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It hasn’t played out that way. Officers have barely issued any tickets—just 1,117 between August 2012 and this October. Meanwhile, they’ve made more than 13,000 arrests for misdemeanor marijuana possession so far this year, a rate of more than 44 a day—higher than in 2012, records show.
As Solis put it: “I think that our expectations aren’t quite what we thought.”
McCarthy was happy for the invitation. He had just spent the better part of an hour insisting that the police department was more than adequately staffed even though it’s spending nearly $2 million a week to pay officers overtime to conduct extra patrols in high-crime areas—three times the original overtime budget.
The question of who’s getting cuffed didn’t come up either, even though it was one of the reasons Solis originally gave for pushing the new law. Before the ordinance was passed, African-Americans accounted for nearly eight of every ten arrests. Not much appears to have changed. So far this year, more than 75 percent of all arrests were made in black wards though they account for less than 40 percent of the city’s population.
