and arrest data; make the aggregate data publicly available/easily accessible; create evaluation systems to analyze
data to identify and address racially biased and harmful practices and policies; and develop strategies and tactics that eliminate any form of racial disparities in enforcement practices. /10
5. Police departments must work with community members to develop, secure, and implement strong, independent, and effective oversight mechanisms for law enforcement. These oversight agencies should conduct regular audits and review of police departments policies and practices./11
6. Local governments should ban the use of consent searches through policies and legislation. Consent searches are often used to circumvent legal standards that require most searches to be based on probable cause. Additionally, the environment in which police seek consent is /12
inherently coercive and they are used overwhelmingly against people of color. As such, the use of consent searches must be completely eliminated. /13
8. State and local governments must invest in non-punitive programs and community-based services and dives from law enforcement. Since the 1980s, the amount of money spent on the criminal legal system has dramatically outpaced expenditures on community services /14
(EG housing, education, jobs, public health, and violence prevention programs) that help build stable, safe communities rather than furthering harm by relying on punitive interventions. Government officials must work with community members to limit the role of police /15
(particularly in communities of color) and redirect these funds to other services so jurisdictions can appropriately and adequately address economic, health, and social problems at their root in ways that strengthen rather than sabotage impacted communities. /16
