If you're caught speeding or jaywalking in Dallas, you get a ticket. That's what some city leaders now want for anyone caught possessing a small amount of marijuana.
"If I had the power to legalize marijuana, I would do it," said Dallas City Councilman Philip Kingston.
Kingston is leading the effort to make Dallas a "cite-and-release" city for anyone caught with less than 2 oz. of marijuana.
Kingston says statistically, marijuana possession arrests disproportionately involve young Latino or African-American men.
"They're not real criminals for smoking a little pot," Kingston said. "But we don't want them to learn to be criminals by sending them to jail."
Kingston says it's also about resources. The Dallas Police Department averages about 200 marijuana-only arrests a month. Since Jan. 1, more than 100 police officers have left DPD.
"We're really in a police crisis," Kingston explained. "An officer who wastes his time taking a young man to jail when he could just write that guy a ticket really is misappropriating the public's resources."
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"This really isn't the big thing that Texas is still kind of making it," pointed out Gregg Gallian, a criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor in the Dallas County District Attorney's office. "The cases is almost always going to get dismissed."
Both men point to changing attitudes about marijuana over the past few years.
A poll released this week by the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune showed two years ago, 24 percent of Texans polled said marijuana should never be legalized. Earlier this month, that number had dropped to 17 percent.
The Dallas City Council has until the end of March to vote on the issue. Kingston said he believes there is enough support to pass a cite-and-release policy.
