Drug effects


Do drug arrests clog the system so much that other crimes are less likely to be punished? One writer thinks so.
Now this is scary. Scott Christianson gives a new view.

Many observers credit the police because reported crime in the nation has generally been going down for nearly a decade.  Reported homicides in New York City and other jurisdictions recently hit their lowest level in more than 40 years.

But discussions of police performance often fail to note another important but overlooked trend, apparently unrelated to the falling crime rate: Federal statistics reveal that the nation's "clearance rate" - the percentage of cases for which police arrest or identify a suspect - has fallen dramatically.  And this shift is fraught with implications.

The arrest clearance rate for reported homicides recently dropped to about 60 percent compared with about 90 percent 50 years ago.  This means that a murderer today has about a 40 percent chance of avoiding arrest compared with less than 10 percent in 1950.  The record for other FBI Index Crimes is even more dismal: The clearance rates have sunk to 42 percent for forcible rape, 26 percent for robbery, and 13 percent for burglary and motor vehicle theft, all way down from earlier eras.

He's right. Every study and article up that I have seen up to this point hasn't mentioned the clearance rate. It certainly goes a long way to explain the public feeling about it. Even though the official crime rate has been dropping, people don't feel safer.

But that is not the scary part. That follows a little later.

It's not that America's cops haven't been making arrests - in fact, their total annual arrests jumped from 3.3 million in the nation in 1960 to 14 million in 2004, a staggering number that helps to explain why the United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world.

So, if reported crime has been going down and arrests have gone up, what accounts for the plummeting arrest clearance rates for murder, robbery, rape, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft?

Part of the answer must involve drug law enforcement - victimless offenses that aren't reported to the police or included as FBI Index Crimes.  Instead of arresting suspects for burglaries and other serious reported crimes, cops today spend much of their energy going after illegal drugs.  Their arrest rate for drug possession ( especially marijuana ) has shot up more than 500 times from what it was in 1965.

And what are some possible implications of this shift?

For one thing, it may give criminals the impression they can get away with nondrug related crimes.

For another, it may lessen public support for the police.  Polls show those who live in "high crime" neighborhoods are generally the most dissatisfied with the police.  Maybe this is because they have reported to the police that they have been victimized by robbery and other serious crimes, then witnessed that the police are not arresting anyone for it but are instead aggressively waging a "war on drugs" in the community.

Nevertheless, the matter of falling arrest clearance rates hasn't received much scrutiny from the police or the public.

There may not be a direct relationship between drug arrests and the falling clearing rate for other crimes. I suspect that there is, based on what I know of the prison population. But then I am libertarian and biased.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Thu - January 19, 2006 at 04:40 AM  Tag


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