Vast Majority of All Seattle Pot Tickets Written by Same Officer
Source: The Stranger
Seattle Police Department chief Kalthleen O'Toole has launched an internal investigation into an officer who personally wrote nearly 80 percent of tickets issued this year for smoking marijuana in public, according to an internal e-mail O'Toole sent officers. The Stranger obtained the e-mail through city sources who asked to remain anonymous.
The tickets, punishable by $55 in fines, had been handed out disproportionally to people of color and the poor, according to a recently released city report.
... O'Toole says the officer "addressed many of the tickets to 'Petey Holmes,'" who had also backed the statewide marijuana legalization law in 2012. "The ongoing review of the officer’s ticket reports also found that, in one case, while contacting two people for public use of marijuana, the officer used a coin toss to determine which of the two individuals would receive a citation. In another ticket report, the officer refers to Washington’s voter-enacted changes to marijuana laws as 'silly.'"
The first report on the ticket's impacts was released July 23. Although black people make up 7.9 percent of the city’s population, researchers found police issued 32.9 percent of their pot tickets to black people. The study by SPD’s Loren T. Atherley and Mark Baird adds, “Early observations suggest a correlation between this low level civil infraction and people of disadvantaged socioeconomic means.” Specifically, 46 percent of the people who received tickets had addresses in government housing or associated with economic distress such as a shelter.
Read more: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/07/30/breaking-vast-majority-of-all-pot-tickets-written-by-same-officer
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Glad there's an investigation!
...stakes out the high-end bars and waits for the partially-drunk yuppies to exit the establishment and are walking to their BMW's.
Yeah....I'm sure of that. 
than hand out cannabis citations? 
