Marijuana arrests increased in 2007
The FBI's yearly report on crime data was released this week, and shows that a record number of Americans were arrested for marijuana possession in 2007:
872,721 Americans were arrested for marijuana in 2007, and of those arrests, 89% or 775,138 were arrests for simple possession - not buying, selling, trafficking, or manufacture (growing) . . . This represents an increase in marijuana arrests of 5.2% from the previous year and the fifth straight year marijuana arrests have increased from the previous year. Now a marijuana smoker is arrested at the rate of 1 every 37 seconds and almost 100 marijuana arrests per hour.
In comparison, Grits points out that "597,447 were for violent crimes, and 1,610,088 were for property crimes. That means just 15.54% of arrests were for violent crimes or property offenses." Dallas criminal defense lawyer Robert Guest takes this a step further, finding that the clearance numbers (crimes solved) for 2007 were:
Murder 60%Rape- 40%
Robbery- 25%
When marijuana is legal the police can work on the 40% of annual uncleared murders. We owe it to the victims of real crime to quit wasting law enforcement resources on marijuana consumers.
What do you want your police solving and/or preventing? Pot smoking, or violent/property crime?
South Carolina had a total of 213,355 arrests, of which 10,681 were arrests for violent crimes, 302 were arrests for murder, and 30,679 were arrests for drug crimes
Just days before the FBI released their statistics showing that over 872,000 Americans were arrested in 2007 for marijuana, our esteemed Drug Czar stated on C-Span that "we did not arrest 800,000 marijuana users," and went on to explain that "we arrest people because they are usually involved with things like violent offenses . . ."
Right around 1:38 on the video: