FBI Crime Report: Cannabis Busts Still Favorite Pastime Of Nation's Cops, Though Experts Say Data Incomplete

The FBI released its 2021 Crime in the Nation Report, which is normally viewed as the most comprehensive look at the rise and fall of crime in the United States. However, this year only 63% of the nation’s more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies submitted data for 2021 and that includes the nation’s two largest cities – New York and Los Angeles – making this year’s report the vaguest since 1979 with just over half of all agencies reporting full data.

What Happened: A change in how the FBI requires agencies to report crimes in 2021 led the participation, which is voluntary but expected, to plummet.

Weihua Li, a data reporter for The Marshall Project told NPR that the FBI's data gap will make it much harder to analyze crime trends and fact-check claims that politicians tend to fling at each other.

One Thing Is Clear: Cannabis Busts Still Favorite Pastime Of Nation’s Cops

The FBI's incomplete data notwithstanding, busting people for cannabis crimes is still among police departments' favorite pastimes. 

Forty-five percent of drug seizure offenses in 2021 involved the confiscation of either cannabis or hashish, according to the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System, which reported 885,509 crimes in 2021 involving the seizure of a controlled substance. Of these, 400,340 involved the seizure of cannabis. 

Numbers Are Lacking

Unlike in past year’s reports, it remains unclear as to how many people were arrested in 2021 for pot-related violations. Why? For the first time in over 50 years, national estimates are not publicly available from the FBI.

However, according to annual arrest statistics archived by NORML, police have made over 28 million cannabis-related arrests since 1965. Annual marijuana-related arrests peaked at over 800,000 per year in 2008 before steadily declining over the past decade.

“At a time when voters and their elected officials nationwide are re-evaluating state and federal marijuana policies, it is inconceivable that government agencies are unable to produce any explicit data on the estimated costs and scope of marijuana prohibition in America,” said NORML’s deputy director Paul Armentano.

“Nonetheless, it remains clear from the limited data available that marijuana seizures and prosecutions remain the primary driver of drug war enforcement in the United States and that hundreds of thousands of Americans still continue to be arrested annually for these violations despite the reality that a majority of voters no longer believe that the adult-use of marijuana should be a crime," Armentano said.