An aide for Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday that the mayor is getting ready for marijuana legalization in the city.

De Blasio's press secretary confirmed the news — which the New York Daily News first reported — on Twitter on Sunday evening.

The mayor is planning to order the NYPD to issue summonses to people caught smoking marijuana in public instead of arresting them.

He is also creating a task force made up of city officials that would tackle issues, such as how police officers would handle public smokers, and create public health campaigns.

De Blasio has long been lukewarm towards legalizing the drug for recreational use, but he has expressed more openness in recent weeks as political momentum has grown in New York state.

Last week, de Blasio promised that the NYPD would reform and overhaul its marijuana arrest policies, after data from the city showed that black and Latino men were arrested at disproportionate rates.

Speaking to NY1 last Monday, de Blasio said his administration has driven down the number of marijuana arrests, but he admitted that the city needs to do better to rectify the disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos being arrested for marijuana possession.





Mayor de Blasio says the city needs to do better to rectify the disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos being arrested for marijuana possession. #NY1Politics pic.twitter.com/cg99A2Wr5K — Spectrum News NY1 (@NY1) May 15, 2018 <_script charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js">

Meanwhile, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance said Tuesday that his office would no longer prosecute any low-level marijuana offenses, including smoking in public, starting in August.





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A growing number of city elected officials have called for legalization in the past few weeks, including City Comptroller Scott Stringer, Public Advocate Letitia James, and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson. Many of them have pointed out the racial disparities in arrests.

"It's going to be smoked in public. So when it's smoked in public, how do you handle it? We don't believe that jailing young black and Latino men at a substantially higher rate makes any sense," Johnson said last Tuesday.



On the state level, Gov. Andrew Cuomo commissioned a study on legalization earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the New York Democratic Party is expected to endorse legalization at its convention later this week.