We all recognize the need for effective law enforcement, but we should also understand our own rights and responsibilities — especially in our interactions with the police.

The NYPD arrested and jailed nearly 400,000 people for possessing small amounts of marijuana between 1997 and 2007, a tenfold increase in marijuana arrests over the previous decade and a figure marked by startling racial and gender disparities, according to a report released Tuesday at the New York Civil Liberties Union. The report, The Marijuana Arrest Crusade in New York City: Racial Bias in Police Policy 1997-2007, is the first ever in-depth study of misdemeanor marijuana arrests in New York City during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations.

There has emerged over the last decade a broad consensus among policy experts, criminal justice scholars and lawmakers that the War on Drugs, with its singular emphasis on incarceration, has failed. In 1993, on the 20th anniversary of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, New York State Corrections Commissioner Thomas Coughlin, III, said the state was "lock[ing] up the wrong people ... for the wrong reasons."

Since the NYPD took control of school safety in 1998, the number of police personnel in schools and the extent of their activity have skyrocketed. At the start of the 2005-2006 school year, the city employed a total of 4,625 School Safety Agents (SSAs) and at least 200 armed police officers assigned exclusively to schools. This report, Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Public Schools, offers the following recommendations for reforming New York City’s school policing program – all of which can be accomplished without any sacrifice to school safety:

This New York Civil Liberties Union report finds stark racial disparities between the general population and the population of persons designated as Level 3 sex offenders. The report also charges that New York uses flawed procedures for assessing an offender's risk of re-offending.

Nationally, 65 percent of teens have been harassed or assaulted during the past year because of their appearance or their perceived or actual gender, sexual orientation, gender expression, race, ethnicity, disability or religion.