To Ticket or Not to Ticket….

Posted Tuesday, July 21, 2015 by Andrew Charles Huff

That is the questions asked by a frustrated Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole of City Council members if they want her cops to stop issuing $27 public marijuana use citations. One issue of concern is that such tickets were written disproportionately toward black people. O’Toole said the tickets were all issued downtown because that’s where the complaints come from. She said she hadn’t heard complaints from other parts of the city.

With 72 such tickets generating national news, O’Toole said Monday she didn’t want to report to the council every six months, as is the policy, about tickets written by officers responding to complaints from the public.

O’Toole also said tickets were written after people did not comply with warnings to stop consuming pot in public, which is against state law. The vast majority of tickets have gone unpaid.