He talked about it on the campaign trail, he talked about it once he was officially the District Attorney, and now according to the New York Post, Ken Thompson has officially announced his office will no longer prosecute people caught with small amounts of pot. You won’t even go in front of a judge, in case judges scare you. There’s just one problem: Police don’t agree with this bold new plan for turning a blind eye to potheads.
The plan in the Brooklyn D.A.’s office is to dismiss any cases of people arrested for simple possession of up to two ounces of pot. You’ll need to have a clean record though, and the DA will still come down on you if you’re arrested for smoking in public or near our precious children. However, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton won’t be instructing his officers to not make pot arrests, saying in a statement that police had to “enforce the laws of the State of New York uniformly throughout all five boroughs of the City.” So don’t go waving your bags of weed around, basically, especially if you’re not white.
For those of you keeping score at home, in addition to being the home of effectively decriminalized pot that you can still be arrested for, New York is also the state with medical marijuana…that you can’t smoke. It’s all a good compromise, see, allowing people to treat pot like a deadly scourge and a harmless recreation at the same time, depending on what level of the government he’s in. Nothing can go wrong here.