Missoula Marijuana Arrests Up, Report Suggests | Missoula | New West Missoula
A report released Wednesday suggests a jump in marijuana offenses in Missoula County compared to last year, despite the passage in 2006 of Initiative 2, the “marijuana initiative,” which made adult misdemeanor marijuana offenses the County’s lowest law enforcement priority.Marijuana incidents in the City of Missoula, the County and on the University of Montana campus are up 27 percent, the report estimates; 63 percent in the city alone.
The numbers are stark enough for the Community Oversight Committee that compiled the report (PDF) to conclude: “The voters’ recommendation is apparently being ignored by most of the officials in a position to heed it.”
John Masterson, chair of the committee and director of Montana NORML, says it should be disappointing to the 55 percent of voters in Missoula County and the 80 percent of voters in some city precincts that voted for the initiative.
But no matter the vote margin, Missoula Chief of Police Mark Muir says nothing’s being ignored—it’s a county, not city, initiative. “The initiative itself never gave any direction to municipal government. Period.”
But peruse through the cases and you’ll see police officers are looking awfully hard for marijuana, Masterson says. He cites one case where pot residue was lifted from a vehicle console with white tape, and another in which a man was busted with less than a hundredth of a gram.
I get into a lot of discussions with law enforcement types regarding marijuana. My eldest female cousin and her husband are both county sheriff’s deputies in the conservative Idaho county where I was born. They believe the laws requiring them to investigate and arrest cannabis smokers are a ridiculous waste of their time. They’d prefer to spend their time going after meth – a big problem in that area.
One of the most oft-heard justifications they and other law enforcement types give me is “We don’t make the laws; we just enforce them.” I’ve always found this to be a cop-out (pardon the pun), because officers have a great deal of latitude in policing crime. Officers will let people go 5-10mph over the speed limit, they typically ignore jaywalking, they’ll often “look the other way” when enforcement of an violation or misdemeanor is too much of a distraction from protecting the public safety.
When you ask a cop about the anti-cannabis laws, he might say, “We don’t make the laws, we just enforce them”, which is supposed to mean “I think this law is stupid and I wish I didn’t have to enforce it, but it’s my job to bust you”. But when the citizens make laws that would allow the police to “look the other way”, like in Missoula County or Denver, Colorado, suddenly that pro-cannabis law isn’t in such strict need of enforcement. Apparently they don’t make the laws, but they do pick and choose which ones they want to enforce.
Furthermore, when citizens make laws that remove the mandate to arrest cannabis consumers, like this year in Massachusetts or Michigan, we see law enforcement actively campaigning against such pro-cannabis laws. Apparently they don’t make the laws, but they do lobby against the laws they don’t want to enforce.
