Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I), arrests in New York City for marijuana have skyrocketed. And while Bloomberg made clear during a radio interview Friday that he does not support legalization of marijuana, he is ready to soften his stance. Bloomberg announced during his State of the City address Thursday that, in the absence of a state law decriminalizing public marijuana possession, he will use his executive power to eliminate jail custody for those arrested for low-level marijuana possession:

Commissioner Kelly and I support Governor Cuomo’s proposal to make possession of small amounts of marijuana a violation, rather than a misdemeanor and we’ll work to help him pass it this year. But we won’t wait for that to happen.

Right now, those arrested for possessing small amounts of marijuana are often held in custody overnight. We’re changing that. Effective next month, anyone presenting an ID and clearing a warrant check will be released directly from the precinct with a desk appearance ticket to return to court. It’s consistent with the law, it’s the right thing to do and it will allow us to target police resources where they’re needed most.

In his statement, Bloomberg also joins Cuomo in supporting a stronger state decriminalization measure. Technically, New York decriminalized marijuana possession in 1977 when it reduced the penalty for possession of 25 grams or less of marijuana to a civil fine. But the punishment does not protect public possession of marijuana, which, according to CNN, includes when an individual is asked to empty his or her pockets during one of the more than half a million stop-and-frisks conducted by the New York Police Department. Cuomo’s proposal would decriminalize possession of less than 15 grams of marijuana even in public view.

Bloomberg’s measure would mitigate the immediate harm to people arrested for marijuana – many of whom never face subsequent charges — but it would not change the fact that those found guilty of public marijuana possession will have a misdemeanor on their record, rather than paying a civil fine.

New York is one of 14 states that have some marijuana decriminalization measure on the books – in addition to the 18 states and the District of Columbia that have legalized medical marijuana, and the two states that have legalized recreational marijuana. Arrests for marijuana possession and other minor drug offenses nonetheless remain frequent and disproportionately impact African Americans.

U.S. Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske, known for opposing legalization of even medical marijuana, joined with NAACP President Ben Jealous in an op-ed published yesterday that declares: “It is clear that we cannot simply arrest our way out of the drug problem. Instead, we need smarter, results-based criminal justice policies to keep our communities safe, including treatment for people with substance use disorders and mental health issues.”

Four senators, Jim Risch (R-ID), Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Ted Cruz (R-TX) previously suggested that any effort to prevent violence against women exceeds the federal government’s power under the Constitution. Earlier this week, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) joined their club of senators who think legislation reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act is unconstitutional:

Some Republicans have objected to new provisions in the law, including one allowing tribal courts for the first time to prosecute men who aren’t American Indians when they’re accused of abusing an American Indian woman on a reservation. . . .

[JOHNSON]: “the Senate has approved a piece of legislation that sounds nice, but which is fatally flawed. By including an unconstitutional expansion of tribal authority and introducing a bill before the Congressional Budget Office could review it to estimate its cost, Senate Democrats made it impossible for me to support a bill covering an issue I would like to address.”

In fairness to Johnson, his objection is much narrower than the one raised by senators like Paul and Cruz, and applies only the provision of the VAWA renewal that would permit tribal prosecutions against non-members of the prosecuting tribe. Nevertheless, Johnson is simply wrong about the Constitution.

It is true that the Supreme Court held back in the 1970s that tribal courts do not have criminal jurisdiction over non-Native Americans, but that decision concluded that “Indian tribes . . . give up their power to try non-Indian citizens of the United States except in a manner acceptable to Congress.” More recently, the Court’s 2004 decision in United States v. Lara recognized that Congress “does possess the constitutional power to lift the restrictions on the tribes’ criminal jurisdiction over nonmember Indians.” The reasoning of that decision would also apply to a law expanding tribal jurisdiction further to include non-Native Americans who engage in violence against women on reservations.

So Johnson is wrong about the Constitution, and his opposition to protecting Native American women is downright cruel. Eighty percent of Native American rape survivors were attacked by non-Indians, and a 2010 report by the General Accounting Office determined that federal prosecutors “declined to prosecute 46 percent of assault matters and 67 percent of sexual abuse and related matters.” As a result, many reservations are virtually law free zones for serial rapists who prey upon Native American women without consequence.

In the middle of the national debate on preventing gun violence, Republican lawmakers in Texas and Maine want gun classes added to public schools. Modeled after a National Rifle Association school program for children, similar proposals that claim to enhance “gun safety” have also popped up in South Carolina and Missouri.

According to the Texas bill sponsor, Rep. James White (R), kids are “resilient” enough to handle guns, which he says are no more dangerous than weightlifting or auto mechanics:

“Education, foremost, as stated in our Constitution, is about teaching our people their rights and responsibilities as a free people,” said White, who emphasizes that the most important component of the class would be teaching students the history and importance of the Second Amendment.

You could go to any high school today and you’ll see them engaging in many what we would consider probably dangerous activities: Welding, auto mechanic, weight lifting, playing sports. So our students are not these little fragile beings. They’re very knowledgeable, they’re very resilient and they can handle this.”

Meanwhile, a bill under consideration in Maine — which has drawn support from Gov. Paul LePage (R) — would add an optional gun safety course, potentially paid for by the NRA’s “Eddie Eagle Gunsafe Program.” The Maine bill sponsor Rep. Paul Davis (R) claimed this course would manage to prevent domestic violence, by giving would-be victims firearms training. “In these situations, these victims [of domestic violence-related slayings] did everything the law provided,” Davis said. “I have to wonder if they knew anything about guns. I don’t think they did. However, if they did and they wanted to protect themselves, what would have happened?”

Instead of offering NRA-sponsored classes at schools, the ultimate way to protect kids from gun violence is to simply not have a gun lying around. According to the Centers for Disease Control Prevention, over 86 percent of firearm deaths of children occur at home. Guns in households increase the risk of suicides and homicides, while anecdotal evidence shows how armed guards and armed teachers could go very wrong.

Friday afternoon, President Obama will speak on gun violence prevention in Chicago. Charles C.W. Cooke, writing for National Review, previews the conservative spin, arguing that because Chicago has a high murder rate and relatively strict gun laws, it “defies belief” that the President would defend gun regulations there.

But Cooke and the other conservatives who will invariably make this argument today are wrong. Chicago’s gun laws aren’t the cause of the recent uptick in violence, nor does it prove that gun regulations are ineffectual. If anything, it underscores the need for tighter federal laws.

Most significantly, it is important to understand that Chicago is not an island. Although Chicago has historically had strict gun laws, laws in the surrounding parts of Illinois were much laxer — enabling middlemen to supply the criminals in Chicago with guns they purchased elsewhere. Forty three percent of the guns seized by law enforcement in Chicago were originally purchased in other parts of Illinois. And even if the state had stricter gun laws, Illinois is not an island either. The remaining fifty seven percent of Chicago guns all came from out of state, most significantly from nearby Indiana and distant Mississippi — neither of which are known for their strict gun laws.

It’s also important to put Chicago’s very recent increase in gun violence in perspective. Data from the University of Chicago Crime Lab’s Harold Pollack shows that this uptick, while certainly worrying, isn’t anything like a return to the historic peaks during America’s crime wave. Pollack notes that “Chicago ranks 79th on Neighborhood Scout’s list of the 100 most dangerous places to live in America…the idea that Chicago faces a unique or unprecedented rise in homicides is incorrect. Our problems are all too familiar and chronic throughout much of urban America.” Chicago, following the national trend, has experienced a significant downturn in homicides in the past decade and a half:

Chicago had an outright ban on handguns from 1982 until 2010, when the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. So there’s no reason to believe that strict regulations on gun ownership were responsible for a spike in gun homicides in 2012, two years after Chicago was forced to loosen its gun laws. Moreover, there’s simply no credible evidence that wider gun ownership or looser gun laws reduce crime.

So why did Chicago’s homicide rate increase in 2012? Pollack says “there’s no simple answer.” But he points to three factors are particularly important: escalating gang conflict as a consequence of police crackdowns and shifting gang territory, outdated law enforcement practices, and — yes — access to guns.

According to Pollack, access to guns significantly increase the risk that a conflict between two gang members escalates to homicide, as weapons designed to kill people (shockingly) make it easier to kill people. Chicago’s streets are flooded with guns: it has roughly six times as many guns as New York City per capita, despite its restrictive laws. So if gang conflict escalates, and the gangs have easy access to guns, the homicide rate should rise. This explanation fits with the fact that 87 percent of Chicago homicides in 2012 were gun-related. New York, by contrast, did not experience a surge in homicides in 2012.
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As leaders in some localities, like Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Arizona are trying to make undocumented immigrants’ lives as inhospitable and miserable as possible, the city of Dayton, Ohio is trying to aid those immigrants if they become victims of crime.

This week, the Dayton City Commission approved $30,000 in funding to reach out to undocumented immigrants when they fall prey to crime. Because of their legal status, many migrants are understandably afraid to involve law enforcement if a crime is committed against them.

The Dayton Daily News has more:

“If individuals are undocumented, there is a significant deterrent for them potentially to report crime,” Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl said. “As I’ve said many, many times, if you want crime to grow in a community, just have people too afraid to report it.”

Federal law provides “U-Visa” status for some undocumented immigrants who are victims of crime. If the victim helps law enforcement authorities investigate and prosecute the offender, they can apply for a U-Visa, which grants four years of lawful immigration status, plus the ability to apply for permanent residency. [...]

“We had an individual about a year or so ago brutally beaten and literally left for dead, who was undocumented,” Biehl said. “The reason this was reported is … the person literally had to crawl to the door of a house to call for help.”

U visas were created in the 2000 re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act. However, not enough has been done to assuage immigrants’ fears and make them comfortable enough to report crimes. Between 2000 and early 2011, just 18,654 crime victims came forward and received U visas, a fraction of the crimes committed against the 14 million undocumented immigrants currently in the country. Federal law currently caps the number of U visas that can be issued annually at 10,000, but that limit has been debated in the current Violence Against Women Act re-authorization push. This week, the Senate voted to re-authorize the law, but it continues to face roadblocks in the Republican-led House.

The city of Dayton, led by Republican Mayor Gary Leitzell, has built a strong reputation in the past couple years as welcoming to immigrants, particularly those fleeing states with harsh new anti-immigrant laws. Immigrants, Leitzell said, bring “new ideas, new perspectives and new talent to our workforce. … To reverse the decades-long trend of economic decline in this city, we need to think globally.”

Florida has long been notorious for its particularly zealous system of criminalizing student discipline known as the school-to-prison pipeline. In 2005, the state made more than 28,000 student arrests, thanks to a “zero tolerance” policy. Seven years later, even as the state has halved that figure to 14,000 arrests in 2012, police intervention in student discipline remains alarmingly common in particular regions, with arrests occurring most frequently for behavior that includes “trespassing” on school property when a student was purportedly suspended, petty school-yard fights, and classroom violations like refusing to take a cell phone out of a pocket. What’s more, Florida still arrests more students than any other state. An extensive new report from the Orlando Sentinel explains:

“The vast majority of children being arrested in schools are not committing criminal acts,” [Florida Department of Juvenile Justice Secretary Wansley] Walters told the Orlando Sentinel.

Sixty-seven percent of the arrests last year were for misdemeanors such as disorderly conduct — a catchall, attorneys say, that has been used when children refused to take a cellphone out of a pocket or yelled in class. Fewer than 5 percent faced weapons charges.

Most arrests, Walters says, stem from “bad behavior, not criminal behavior.” […]

An Orange high-school senior, for example, was arrested last spring because, during a suspension for insubordination, she returned to campus to take her final exams, said Olga Telleria-Khoudmi, juvenile-division chief for the Orange/Osceola Public Defender’s Office.

These arrests are now concentrated in Central Florida, where nearly all public and middle schools and some elementary schools have police officers on site, and “schools are turning to police to handle misbehavior that guidance counselors and psychologists don’t have time to address,” according to the Sentinel. This raises serious concerns about the push to place more officers in schools in the wake of the Newtown, Ct. mass shooting, as putting more armed guards in schools has already been linked to an uptick in arrests. Miami-Dade County, by contrast, has had substantial success in curbing these arrests by turning instead to an extensive network of social services and using civil citations in place of criminal charges.

As in all regions where these arrests are common, they disproportionately affect minority students, particularly black and disabled students, branding youth with criminal records and diverting kids out of school and into to the criminal justice system. In Florida, 47 percent of arrests are of black students, even though they make up only 23 percent of the state’s population; 29 percent of arrests were of disabled students, even though they make up just 13 percent of the state population.

This phenomenon is not isolated to Florida. Some of the most egregious incidents of criminalizing student behavior have occurred in Mississippi, where students at one school were regularly handcuffed to a rail in a school gymnasium for not wearing a belt, and a peanut-throwing fight on a school bus resulted in the arrest of five students for felony assault, which carries a minimum five years in prison. But the problem is nationwide, and does not bode well for the future U.S. incarceration rate, which currently eclipses that of any other country in the world.

The National Rifle Association has held firm in its opposition to all gun regulation being considered in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. As the public overwhelmingly supports measures like universal background checks and bans on high capacity magazines, the NRA is trying to convince Americans they are up against a lawless future full of criminals who want to kill respectable, middle-class people. On Thursday, the NRA released a new ad arguing that banning high capacity magazines would leave families unarmed against hoardes of “madmen, drug cartels, and home-invading killers.”

The ad intones:

So, they want to ban high capacity magazines. Not for the security that surrounds the President, Congress, Mayor Bloomberg, rock stars, CEOs and wealthy bigshots. And the madmen, drug cartels and home-invading killers will still get them from the same black market that sells drugs, stolen cars, and everything else that criminals buy. It’s just the rest of us, the law-abiding average people who will have to defend our families with limited capacity magazines. Welcome to Barack Obama’s middle class.

Watch it:

The ad builds on the same apocalyptic narrative in NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s Daily Caller op-ed on Wednesday. The op-ed warned that “Latin American drug gangs have invaded every city of significant size” and “foreign terrorists” were planning to invade the country via Mexico. The new ad’s dig at security guards for high-profile politicians and celebrities also echoes the NRA’s widely criticized video blasting Obama for giving his children Secret Service guards.

Thus far, the NRA’s fearmongering has only alienated the public — the gun lobby’s approval rating sunk 10 points after LaPierre’s paranoid press conference a week after Sandy Hook, in which he blamed gun violence on media glorification and called for more guns in schools. Meanwhile, 59 percent of Americans favor a ban on high-capacity ammunition clips like the ones used by Tucson shooter Jared Loughner, Aurora theater gunman James Holmes, and Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza.