If a new policy passes in Pinellas, come January you might not go to jail if you're caught with a couple of Js, but don't call it decriminalization.
Pinellas County Commissioners and top law enforcement and criminal justice officials spent much of Tuesday morning weighing the plusses and minuses of lightening punishments for marijuana possession and other light crimes.
While Tampa recently passed an ordinance that replaces arrests for people caught with less than 20 grams of marijuana with civil citations about as harmless as a parking ticket (something St. Pete is also considering), it looks like Pinellas is taking a different route: an arrest avoidance/diversion program.
It's unclear what the exact details of that would be, but unlike civil citations, the offender would likely not have to pay a fine that escalates with each offense, but would instead have to participate in things like rehabilitation and community service. Similar to civil citations, the accused would avoid arrest in most cases.
The commission had originally been looking at civil citations, but ultimately gave a nod to the pre-arrest diversion program Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gaultieri brought to the dais.
“One of the things that is changing my mind is the whole idea of people having to pay a ticket that escalates over time," said County Commissioner Pat Gerard. "That inversely impacts people that don't have any money, and those are the people that are going to end up in jail.”
The major concern in Pinellas and other places is the impact that arresting someone for a minor offense can have on an individual's life.
“We need to have smart justice, and we need to continue with justice,” Pinellas County Public Defender Bob Dillinger told the commission. “We are keeping people from getting jobs. The greatest impediment that I see in our public defender clients is they have a record. And if it's a record, even if it's a simple battery record or an open container, versus a person with no arrest record, they don't get a job. And we want people to have jobs.”
St. Petersburg has been waiting on Pinellas to take up such a measure before it determines whether it should develop its own. Advocates called for uniformity throughout the county.
“If each city did their own thing, then the problem would be, what kind of database are they going to put in, who's going to monitor this and it wouldn't be fair throughout the county,” said St. Petersburg Police Chief Anthony Holloway.
Activists in favor of decriminalizing marijuana agreed that such uniformity would be best, given the possibility that law enforcement might revert to the tendency of targeting African Americans at disproportionately high rates.
“If it's left up to the discretion of the officer, then we get those disparity issues, where we have some troublesome area, quote unquote, in south side St. Pete, where they like to patrol, and someone not harming anyone is sitting there with less than 20 grams of marijuana is all of the sudden seen as a criminal," said activist Jon-Paul Rosa of Clearwater.
While the county will likely change the policy, some officials warned against mischaracterizing the measure as decriminalization.
“In today's internet society… our community is full of headline readers," said Anthony Rondolini, Chief Justice of the 6th Circuit Court. "There's not a lot of analysis of the second page, if you will. What people perceive of these ordinances is that it's a decriminalization of marijuana. You can call it civil citation, whether it's on the diversion side or whether it's on the ordinance side, but when these ordinance are passed, the public perceives that our government is decriminalizing marijuana, and nothing can be farther from the truth.”
Pinellas County Commissioner Ken Welch said Gaultieri's proposal is "the best practical way that we can move forward right now, given the disparity between state law and local law, given the sheriff's position, [that of] the state attorney, chief judge and others. I think this path of adult pre-arrest diversion really meets the goals we talked about.”
This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 6, 2016.