Crimes against persons: up about 24%

Crimes against property: down about 10%

Crimes against society: up about 23% which includes narcotics crimes up by 21%

All other crimes: up over 150%

No one should be trying to read data out of this noise, but if you are, it's not looking good for any legalization argument.

Those two categories plus a similar growth buried in "All Other Offenses" accounts for essentially all of the growth in reported crimes.

There is probably a story there somewhere.

This was the second paragraph of the crime section.

If you can't find a statistic to cherry pick for your argument in a list of 36 you have a very bad argument.

• Arson has doubled since legalization! Bunch of flaming stoners.

• Embezzlement is down 88%! Who knew this was all society needed to fortify people's fiduciary responsibilities.

http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/720/documents/statistics/20...

How much more severe was this winter compared to last year?

I think this is a more important point than either you or the author realize. Yes it seems obvious, but was it worth calling marijuana users criminals in the first place? If you stop arresting all these people, and negative side effects don't increase, why were they getting arrested to begin with? Getting arrested is a huge deal and impacts your future job prospects, not to mention the short term aspects of possibly being jailed, etc. If that all happens before legalization, but not after legalization, can we really justify the seemingly arbitrary consequences in these people's lives? All other things being equal, getting a bunch of people arrested and calling them criminals is not necessarily better than leaving them be and calling them normal.

    > According to government data, the Denver city- and
    > county-wide murder rate has dropped 52.9% since recreational
    > marijuana use was legalized in January. This is compared
    > to the same period last year, a time frame encompassing Jan. 1
    > through April 30.

edit - though I agree that the data isn't good enough to really support any conclusions yet. That would take about ten years and several different cities.

I don't know why anyone thought this was a good enough article to upvote. Someone out there is working on a good article about the effects of legalization on crime rates. This isn't it.

According to government data, the Denver city- and county-wide murder rate has dropped 52.9% since recreational marijuana use was legalized in January. This is compared to the same period last year, a time frame encompassing Jan. 1 through April 30.