This. It is a matter of health, not taste or personal preference. |
Wait. DIdn't you all want to legalize this stuff? And now you're complaining? |
It's not delusional, MPD used to make more than 2,000 pot possession arrests per year. Most of them didn't go to prison, true. But those statistics aren't just imaginary. |
But it is lying with statistics. If someone was arrested for raping a child, and the police also threw in a charge for pot possession, you would say that’s evidence of a war on pot. I’d say it’s going after people who commit heinous crimes and throwing in a pot charge at the end because f them. But if they hadn’t done something heinous, they would have never been arrested in the first place. |
We did not all vote to legalize this stuff. |
No, sorry, you're just wrong about that. These are arrests, not charges, and the Post found most cases never went any further than the arrest. Before weed was decriminalized, MPD used to arrest people all the time for possession. 40 arrests a week! If most of these charges were just tossed in on top of much more serious charges, prosecutors wouldn't have dropped or no-papered 70 percent of the ones the Post examined in 2019. Also, there were a total of 12,000 crimes recorded in D.C. last year, about 10,000 of which were property crimes. How do you make 2,000 marijuana arrests in connection with other more heinous crimes if there are only 2,000 non-property crimes reported in the first place? |
You’re looking at the wrong numbers (you’re obviously looking at the so far this year stats). DC typically records 30,000 crimes per year, of which about 4,000 are violent crimes |
You are too smart for your own good. You have no life experience about any of this so why do you feel the need to argue about something you obviously don’t know anything about? I have smoked for decades and let me assure you that cops have been using cannabis as a pretext to harass outsiders and perceived undesirables the whole time. I also know for a fact that cops will continue to try to harass cannabis users even now that it is legal. Just read this thread and see for yourself how much insanity and hate is directed at law abiding cannabis users. This is a culture war. |
Stop trying to make the war on cannabis happen, Gretchen. NOBODY CARES that you smoke. They do care if you make life worse for them - such as creating a nuisance with your pot smoke wafting into their house. |
OK, fine, but there's still no way that every pot arrest before it was decriminalized was precipitated by an arrest for something more violent. Your "someone was arrested for raping a child" example was absurd hyperbole anyway that I shouldn't have bothered replying to. If you seriously think the police never arrested people in D.C. (especially black people east of the river) just for possession of marijuana, you're just being willfully ignorant. |
This is DC. Most cops are black. |
Yes, and? Black cops can't mostly arrest black people? I didn't say anything about what race the cops were, but it's a matter of public record that most of the thousands of simple marijuana possession arrests involved black people in wards 7 and 8. |
Probably not a coincidence that the vast majority of arrests for violent crimes are also in wards 7 and 8. |
Look, if you really want to keep on insisting that most pot arrests were just incidental to arrests for more violent crimes, that's fine, but it's not exactly a controversial or radical idea that the police used to (and in some places, still do) make arrests just for possession of small amounts of marijuana. No other violent crime involved. I'm not going to bother continuing to argue with you about this, as it would take more time exploring the data than I'm interested in devoting to this stupid message board. But I promise you that more recently than the 1970s, people have been arrested for nothing more than possessing a small amount of weed. |
This alternative universe you describe where DC cops sweat the small stuff is oddly appealing compared to the reality of crime being at a 20 year high and enforcement seeming to be at an all time low |