When a panicked stranger emailed me this past weekend to say that police in Cartersville, Georgia, had “locked up a hundred kids when they claimed to find less than an ounce of weed at a house party,” I didn’t need to ask if the kids were black. I already knew. Police departments across north Georgia, a region north of Atlanta where Cartersville is located, just aren’t that likely to arrest 100 white kids at a house party if they discovered less than an ounce of marijuana. stranger emailed me this past weekend to say that police in Cartersville, Georgia, had “locked up a hundred kids when they claimed to find less than an ounce of weed at a house party,” I didn’t need to ask if the kids were black. I already knew. Police departments across north Georgia, a region north of Atlanta where Cartersville is located, just aren’t that likely to arrest 100 white kids at a house party if they discovered less than an ounce of marijuana. But that’s exactly what happened in Cartersville. When I searched for local news reports in Atlanta and found that police actually arrested, charged, and jailed these people — the overwhelming majority of them young and black — for marijuana possession, I was initially puzzled. Had all 70 of them possessed marijuana? Nope.

Many of the men and women who were arrested were then fired from their jobs after they were left in jail for days on end.

After claiming to find less than an ounce of weed in total — which has a street value of around $150 to $200 and would mean only a ticket in the nearby city of Atlanta — police in Cartersville charged all 70 people gathered for a birthday party — including men, women, boys, and girls, ranging from the ages of 15 to 31 — with drug possession and hauled them off to Bartow County Jail. A pregnant woman said she was verbally abused and mistreated in jail. Another person said they were threatened with Tasers and locked in actual cages. Some of the attendees were military veterans and college students who were home for the holidays. Others were standout student athletes. Many of these people’s lives will be ruined because of that small amount of marijuana. Scores of lawyers have been hired; nearly $100,000 in bail money was paid; and good people — who, for all we or the cops know, have never even smoked weed — are wondering if they are about to have a criminal record. Their mugshots were publicly released. Unable to afford bail, many of the men and women who were arrested were then fired from their jobs after they were left in jail for days on end. “I thought they were just gonna shut the party down and everybody was going to go home,” said Deja Heard, who had rented the home on Airbnb for her 21st birthday. And the partygoers didn’t even understand what was happening: “We did not know what we were going to jail for,” said Nija Guider in an interview with Tyisha Fernandes of Atlanta’s CBS affiliate. Other attendees said police initially had told them to get into the police vans to get warm since it was freezing cold outside — only to keep them there and haul them off to jail. This is something you might expect in north Georgia. I know Georgia and these parts of it well. I lived in Atlanta for most of my adult life — the actual city. North Georgia likes to consider itself part of Atlanta, but it’s not. One of the reasons is that it’s outside a belt around the city where the dynamics surrounding race suddenly change. That’s not to say that black people don’t face the risk of arrest for marijuana in the immediate Atlanta area; in fact, the two Georgia counties that make up Atlanta and some of its surroundings have some of the most racially disproportionate rates of marijuana arrests in the U.S., according to a 2013 study by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The arrests happened outside a belt around the city where the dynamics surrounding race suddenly change.