Spectacular Magazine - April 2014 (rev) | Seite 12

Durham Police CONTINUES

state in the country that always prosecutes
16 and 17 year olds as adults, these low-level
marijuana arrests routinely become part of
a permanent record that can significantly
inhibit an individual’s ability to obtain
education and employment when they reach
adulthood.
The combination of North Carolina’s
punitive criminal statutes, civil penalties,
and Durham Police Department’s aggressive
marijuana enforcement efforts has produced
a litany of unjust outcomes. One such
example is that of Benjamin Hashim, who
works in an after-school program for
at-risk children in Durham, but who has
repeatedly been denied admission to a local
Master’s counseling program on account of
a misdemeanor marijuana conviction more
than a decade old.
So what accounts for these enormous
disparities? Part of it appears to be a
concerted effort to saturate neighborhoods
like Walltown, East Main Street, and the
Holloway St. corridor with roving drug
enforcement officers, who stop and search
pedestrians and motorists alike with little
regard for their individual dignity or civil
rights.
In his newly-published memoir,
Strangers at My Door, Durham minister and
Random House author Jonathan WilsonHartgrove details his personal frustrations in
dealing with officers while trying to advocate
for a local quadriplegic man who had been
repeatedly profiled, stopped, and searched
by officers “hoping for a drug bust.” In
some Durham neighborhoods entire blocks
of people fear these roving drug patrols, not
because they are doing anything wrong, but
rather because some officers appear to view
everyone in their neighborhood with an equal
degree of suspicion.
The pursuit of marijuana arrests - a
performance indicator in lucrative federal
drug enforcement grants - appears to animate
many of the illegitimate traffic searches,
which are conducted primarily against
young black men. It is for this reason,
among others, that many organizations
and community members have asked the
police to designate marijuana enforcement
the department’s lowest law enforcement
priority (“LLEP”). The dramatic in ܙX\