Are post-Drug War reforms disrupting racialized patterns in urban drug enforcement?

The past decade has seen a wave of criminal justice reforms aiming to reduce criminal penalties for drug offenses. Like other states, California has implemented reforms to scale back drug war-era enforcement, such as legalizing marijuana, reducing low-level drug offense classifications, and diverting people to treatment.

Proposition 47, a ballot initiative passed in 2014, was a key reform that reduced criminal penalties for drug possession and several property crimes to misdemeanors, leading to declines in drug arrests and incarceration. The reform effort also led to declining racial disparities in drug arrests statewide. 

Citing these results, proponents argue that the proposition provides a clear and replicable roadmap to reducing unnecessary incarceration. However, it is not yet clear whether these reforms will successfully disrupt racialized patterns in urban drug enforcement and we do not yet know whether reforms aimed at reducing drug-related arrests have been applied equitably across race and place.

Using detailed data from the California Department of Justice, the Possibility Lab team examined racial and geographic trends in arrests for drug possession in the City of Los Angeles from 2010-2019, to understand whether California’s Proposition 47 has been applied equitably across race and location. Our findings indicate that drug arrest rates and racial disparities declined citywide between 2010-14 and 2015-19. However, 18.6% of the reduction was driven by a decrease in extraordinarily high arrest rates in a single, majority Black neighborhood. At the same time, the disproportionate arrests of Black people actually increased in the areas with the highest percent white residents.

These results have important implications for our understanding of whether and how policing practices change in the context of a reversal of punitive drug policy and highlights the hyperlocal nature of urban policing, such that city-wide disparities can be both generated and reversed by police practices in just one majority-minority neighborhood.

The nuanced patterns we find—declines in the rate of drug arrests in some highly concentrated communities of color, even as racial disparities in whiter communities increased—point to a combination of both positive and also potentially pernicious trends in urban policing that are not evident when rates are aggregated city-wide or reforms are assessed across the state.

This project was made possible with funding from the National Institute of Justice.