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NEW YORK (FOX 5 NEWS) - Forget your parents -- imagine getting busted for smoking pot by the city's top cop. That's just what happened to one New York City school girl. NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton hasn't been on patrol but he still knows how to sniff out wrongdoing.
Bratton entertained a crowd of lawyers at a breakfast at New York Law School as he described his encounter with the pot-smoking student. He said he was down near Wall Street one morning at 8:30 when he smelled marijuana. He said directly in front of him was a young woman "happily puffing away." She was wearing a school bag labeled with the name of a local school.
"My security officer came up on one side, I came up on the other, tapped her on the shoulder," Bratton said. "She looked over -- and I wish I had a photograph of that face. She instantly recognized me. We politely removed the marijuana and threw it into the local sewer and suggested she might have a better academic day without the influence of that on the way to school."
In 2014, Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that police officers would ticket, rather than arrest, people for possessing small amounts of marijuana. But smoking pot in public is still something you can be arrested for or given a summons. Lucky for the school girl, the commissioner let her off with a stern warning.
The commissioner showed he has a sense of humor. But he is serious about being against the legalization of marijuana because he feels it is a gateway drug. He does support marijuana for medicinal use. It was just one of a number of topics he talked about during the breakfast at New York Law School.