THE RECORD Turns Cannabis Arrest Data Into Street-Level Art Campaign

Campaign deploys data visualizations in high-enforcement neighborhoods

The installations appeared overnight across Brownsville, East New York, and Harlem—neighborhoods that accounted for more than 40% of New York City's cannabis arrests between 2010 and 2019, according to NYPD data compiled by the Drug Policy Alliance. Each site features a floor-to-ceiling timeline. Arrest counts by year, precinct, demographic breakdown.

THE RECORD sourced the data from Freedom of Information Law requests filed with the NYPD and cross-referenced against court records obtained through the New York State Unified Court System. The collective worked with data scientists at the Marijuana Arrest Research Project to verify figures and ensure geographic accuracy down to the census tract.

Visualizations highlight racial disparities that persisted through decriminalization

A 40-foot mural in Bedford-Stuyvesant anchors the campaign, showing arrest rates per 1,000 residents broken out by race. Black New Yorkers were arrested at 8 times the rate of white residents for low-level cannabis possession between 2014 and 2018, even after the city's 2014 de facto decriminalization policy, according to the data set.

That gap widened in precincts covering Brownsville and East New York, where enforcement rates remained elevated through 2019—the year before New York's adult-use legalization took effect. The mural uses a color gradient to map enforcement intensity, with the darkest bands corresponding to the 75th and 79th precincts.

Street campaign targets policy blind spots in New York's equity framework

New York's Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act, passed in 2021, created a Social and Economic Equity Plan designed to prioritize license applicants from communities with high enforcement histories. But THE RECORD's campaign argues that the state's equity metrics rely on conviction data, not arrest data—a distinction that excludes thousands of cases dismissed or pleaded down.

The collective's calling for the state's Office of Cannabis Management to expand its Justice Involved definition to include arrest records, not just convictions. That change would widen the pool of equity applicants by an estimated 22,000 individuals, based on NYPD arrest records from 2005 through 2020. For more context on New York's equity licensing framework, see the CannIntel topic hub on Cannabis Justice Reform.

What's next for the campaign and its policy ask

THE RECORD plans to expand the installation series to Albany and Rochester in October, with data sets covering those cities' enforcement patterns from 2000 through 2024. The collective's also circulating a petition urging Governor Kathy Hochul to direct the OCM to revise its equity applicant criteria by year-end.

The campaign has drawn support from the Legal Aid Society and the Bronx Defenders, both of which have filed administrative comments with the OCM on behalf of clients excluded from equity consideration due to the conviction-only standard. Whether the state acts on the ask remains an open question, but the street-level visibility is forcing the conversation into neighborhoods that lived the enforcement data firsthand.