Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson announced Monday that people in Cleveland caught with pipes or syringes containing drug residues will no longer be charged with felonies. Under current practice in Cleveland, people caught with dirty paraphernalia are charged with felony drug possession.

More than 6,000 people were arrested on felony drug charges every year in the city. The mayor said he expected the change to reduce that number by from 1,200 to 1,500.

Under Jackson's proposal, it would take three dirty needle arrests to earn a felony drug possession charge. A first drug paraphernalia arrest would be charged as a second-degree misdemeanor and a second as a first-degree misdemeanor. People charged with either of those offenses could be diverted to Cleveland's drug court. A third offense would be sent to Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court and treated as a drug possession felony.

Jackson portrayed the measure as aimed at getting drug users into treatment without saddling them with a felony record as well as helping to improve the quality of life in the city. "If people have a couple chances, they better take advantage of it," the mayor said. "This is about helping people and stopping the behavior that is destroying our neighborhoods," he added.

Cleveland is the only large city in Ohio that routinely charges paraphernalia cases as felonies. Community activists there have argued for years that since similar cases in the suburbs are treated as misdemeanors, Cleveland residents have been treated unfairly.

But although tensions about racial disparity in Cleveland's drug war are simmering -- the Plain Dealer did a recent series on disparities in felony drug prosecutions -- Mayor Jackson attempted to tamp them down. Drug users come from all communities, he said, and suburban users would be treated just like inner city ones. "It's not a race issue," he said. "Everybody will be treated the same."

Well, that's progress, we suppose.