Some Poor Sap Got Caught Smoking Weed by the Commissioner of the NYPD
You’re walking to school in the morning, minding your own business, smoking your own weed, when you feel a tap on your shoulder. It’s some old guy in a suit. It’s a cop. Oh my god, it’s the most powerful cop in all of New York City.
If an anecdote NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton told onstage today is to be believed, this was the situation faced by some poor school-aged sap on Wall Street recently. From Capital New York:
I had one of my officers with me, we were walking along and the smell’s not going away and I say, ‘Where the hell is that coming from?’ And I’m looking around and we come up to a red light, a pedestrian light that you can’t cross. And we’re standing there and directly in front of me is this young woman happily puffing away. She’s got her earphones in and her school bag, on her way to one of the local schools. And so my security officer comes up on one side, I come up on the other, tapped her on the shoulder. And she looked over and I wish I had a photograph of that face. Because she instantly recognized me. We politely removed the marijuana and threw it into the local sewer and just suggested that she might have a better academic day without the influence of that on the way to school.
The woman was not arrested or even ticketed, so you might say she got off lucky.
But what about Bratton himself? Article 153, section nine of the New York City health code reads:
§153.09 Throwing or dropping offensive matter into streets, public places, rivers and other places prohibited. No person shall throw or put any blood, swill, brine, offensive animal matter, noxious liquid, dead animals, offal, putrid or stinking vegetable or animal matter or other filthy matter of any kind, and no person shall allow any such matter to run or fall into any street, public place, sewer, receiving basin or river, any standing or running water or into any other waters of the City as defined in §145.01.
And what is weed if not stinking vegetable matter? Officer, arrest this man.
