The FBI has released its 2021 Crime in the Nation Reportwhich is usually considered to be the most comprehensive overview of the rise and fall of crime in the United States. However, this year only 63% of the 2021 data submitted by more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, and that includes the country’s two largest cities – New York and Los Angeles — making this year’s report the most vague since 1979, with just over half of all agencies reporting complete data.
What happened: A change in how the FBI prompts authorities to report crimes in 2021 resulted in a slump in voluntary but expected participation.
Weihua Li, a data reporter for The Marshall Project NPR told NPR that the FBI’s data gap will make it much more difficult to analyze crime trends and verify claims that politicians tend to hurl at one another.
One thing is clear: cannabis is still the favorite pastime of the nation’s cops
Despite the incomplete FBI data, arresting people for cannabis crimes is still one of the police departments’ favorite pastimes.
Forty-five percent of drug seizure offenses in 2021 involved seizures of cannabis or hashish, according to the FBI National incident-based reporting system, which reported 885,509 offenses related to the confiscation of a controlled substance in 2021. Of these, 400,340 concerned cannabis seizures.
numbers are missing
Unlike last year’s reports, it remains unclear how many people were arrested for marijuana-related violations in 2021. Why? For the first time in over 50 years, the FBI’s national estimates are not publicly available.
However, according to annual arrest statistics archived by NORMALdid the police Over 28 million cannabis-related arrests since 1965. Annual marijuana-related arrests peaked in 2008 at over 800,000 per year, before steadily declining over the past decade.
“At a time when voters and their elected representatives across the country are reassessing state and federal marijuana policies, it is unthinkable…
