Got weed? John Pica apparently did: He’s now in custody after a Sunday pot bust gone awry, where a rookie cop lost several teeth after being shoved down a flight of stairs.
The cop and her partner were making a routine arrest in an East Harlem housing project; at least one perp resisted. Pica, a 26-year-old petty criminal and alleged cop-fighter, was arrested Monday — charged, not for the first time, with assaulting an officer.
The incident has received far less attention than the in-police-custody fatality on Staten Island last week, and understandably so.
After all, the death of Eric Garner, 43, in a street fight with cops is a tragedy, no two ways about it. But it shares with the Pica case a question most New Yorkers thought had been answered long ago.
That is, when cops seek to make a legitimate arrest, and the subject refuses to submit — as was emphatically the case with Garner — what next?
Police Commissioner William Bratton says his officers won’t walk away from such a challenge — and he’s right: They mustn’t.
Though it’s an open question how this works as the de Blasio administration steadily back-pedals away from two decades of aggressive policing practices.
Yet while the Garner case is (quite properly) under intense investigation, for the time being it’s something of an outlier. Cigarette loosies and chokeholds are at best peripheral to the NYPD’s work and New York’s fractious public-safety debate.
Not so two key elements of the Pica case — pot and public housing.
l Ongoing federal “civil-rights” litigation is seeking precisely to reduce the police presence in the city’s housing projects — on the grounds that it has a disparate negative impact on minorities, so many of whom live in the projects.
It’s a bit of a head-scratcher, since that police presence is meant to protect residents from the rampant crime in many of those projects.
But, hey, the argument was enough to kill stop-and-frisk, and there’s no real reason to think the suits won’t effectively evict cops from the projects, either. And if they’re not policing the projects, they’re not stopping anyone from toking in the halls.
l Kenneth Thompson, the new Brooklyn DA, has declared that most low-level marijuana busts in his borough simply won’t be prosecuted.
If his hands-off-weed policy had been in effect citywide, there likely would have been no confrontation in the first place. After all, why make a marijuana arrest if there will be no prosecution?
All in all, then, things are looking up for John Pica and his associates.
Which is not to equate the perverse housing-project litigation (with its potentially lethal consequences) with Thompson’s views on low-level pot busts. The DA is in range of a provocative public-policy debate, even if he’s also revealed an upside-down understanding of what the rule of law really means.
Thompson says that NYPD pot policies unfairly target minorities. It’s a cliché claim, yet to be convincingly proven — but there’s no doubt that marijuana enforcement is a source of profound tension between the police and the policed in New York City.
And not just in New York.
Weed is ubiquitous, as are most other illegal recreational narcotics. If effectiveness is a fair measure of policy success, it’s pretty clear that drug prohibition has been a lost cause in America for a long time.
Is it time to call the whole thing off? Or most of it?
That seems to be what Thompson — who took office in January — is suggesting with his selective-prosecution policy.
He says his office is culling hundreds of old arrest forms and appearance tickets with a view toward tossing most of them before moving directly toward an explicit no-prosecute policy.
He’s on shaky ground here. While DAs have a lot of discretion, they really aren’t meant to nullify legitimately enacted laws simply because they find them distasteful.
That is, one borough can’t be allowed to secede from law enforcement; defendants in the other four surely will notice — and so will their lawyers. Equal protection lawsuits are certain to follow.
Anyway, a general refusal to obey a given law is no reason to ignore violations — even if that law seems pointless and wrong-headed.
Still, if Thompson is indeed seeking to force a debate on New York’s drug laws, good for him. Here’s hoping he succeeds.
In the meanwhile, though, he’s obligated to enforce them — all of them — and he shouldn’t lose sight of that.