tHe War on MariJUana in BlacK anD WHite

(and sometimes lifelong) personal cost to individuals and their families as well as at a
pecuniary cost to taxpayers.
Therefore, while the crime-mapping components of COMPSTAT can identify where serious
crimes are occurring with greater frequency, thus focusing police departments’ resources on
those areas to address serious crimes, it need not and indeed should not be accompanied by
unconstitutional stop and search practices or a focus on generating high numbers of arrests
for minor offenses in those areas. To move away from evaluating progress and productivity
through arrest numbers, police departments should reduce the reliance on stops, citations,
summons, and arrests and broaden their benchmarks of success, relying instead more heavily
on other measurements of community safety and police-community relations.
b. The Federal government Should not Include Marijuana Possession Arrests in its
Performance Measures for Byrne justice Assistance grants
Justice Assistance Grants were created with the purpose of curtailing serious, violent crime
and cracking down on drug kingpins. However, because arrest statistics — which include any
arrest, including any drug arrest — are included in law enforcements’ performance measures,
police departments are likely encouraged to increase their arrest numbers by targeting their
limited resources on low-level drug users and possessors. By including marijuana possession
arrests in performance assessments of a states’ use of federal funds, the federal government
is relying upon an unreliable measure of law enforcement’s effectiveness in fighting crime and
reducing the traffic and availability of drugs. Indeed, such arrests reduce neither the use nor
availability of marijuana.
Therefore, the Bureau of Justice Assistance should take the following steps to reform the
existing JAG process:
• Cease including marijuana possession arrests as a performance measure for
purposes of federal funding
• Ensure that federal funds are not provided or used by state and local law
enforcement agencies to make arrests for marijuana possession
• Require law enforcement agencies receiving federal funding to enforce a ban
on racial profiling and document their pedestrian and traffic stops, arrests, and
searches by race, ethnicity, and gender (designating money for data collection if
needed)
• Reform performance measures to include factors such as the numbers of citizen
complaints, surveys measuring community satisfaction with the police, including
community views on the legitimacy and fairness of police actions and decisions, and
the rates of violent crime
120 | The <strong>War</strong> on Marijuana in Black and White