Tag Archives: Misdemeanor

Police Accountability, Politics, US

Raising resisting arrest to felony charge could happen in NYC

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The commissioner of the NYPD, Bill Bratton, has made the suggestion of raising the charge of resisting arrest to a felony.

At a joint hearing on Wednesday with the four State Senate committees, Bratton made the suggestion along with a number of other recommendations. “I think a felony,” said Bratton according to the Observer, “would be very helpful in terms of raising the bar significantly in the penalty for the resistance of arrest.”

Currently, resisting arrest in the state of New York is a misdemeanor charge, but Bratton said the current penalties for the charge are not enough to deter the nearly 2,000 resisting arrest charges per year in the city. According to the New York Post, the charge rarely gets prosecuted in court, but if it were raised to a felony this could change. “We’re asking district attorneys to treat them more seriously than they have been treated in the past.” said Bratton.

Bratton did acknowledge some of the cases involving the charge may not be legitimate, however.

A report published in December last year by the WNYC by retired criminal justice professor Sam Walker, says, “There’s a widespread pattern in American policing where resisting arrest charges are used to sort of cover – and that phrase is used – the officer’s use of force… Why did the officer use force? Well, the person was resisting arrest.”

According to this same article, not all officers fall into this category of using the charge as a “cover.” Records uncovered by Walker show the number of NYPD officers who are involved in civilian complaints related to an officer’s use of force, are a very small percentage.

“If there are 10 lawsuits — lawsuits — there’s something wrong here,” said Candace McCoy, a professor at the Graduate Center and John Jay College at the City University of New York in the same report. “And if this person has not been reprimanded and controlled there’s something wrong.”

Some of the other suggestions made by Bratton, which did not generate as much controversy, are having heavier penalties for individuals who fatally attack law enforcement officers, installing bulletproof glass in police vehicles, and possible punishments for people who publish personal information of officers.

Drug War, Featured, Police State, US

California could release up to 10,000 nonviolent offenders

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As part of a proposition California passed on Tuesday, the state could see up to 10,000 incarcerated people eligible for early release.

Proposition 47, known in California as the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act, will reclassify various offenses which were previously felonies, as misdemeanors.  Some of these offenses include personal illicit drug use, shoplifting, and theft under $950.

Analysts have said they think with this proposition in place, California will hand out 40,000 less felonies each year, and the state would also save up to $150 million dollars.

The Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center wrote, according to Common Dreams, “The current sentencing and correctional system in California is costly and inefficient and voters would prefer their tax dollars to be spent on education and health care rather than incarceration.”

Other uses for the saved money include supporting victim services, mental health programs, and drug treatment programs.  Marc Mauer from the Sentencing Project, said, “This historic vote demonstrates support to advance a public safety strategy beyond incarceration to include treatment and prevention.”

The proposition will also apply to people currently being held in the California prison system, which is how those incarcerated people could apply for early release.

Similar legislature has been enacted in other states in the past few years.

Georgia, for example passed a law in 2012 which, according to FiveThirtyEight, allowed alternative sentencing for low-level, nonviolent offenders.  The state’s prison population dropped by about 14 percent by the end of 2013 and the crime rate dropped by about 4 percent as well.  The state also saved approximately $20 million in the first year of enacting the new law.

Other states have enacted similar legislature in the past few years, but the laws were enacted to recently to offer any significant data.

Drug War, Economy, Election, Health, Politics, Technology, US

From Marijuana to GMOs to Fracking – Results of the Midterm Elections

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The 2014 Midterm Elections led to the approval of measures such as marijuana legalization in Oregon, Alaska, and Washington D.C., a ban on hydraulic fracturing in Denton, Texas, and a shift in the way California defines offenses, such as drug possession.

Oregon became the third state to legalize the “possession, use and sale of recreational marijuana for adults 21 and over,” according to the Huffington Post.

The Alaska Dispatch reported that voters in Alaska approved legalizing recreational use of marijuana “by about 52 percent in favor to 48 percent opposed, with 100 percent of the state’s precincts reporting.”

According to USA Today, the measure to legalize marijuana in Washington D.C. was “overwhelmingly approved” by voters, and will apply to sections of the district that are not considered “federal land.”

Although the measure to legalize medical marijuana in Florida received 57% approval, it did not receive the necessary 60%, in order to pass.

Florida Today reported that voters “narrowly rejected” the legalization of medical marijuana, “after a surge of ads saying the ballot initiative was riddled with holes,” which cost $6.2 million, and had the backing of a Las Vegas casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson.

Following the elections, Denton became the first city in the state of Texas to ban hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The Fort Worth Star Telegram reported that 58.6 percent of voters approved an ordinance that “will drastically restrict drillers’ attempts to tap the rich natural gas reserves within the city limits.”

A measure to label foods containing genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), appeared on the ballots in Colorado and Oregon. It was rejected in Colorado, and is still “too close to call” in Oregon. The Oregonian reported that the measure to label GMOs  “trailed 49 percent to 51 percent,” with nearly 80 percent of votes counted.

According to Reuters, this outcome came after corporate food and agriculture interests, such as Monsanto and DuPont, “poured more than $36 million into anti-labeling campaigns in the two states.”

Voters in California approved a measure that redefines certain offenses that were considered felonies, such as shoplifting, fraud, and possession of small amounts of drugs, including heroin and cocaine, as misdemeanor.

The Huffington Post reported that as a result of the measure, as many as 10,000 people “could be eligible for early release from state prisons,” and the expectation is that courts “will annually dispense around 40,000 fewer felony convictions.”

Ben Swann joins correspondents Erin Ade, Edward Harrison, Abby Martin, and Tyrel Ventura, from RT News, to discuss the ballot measures: