New York Police Department officers have spent 1 million hours making 440,000 marijuana arrests between 2002 and 2012, according to a new report from the Drug Policy Alliance. DPA put together the data in response to a request from New York City and New York State, as they consider measures to decriminalize marijuana. Each of these arrests can cost $1,000 to $2,000, according to a 2011 DPA estimate, costing New York City $75 million in just a single year (2010). The report explains:

In our ongoing research about marijuana possession arrests in New York, we have found that a basic misdemeanor arrest for marijuana possession in New York City varied from a minimum of two or three hours for one officer, to four or five hours or even longer for multiple officers. [...]

We multiplied 2.5 hours by the number of lowest‐level marijuana possession arrests (charged under NYS Penal Law 221.10) for each year since 2002 when Mayor Bloomberg took office. […] That is the equivalent of having 31 police officers working eight hours a day, 365 days a year, for 11 years, making only marijuana possession arrests. [...]

Two officers for five hours equals four million hours of police time. This does not include the time spent by police supervisors or by corrections, court, and prosecutor staff, nor the time officers spent searching for people to arrest.

This is not the only area in which New York City police officers have been particularly aggressive. This week, a federal court is hearing a class action challenge to the rampant stop-and-frisks that yielded more NYPD stops in 2011 of young black males than their total population in the city. But the numbers make a compelling case that focusing on marijuana crackdowns detracts both money and resources from addressing serious and violent crime. An 2007 law review article on New York’s marijuana arrests concluded:

We find no good evidence that the MPV [marijuana in public view] arrests are associated with reductions in serious violent or property crimes in the city. As a result New York City’s marijuana policing strategy seems likely to simply divert scarce police resources away from more effective approaches that research suggests is capable of reducing real crime”….

This policing strategy focused on misdemeanor [marijuana in public view] arrests is having exactly the wrong effect on serious crime – increasing it, rather than decreasing it …

While New York State decriminalized some marijuana possession in 1977, it did not lower the penalty for the so-called MPV arrests described above. Once a suspect is asked to empty his pockets during one of the millions of NYPD stop-and-frisks, marijuana is considered in “public view” and individuals can be arrested. Reports suggest that the New York State legislature could expand decriminalization to cover MPVs in New York City as early as this week. This would make possession of small amounts of marijuana a civil rather than a criminal infraction. Bloomberg has already eliminated overnight jail custody for those arrested.

Plymouth County, MA Sheriff Joe McDonald (R)

A day after ThinkProgress and others reported that Joseph D. McDonald, Jr. (R), Sheriff of Plymouth County, Massachusetts, told a “joke” at a Republican St. Patrick’s Day breakfast suggesting the nation would be better off if President Obama were assassinated, McDonald stood by his joke and compared his critics to Nazis.

Though McDonald’s office still has not responded to a request for comment from ThinkProgress, the Plymouth Patch reported Tuesday that Sheriff McDonald defended the “joke” as more than 150 years old and repeated it in its entirety. According to the story, McDonald attempted to spin himself as the victim of Nazi-like tactics: “The irony of it is, it’s perfectly OK for them [liberals] to make those jokes about President Bush or someone from the other side of the aisle. I can imagine what some of this place comes from not 2013 United States, it’s more like Nazi Germany in 1938.”

The report also notes:

“The joke I told was like The Christmas Carol story,” McDonald said Tuesday afternoon.”And I want to preface it by saying it’s something akin to a joke I’ve heard liberals tell.”

He said people have made death threats on his Facebook page and have called the joke treasonous. He called people who have complained about the joke and demanded that he resign “hypocrites.” …

McDonald defended the joke and called complaints about it were ironic. “The basic concept of it has been around since the Andrew Johnson administration,” he said. “The radical Republicans wanted him to take a much harder line on Reconstruction of the South, and the joke was that Johnson should have gone to the theater instead of Lincoln.”

McDonald’s defense of his comments — and his attacks on anyone who dared speak out against them — ignores the fact that as a public safety official who has taken an oath of office, he is held to a higher standard that some unnamed liberals or political activists of the 1860s.

As ThinkProgress explained this morning, the question of how supporters of equality win the Supreme Court case against the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act is almost as important as the question of if they win. The same applies to a companion case that will be argued next Tuesday challenging California’s Proposition 8, Hollingsworth v. Perry. Here are four different ways that the justices could eliminate this anti-gay ballot initiative, ranked from most to least desirable:

• Marriage Equality For All: The Constitution says that “[n]o State” may “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” That means all fifty states. So the correct way for the Supreme Court to decide Perry is to announce that marriage discrimination against same-sex couples is not allowed in the United States. Period.
• Marriage Equality For Some Now, Marriage Equality For All Later: Although the law is clear that anti-gay discrimination is unconstitutional, it is far from certain that there are five justices prepared to bring Alabama into compliance with the Constitution, even if they are ready to restore marriage equality in California. To thread this needle, the Ninth Circuit offered a one-state solution that abolishes Prop 8 but does little to advance gay rights elsewhere. The Obama Administration proposed what now amounts to a nine-state solution, upgrading states with civil unions into full marriage equality states but leaving until another day states like Alabama. Ultimately, however, the most important question is not how may states are directly impacted by the Court’s decision in Perry, but whether the justices use the magic words “heightened scrutiny.” If they hold that anti-gay laws are subject to such scrutiny, it would mean that all discrimination against gay people will be treated with great skepticism by the judiciary — including any state law permitting marriage discrimination.
• A Good-For-This-Ride-Only Opinion: As we explained this morning, Justice Kennedy wrote two of the most important gay rights decisions in the Supreme Court’s history, but he wrote both of them very narrowly. It is possible that he will want to do the same in the Prop 8 case, striking down California’s anti-gay ballot measure without doing much else to advance the cause of marriage equality. Indeed, this is more or less the approach that the Ninth Circuit took in its opinion.
• The Jurisdiction Dodge: As with the DOMA case, the Prop 8 case presents a somewhat unusual jurisdictional issue — whether any court has the authority to hear an appeal to the trial court’s decision striking down Prop 8. Judge Vaughn Walker, the trial judge in this case, issued a very broadly worded injunction: “Defendants in their official capacities, and all persons under the control or supervision of defendants, are permanently enjoined from applying or enforcing” Proposition 8. Thus, if this injunction remains in effect, even because no court can claim the authority to narrow or vacate it, California will likely become a marriage equality state once more. The problem, as Marty Lederman points out, is that it is not entirely clear that Walker had the authority as a district judge to issue such a sweeping injunction. For this reason, in addition to the fact that it is better to achieve marriage equality on the merits than on a procedural technicality, a decision kicking the case on jurisdictional grounds is not a very desirable outcome.

Self-proclaimed troll Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer was sentenced to 41 months in prison and three years of supervised release yesterday for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) by accessing data left publicly available online by AT&T — the high end of the range called for by federal sentencing guidelines in his case. In 2010 Auernheimer and a colleague discovered a major security flaw in the system AT&T used to track iPad owners: There was no security — in fact, anyone with a web browser could have accessed the data because it was published on the the open web.  Auernheimer shared information on the exploit with Gawker after the flaw was fixed — resulting in the exposure of AT&T’s inability to protect customer data and CFAA charges against Auernheimer.

Auernheimer’s situation has not gotten the same level of attention as other high profile CFAA cases like Aaron Swartz or Reuters’ Matthew Keys, no doubt at least partially due to the wildly unsympathetic defendant: His history of aggressive trolling is so disgusting even reddit couldn’t sympathize with him and he has also been arrested on drug charges. But the details of his case represent one of the best examples of how current computer crime law fails to address how the internet actually works. For instance, the “unauthorized access” to AT&T’s network Auernheimer was convicted of is essentially the same web crawling process used by search giants to map the internet, according to experts who spoke with Fox Business at the time of Auernheimer’s conviction:

Web crawlers … are automatic indexers which search through content on a website and index the information for easy access in search engines. This is a regular part of the Internet that is essential to the functionality of websites such as Google and Yahoo … Most commentators believe that if data is revealed to un-authorized users who use the above technique, then the responsibility is on the data owner to secure that information behind a password or some other authentication mechanism. If [these individuals] can be arrested for adjusting a URL in a numerical sequence, then to what degree can other users be arrested for entering any URL?

Swartz allegedly circumvented access protocols to download JSTOR documents by changing his MAC address. Keys allegedly gave his old credentials to hackers with a blessing to “go fuck some shit up.” Yet, as AT&T confirmed in their testimony during his court case, Auernheimer didn’t crack any code or passwords. He just did the same thing many network security researchers do every day: Snoop around for security flaws, and expose them. Auernheimer certainly did not follow industry best practices — like informing AT&T — but he also didn’t use the information for evil, unless you count making consumers aware of the insecurity of their data as evil. Some might even call that a public service announcement: As Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Attorney Marcia Hoffman noted, Auernheimer “is facing more than three years in prison because he pointed out that a company failed to protect its users’ data, even though his actions didn’t harm anyone.”

Make no mistake, laws are needed to govern cyberspace. There are dangerous and criminal activities being committed online — maybe some of Auernheimer’s past behavior included — but the AT&T “hacking” wasn’t one such situation. It’s very unlikely that if someone more reputable discovered the same exploit and disclosed it in a more responsible manner, the situation would have resulted in the same criminal case. Indeed, the same technical practice, web crawling, is deployed by large corporations as part of their regular business practices. That alone shows something is majorly amiss in computer crime laws.

People across the ideological spectrum are agitated over this Philadelphia Magazine article by Robert Huber entitled , “Being White in Philly: Whites, race, class, and the things that never get said.”  The article centers on anonymous interviews with white people describing their “honest” views about race, often not stated publicly according to the author.  Huber describes the genesis of his article as follows:

A few months ago I began spending time in Fairmount, just north of the Art Museum. Formerly a working-class enclave of row homes, it’s now a gentrifying neighborhood with middle-class cachet and good restaurants. I went to the northern edge, close to Girard Avenue, generally considered the dividing line from North Philly, and began asking the mostly middle-class white people who live there, for whom race is an everyday issue, how it affects them.

As you might expect, Huber gets a raft of inflammatory and outright racist comments from people such as Anna, “a tall, slim, dark-haired beauty from Moscow getting out of her BMW”:

‘”I’ve been here for two years, I’m almost done,” she says. “Blacks use skin color as an excuse. Discrimination is an excuse, instead of moving forward. … It’s a shame—you pay taxes, they’re not doing anything except sitting on porches smoking pot … Why do you support them when they won’t work, just make babies and smoking pot? I walk to work in Center City, black guys make compliments, ‘Hey beautiful. Hey sweetie.’ White people look but don’t make comments. … ”

But  he also elicits seemingly more thoughtful (if self-absorbed) responses from a young white mother named Jen who has recently enrolled one of her own children in a public school near her home that is 74 percent African American.   Trying to ascertain why more white parents don’t opt for the predominately black school, Huber describes:

Another mother told Jen: “I didn’t want to be the first”—in other words, the first to make the leap to Bache-Martin. “It takes a special person to be first.” Another told her: “Not everybody is as confident as you.”

Sipping tea in Mugshots on Fairmount Avenue, Jen rolls her eyes over the nut of the problem: Unfounded fear. Groupthink. A judgment on a school without even setting foot in it. “I wouldn’t like to imply that it’s about anything else,” Jen says, but of course it is: race.

Another younger white man named Paul who recently fell on hard economic times also offers some hints of possible cross-racial understanding based on shared experiences (again somewhat devoid of the context of other people’s lives).  After being approached by a 12-year old black boy to possibly buy Oxycontin, Paul tells Huber about the event:

“I got laid off in October ’08 and was out of work for six months. I had to find money—it gave me a different perspective. And it seemed this kid was just trying to make money. He was just trying to get by. I come from a different world—I don’t think I’ll ever have to sell drugs. I did have to beg for a job as a waiter at 25—that’s as low as it would go for me.”

A man of perspective, Paul, a very evenhanded guy. But that night, something dawns on me: Confronted with a drug dealer in his new neighborhood, Paul understood that the guy had to find a way to get by. That he was struggling. That he had made an economic decision. But the “guy” who wanted to sell Oxycontin to Paul was achild—one probably in seventh grade.
Read more

Later today, a Tennessee House subcommittee is scheduled to consider a bill that would take away university police departments unless those institutions permit religious student organizations to engage in anti-gay discrimination. The bill arises from a conflict between Vanderbilt University and anti-gay lawmakers led by state Rep. Mark Pody (R), who object to Vanderbilt’s policy which requires student organizations to accept “all comers” if they wish to be subsidized by the school.

Last week, however, Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper (D) threw cold water on Pody’s efforts with an official opinion explaining that the bill is unconstitutional, at least as-applied to private universities such as Vanderbilt. As Cooper’s opinion explains, private universities generally have a right to decide which student organizations they wish to be associated with, and that includes the right to take a stand against discrimination:

It is well established that the State may not condition continued receipt of a valuable state benefit (here, the exercise of the State’s police power to commission and maintain a police force) on a private institution’s compliance with an unconstitutional condition. . . .

As previously discussed SB1241 impacts a private university’s First Amendment right of free association and distinguishes between those universities that organize their student groups in conformity with SB1241 and those that do not. This classification thus impacts a fundamental right – a private university’s First Amendment right to free association – and would be reviewed under the strict scrutiny standard. The General Assembly has an interest in how the State delegates its police power to a private university. Even if that interest is compelling, the General Assembly cannot assert that interest through an unrelated requirement that a private university abandon its right of free association.

Cooper also concludes that Pody’s anti-gay law would be constitutional as-applied to public universities, because Tennessee is allowed to decide that it does want to associate itself and its universities with anti-gay discrimination. This conclusion, however, is likely not correct. Just as the federal government cannot discriminate against gay couples when it doles out marriage benefits — that’s why the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional — a state government also cannot form official groups that engage in anti-gay discrimination. Thus, to the extent that a student group at a Tennessee university is an arm of the state itself, such as group is not permitted to engage in anti-gay discrimination.

A sign in the Muslim Student Association room at Hunter College. The sign points to a news report on NYPD spying.

Systematic and widespread monitoring of Muslims’ everyday life by undercover informants, brought to light by an Associated Press investigative series last year, has had a severe chilling effect on speech, religious activity and community life, according to a new report by several civil rights organizations. Muslims fear speaking out even about the New York Police Department surveillance itself, and even youths described the fear of being arrested as “very real,” deterring them from activity that ranges from community involvement and speaking in class, to posting expressive messages on Facebook. “[W]hen your speech is limited, you can’t really do much: you can’t write on the internet, you can’t talk on the phone because they’re tapped, you can’t speak in public,” said one 22-year-old Sunday School teacher.

In interviews with 57 students, business owners, community leaders and educators, many recount having been asked to spy on their peers. One student recalled having been called into the principal’s office at age 16 and asked by the NYPD about her online activity. Several individuals described being questioned as suspects, and then later offered bribes to serve as informants when police realized they were not suspicious – told in moments of financial weakness that the police could “give them their freedom” by paying them for spying or providing them with a place to live. “These incidents – not infrequent in certain communities – have led many to realize that others, possibly their own peers, may not be as able to resist the pressures of working as informants,” the report said. This has bred mistrust both within the Muslim community and of law enforcement officers, prompting individuals and even businesses to accuse one another of being informants.

One of the most widespread and alarming elements of this NYPD surveillance was the recruitment of young people to infiltrate college groups. AP reports revealed that informants even accompanied students on a whitewater rafting trip, leading to fear that informants could be anyone and infiltrate anywhere. The report explains the impact on college campuses:

For college students, typically aged between 17 and 22, the prospect of dealing with surveillance by a police department, infiltration of events and extracurricular activities by informants, and the potentially devastating academic, professional, and personal repercussions can be overwhelming. … We found that the NYPD’s surveillance of students chilled First Amendment activity in what is perhaps the single most important formative and expressive space for any American youth: the college campus. […]

[W]ith a general understanding that dealing with “politics” is controversial, Muslim students find themselves steering away from those majors, classes, or extracurricular activities. Two students, both active members of their MSAs, reported switching their majors from political science to more conventional majors after becoming concerned about law enforcement scrutiny of “political” young Muslim males. […]

The isolationism that comes with being a member of a “spied on” community means that Muslim students are getting a fundamentally different, and less rewarding college experience compared to their non-Muslim peers.

As the report explains, these impacts suggest both First Amendment (free speech and religious suppression) and Fourteenth Amendment (discriminatory practices) implications, in a program that that may have broken the law and yielded no leads or cases.

Next week marks a rare moment in the Roberts Court’s history, an opportunity for this Supreme Court to actually make the law better than it was before they decided to weigh in on an issue. Although Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court’s ostensible swing vote, is a hardline conservative on campaign finance, health care and corporate immunity to the law, his record on gay rights is relatively moderate. Kennedy authored two of the most important gay rights decisions in the Court’s history and is viewed as a likely vote to strike down the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act.

As with so many things involving the Supreme Court, however, the devil is in the details. The Court’s decision in the DOMA case, United States v. Windsor, could extend the Constitution’s promise of marriage equality to all Americans, but it could just as easily reach a more narrow result or even sow significant seeds of confusion in the the law governing married couples. Broadly speaking, here are four ways the Supreme Court could halt DOMA, arranged in order from most desirable to least desirable:

• Marriage Equality For All: The simplest, and most obvious solution, is for the justices to just follow the Constitution. The Constitution guarantees “the equal protection of the laws” to all people within the United States, and this guarantee is most robust when applied to groups that have experienced a “‘history of purposeful unequal treatment‘ or been subjected to unique disabilities on the basis of stereotyped characteristics not truly indicative of their abilities.” As LGBT Americans are undoubtedly such a group, the Court should simply strike down all marriage discrimination laws and declare that every state must come into compliance with the Constitution.
• Marriage Equality In New York, Punt On Alabama: Although marriage discrimination cannot be squared with the Constitution, Justice Kennedy has a history of deciding gay rights cases on very narrow grounds. Neither of his two leading gay rights opinions followed the ordinary framework applied to laws that deny equal rights to a group historically subject to irrational prejudice, instead relying on novel and narrow reasoning. For this reason, it is possible that the Court will strike DOMA — thus extending federal marriage rights to same-sex couples — but punt on the larger question of whether every state must comply with the Constitution. If this happens, a key question is whether the justices apply “heightened scrutiny” to DOMA, a kind of skeptical constitutional analysis that will make it very difficult for any anti-gay law to withstand court review in the future.
• No Jurisdiction: Easily the messiest way the justices can resolve this case is by ruling that they do not have jurisdiction to hear it in the first place — a real possibility in light of the fact that they scheduled 50 minutes of argument time on the question of whether the Court has jurisdiction. If the answer is “no,” the result could be a big, sloppy mess. Normally, when the Supreme Court decides that it lacks jurisdiction over a case, it also holds that the case should never have been brought in federal court to begin with. This case, however, presents an usual circumstance where the Supreme Court may not have jurisdiction to hear an appeal even though nearly everyone agrees that the trial court that sided with the plaintiff challenging DOMA was within its lawful authority when it did so.Because the circumstances of this case are so unusual, it’s not entirely clear what happens if the Court holds that they lack jurisdiction. One well-known attorney told ThinkProgress that it would mean DOMA is invalid in New York and New England, where federal appeals courts struck it down, but valid elsewhere. Professor Marty Lederman says the answer depends on why the Court concludes it lacks jurisdiction, but one possibility is that the administration could simply cease enforcement of DOMA “in the absence of any possibility of judicial resolution.” This is obviously a messy solution, and it is one that would lead to DOMA awkwardly lurching back to life if an anti-gay president takes office in the future.
• The Tenth Amendment Nonsense: The First Circuit’s decision striking down DOMA includes an odd states’ rights section that resembles some of the arguments conservatives used to challenge Medicaid. This kind of argument could resonate with Justice Kennedy or even Justice Clarence Thomas, who has previously described an anti-gay law as “uncommonly silly.” Indeed, if all five conservatives embrace this view, they could potentially do significant damage to the social safety net under cover of a decision that most progressives would celebrate. Nevertheless, this outcome is unlikely, as at least one member of the conservative bloc is unlikely to join any pro-gay decision.