Back in January, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that her office would stop prosecuting cannabis possession, regardless of the quantity or the arrestee’s criminal history. In her announcement, Mosby cited the “disproportionate impact that the war on drugs has had on communities of color,” and declared, “There is no public safety value in prosecuting marijuana possession.”

But Baltimore’s police still haven’t bought into the change: They say they’ll continue cuffing and bringing people in for having more than 10 grams of weed, even if prosecutors will drop the charges.

It’s a stalemate that’s created a “catch-and-release” situation, with police continuing to arrest people for pot, only to be almost immediately freed by prosecutors. And neither side seems happy about it.

in the front room of their offices, a rowhouse in the middle of a one-way street pocked with boarded-up homes in the city’s Madison-Eastend neighborhood. Guyton—known locally as “Mr. C”—has pushed to keep his community free of drug-related violence and resulting conflicts with police since co-founding the center in 1995. The center works with at-risk youth and provides transitional housing, mental health counseling, and other social services to residents.

After years on the front lines of managing the impact of the war on drugs on this community, Guyton and Gladden welcome any progress in the national movement to decriminalize cannabis. But they’re also worried that confusion about the rules around weed could present an entrapment risk for residents who believe they can now smoke openly in public. Then police show up. “They start making some arrests and now we’re dealing with that catch-and-release all over again,” Gladden says.

Guyton knows of two young men separately arrested for possession within the last month. Both were jailed, only to be released within 24 hours. “They are still in confusion mode—why did they lock me up and then turn around and release me?” Guyton says. “It does something to them … It makes them angry, confused. They just talk about how stupid it is.”

Mosby’s move added Baltimore to a growing list of cities where prosecutors are dropping cannabis offenses en masse and moving to purge thousands of conviction and charges. From New York to Philadelphia to Houston to St. Louis and elsewhere, these efforts share a common goal: Reduce enforcement of drug laws proven to largely target African Americans, and free up resources for prosecutors and cops to focus on more serious crimes.

In most cities, district and state’s attorneys are pursuing these reforms with the cooperation—albeit sometimes grudging—of police and city leaders.

Like other prosecutors charting the cannabis-decriminalization course, including Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner and St. Louis’s Kim Gardner, Mosby has drawn varied criticism for the policy. Defense attorneys have argued that without BPD buy-in, the pledge amounts to “virtue signaling” by Mosby, whose prosecutors can elevate cases to possession with intent to distribute—a crime they’re still pursuing—at their discretion. Vacating and expunging the cases has already proven to be challenging for her office, given that many of them included charges other than possession. Dropping them could have unintended repercussions, as for someone who violated probation because of a weed arrest.

More broadly, Mosby’s policy risks exacerbating the rift that has grown between her and BPD since her high-profile decision to charge six officers in the killing of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old man who died in police custody in April 2015. Three of those officers were acquitted; charges were dropped for the rest. (Mosby’s office did not respond to requests for comment from CityLab.)
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/...nalize/585406/