The more I read the news coming out of the Big Apple these days, the more I’m beginning to believe that young black people there aren’t as much of a threat to the police as they are a mark for them.

First there was Sean Bell. The unarmed, 23-year-old died after police unleashed a storm of 50 bullets at him and his friends outside of a Jamaica, Queens nightclub in November 2006.

The three detectives, who recently were found not guilty on manslaughter charges stemming from that shooting, apparently thought that the only way to stop any potential for gunplay among young black men was to simply beat them to the punch; to kill them all first. And count on an acquittal later.

But now, it seems police officers aren’t just finding their marks in troubled nightspots. They’re looking for them on the streets of Harlem and Brooklyn. They’re looking in pockets and backpacks and purses.

And what they’re finding is miniscule amounts of marijuana -- and an excuse to continue to arrest and criminalize a disproportionate number of young blacks and Latinos. Youths who, as a group, smoke weed far less frequently than whites.

Yet according to a study by Harry Levine, a Queens College sociology professor, and Deborah Peterson Small, a drug law reform activist, between 1997 and 2007, the NYPD arrested and jailed about 205,000 blacks, 122,000 Latinos and 59,000 whites for possessing small amounts of marijuana.

Those arrests were way out of whack to the percentage of blacks who live in New York City; they make up 26 percent of the population but 52 percent of the marijuana arrests.

Latinos, who make up 27 percent of the population, made up 31 percent of the arrests. But whites, who make up 35 percent of New York City’s population, made up only 15 percent of those arrested.

Now, one could believe that white folks in the Big Apple are just saying no to drugs more often than blacks. And if one believes that, he or she is smoking something stronger than reefer.
 
There is no shortage of studies, particularly government studies of high schoolers and young adults, which show that young whites smoke marijuana far more frequently than blacks or Latinos. The difference is that when the whites fire up their joints, they are likely to do it in communities that are more economically stable and absent of poverty-induced crime, and by extension, police.

The situation tends to be the opposite for black and Latino youths; youths who live in neighborhoods with the kind of crime that has people calling for more police, only to find that the police come as occupiers rather than peacekeepers.

That seems to be the situation in New York City.

Levine told The Village Voice that many of the arrests of young blacks are the result of stop-and–frisk searches that began during the regime of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Because black and Latino communities are more heavily policed than white communities, blacks tend to be stopped for dubious reasons more often. Many times, Levine said, the police are able to charge them through trickery; by telling them that if they show them what in their pocket or backpack, they’ll go easy on them.

Unlike young white kids, however, nothing goes easy for the young black or Latino youths who succumb to that trickery. Most don’t have a parent with lawyers or connections to deal with a frivolous charge or an overzealous cop. Unlike the white kids, their youthful mistakes morph into criminality. It gets them a record, not forgiveness.

And it gives the cops an excuse to keep their jobs without doing a damn thing to stop the real drug problem. They aren’t shackling the kingpins. They’re shackling the futures of black and Latino kids.

Yet the thing that Levine found that really angered me -- and it ought to anger young black folks in New York City enough to not walk around with weed in their pockets or backpacks -- is that pot arrests are easy busts for police. The police rack up overtime for going out and arresting young blacks with small amounts of weed on them, and it makes them look like they’re being productive.

In other words, the lives of young blacks, and young black men in particular, are being reduced to what amounts to busywork for the cops. So the cops in New York City, like the private prison profiteers elsewhere, have found a way to make money from finding new ways to criminalize the missteps of young blacks.

Of course, the easiest solution here would be for black youths to just say no to drugs. And I’m sure that a lot of them do. But them saying no still doesn’t mean that anyone ought to tolerate a law enforcement system that makes it easy for the police to treat black and Latino youths as marks.

And if this sort of discrimination continues to happen, it’ll do more to stymie the futures of black and Latino kids than to end the drug trade that is being used to justify it all.