Six Dallas County cities disproportionately arrested Black people for marijuana possession in 2018, a new study finds.
Arrests of Black people for marijuana possession in six Dallas County cities far outpaced those of other races in 2018, according to a report from SMU’s Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center, which will study what effect District Attorney John Creuzot’s policy change on prosecuting marijuana cases has.
Creuzot’s campaign platform included a vow not to prosecute first-time misdemeanor marijuana offenses because, he said, data supported his assertion that Dallas police disproportionately arrested Black people for marijuana offenses even though national studies show people of most races use marijuana at similar rates.
“If you’re an assistant city manager or city manager and you’re looking at this, you’re going to have to try to defend it,” Creuzot said. “And it’s obvious that we have two policing practices out here: one for people of color and one for everybody else.”
SMU’s study backs up his assertion in the first of a five-part series that will roll out throughout the year. The first study, published earlier this month, uses 2018 as a baseline to measure Creuzot’s influence. His prosecutors stopped taking first-time misdemeanor marijuana cases after he took office in January 2019, even though the policy didn’t become official until April of that year.
Researchers examined the racial composition of people whose cases were referred for prosecution in Dallas, Garland, Grand Prairie, Irving, Mesquite and Richardson.
“As compared to their representation in each city’s population, Black people were grossly overrepresented among those who were accused of low-level drug offenses,” the report’s authors said.
Black people in Richardson make up 10 percent of the city’s population but 52 percent of Class A and B misdemeanor marijuana referrals for prosecution. Dallas’ Black population is 24 percent but made up 64 percent of prosecution referrals for the same offenses.
Two to four ounces of marijuana is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to one year of jail and a fine as much as $4,000. A Class B misdemeanor, less than two ounces, is punishable by up to 180 days in jail and a fine as much as $2,000.
The study also looks at Class C cases, possession of paraphernalia, and found Black people disproportionately represented in all six cities. But Class C cases are prosecuted in municipal courts, not by the district attorney’s office, and can only carry a fine.
“Our central question is: Can a district attorney’s non-prosecution policy change policing and/or can it change equity in the courts?” Deason Center Director Pamela Metzger said.
Most of the six departments said they became aware of the data only after the report was published.
Richardson and Garland police said they needed more time to review the data before commenting.
Irving police questioned whether the data included people who were arrested on multiple charges, including marijuana, and people who were passing through Irving but were not residents of the city. Grand Prairie police argue lumping nonresidents into the data skews the percentages.
“While I am always open to good-faith recommendations to improve our profession, solutions begin with a factual representation of the data,” Grand Prairie Police Chief Daniel Scesney said in a written statement to The Morning News. “Dedmon compared all Grand Prairie marijuana cases, regardless of where the defendant resided, to only Grand Prairie resident demographics.”
He said that if researchers had compared marijuana cases for Grand Prairie residents, the study would have found Black people represented 23.6% of the marijuana cases filed, almost matching the city’s population.
“Misrepresenting this data is not only unfortunate for the residents of Grand Prairie, and the men and women who protect it, but also our entire community regardless of city,” Scesney said.
The study does not differentiate nonresidents. But Metzger said the distinction does not change the finding that there is disproportionate law enforcement against Black people. She said her team welcomes the departments to share their data.
2019 was a significant year for prosecuting pot possession because state lawmakers legalized hemp during the legislative session that spring.
That meant police needed to test substances to determine whether they’re marijuana or hemp because they look and smell the same.
Facing a rise in requests from agencies for testing, the Texas Department of Public Safety said its labs would not test misdemeanor amounts of suspected marijuana because the law didn’t provide additional money for misdemeanor cases.
That meant police or prosecutors would have to pay an outside lab to test. Creuzot said his office looked into the costs and found they ranged from $100 to more than $217 for each test. Many district attorneys across the state responded by saying they simply would not accept such cases.
Irving police factors testing into their budget and continues to arrest people for marijuana possession, subject to each officer’s discretion, Public Information Officer Robert Reeves said.
“We do still make arrests based off how that falls with state law,” he said. “If the district attorney’s office decides to dismiss a case then that’s on the district attorney’s office.”
To gauge whether area police responded to Creuzot’s policy in January or the legislative change in June, Deason Center researchers calculated monthly averages in 2019.
Some municipalities had a more drastic change after Creuzot’s policy than after the law changed, though others didn’t see much change until the law was enacted, Metzger said.
“So, we can get a picture, even if it’s not a perfect picture,” Metzger said.
Those findings will be covered in the second report of the series, which is scheduled to be published in June.
“What we’re really excited to talk about in these coming reports is there may not be just one answer,” she added.
Dallas Police Chief Eddie García, who came to Texas from San Jose, Calif,. this year, implemented a policy in April to stop filing charges for possessing less than 2 ounces of marijuana.
But the district attorney’s policy had little influence on his decision, García told The Morning News. His primary reason for changing Dallas’ policy was to free up his officers so they can focus on violent crime and policing hot spots.
“I mean it when I say we’re not going to sweat the small stuff and that we’re here to tackle violent crime,” he said.
California legalized marijuana in 2016, and García said he did not see violent crime increase as a result.
The impact in 2019 of each department’s changes vary from city to city, Metzger said, and will publish in a future report.
Another report will delve into what prosecutors do with marijuana cases that land on their desks and the series will end with recommendations for improving racial equity, Metzger said. The series will not publish 2020 data because of effects the pandemic may have caused, Metzger said.
Creuzot said his hunch is that his policy contributed to changed behavior in police departments because they stopped bringing misdemeanor marijuana cases at the same rate they once did, he said.
But those cases weren’t aggressively prosecuted even before his tenure, said Creuzot, a former longtime state district judge and defense lawyer who was also a prosecutor before taking the bench.
One of his last clients as a defense lawyer had a misdemeanor marijuana case that prosecutors dismissed after he donated food to the North Texas Food Bank and passed a couple of drug tests, Creuzot said. He told police chiefs this story in a meeting shortly before the pandemic to convey that prosecutors already weren’t correlating marijuana use with violent crime.
“There is some perception that taking any number of people that you can to jail for misdemeanor marijuana has some greater impact on crime,” Creuzot said. “Well, actually, the research shows that’s not true.”
