Bravo to Pam Slack and the rest of those who voted for marijuana reform at the city council meeting last night.
To those who opposed it, please note there is nothing wrong with the city council working toward hurting people less often. If they must exist, that behavior seems totally appropriate to me.
The city council hires and fires the city attorney, clerk, and manager, from my understanding. The manager hires and fires the police chief. Seems clear to me that the council could hand down a do-not-enforce or at the least a lowest enforcement priority policy to the police chief (who seems like a reasonable guy from my recent breakfast with him). That would actually accomplish significant decriminalization in a fairly short order (as opposed to Fred Parsells’ suggestion of a “substantial” fine, which would continue to harm peaceful people) resulting in many Keeniacs no longer having to be afraid of being caged for enjoying recreational or medicinal cannabis consumption.
I support steps in the right direction, but there’s no reason that this can’t be done in one step. Imagine the city council people saying this to the police chief:
Arthur,
It has come to our attention that your agents are harming peaceful people who possess or sell a plant called cannabis. The typical excuse for this is that you are “just doing your jobs” and enforcing the laws handed to you by the state legislators. We’d like to remind you that it is not your job to enforce bad statutes against good people. To refresh you on what your job is, please review your own Department Statement of Values and the Law Enforcement Code of Ethics. Right at the top of the values statement it says: (emphasis added)
We will obey and enforce the laws of the State of New Hampshire with courage, diligence, and discretion.
Your officers use discretion all the time when they choose not to enforce certain statutes based on their interpretation of its appropriateness. We are suggesting you expand your discretion to include ignoring peaceful people who haven’t harmed or endangered others, even if their actions are violations of statutes. To further clarify, perhaps you should have your officers review their Statement of Ethics more often and ask themselves if what they are doing on a daily basis matches up:
my fundamental duty is to serve mankind; to safeguard lives and property; to protect the innocent against deception, the weak against oppression or intimidation, the peaceful against violence or disorder; and to respect the Constitutional rights of all people to liberty, equality, and justice.
We are telling you that it’s time to stop “just following orders” and time to do what’s right. It is your job to protect the peaceful against violence. This is not accomplished by throwing the peaceful in cages or forcibly extracting their wealth. We trust that you will start spending your resources on investigating real crimes that involve victims, or your job will be in jeopardy. We look forward to your cooperation in this matter. You will likely find that many people’s opinions of you and your officers will start to rise when they are no longer afraid you will cage them, their friends, or their family, when they have not harmed others.
