The claim
New York police department commissioner Bill Bratton said that in 2015, marijuana has been involved in “most violent acts in the city”.
His comments on Monday were in response to the 17% increase in shootings this year compared to the same period last year.
In 2015, there have been 54 homicides in the city. This time last year, there had been 45.
Pot is to blame, says Bratton.
He said the problem with “this seemingly innocent drug” is that it is being legalized in other states. These laws are so much of a problem, he says, that “people are killing each other over marijuana more so than anything that we had to deal with in the 80s and 90s with heroin and cocaine.”
Police department officials echoed Bratton’s statement that marijuana is connected to the uptick in homicides this year.
The evidence
Marijuana legalization campaigners were quick to twist Bratton’s words in favor of their cause.
“This is a perfect illustration for why marijuana should be regulated and controlled by the government,” Rachelle Yeung, a legislative analyst at the Marijuana Policy Project, told DNAinfo. “If there has been an increase in [violence], it’s because the government is leaving the current marijuana market in the hands of criminals.”
Yeung’s “if” points to the dubiousness of Bratton’s alarmist rhetoric.
First, the historical comparison is blatantly inaccurate, and Bratton should know this. He was hired as director of the city’s transit police after the citywide murder rate peaked at 2,262 in 1990 (pdf). Four years later, he was made police commissioner (for the first time).
That annual figure puts the number of deaths per month in 1990, on average, at 188. Considering less than one-third that number have been killed in a two-month period, the numbers so far don’t compare.
Now, the veracity of tying “most violent acts in the city” to marijuana is more difficult to answer.
Bratton said that of the 15% increase in drug-related homicides, marijuana was involved in 60% of the cases. NYPD’s chief of detectives, Robert Boyce, specified slightly more, saying there were seven drug-related murders this year and they involved marijuana dealers being targeted.
The other murders were tied to incidents including robberies, gang warfare and domestic violence. The role of marijuana in those incidents remains unclear, and the NYPD has not provided a full numerical breakdown of the malleable phrase “violent crimes”.
The “drug-related incident” comments do, however, show us that the city is not throttling back to its 1990 crime levels.
Officials in 1990 initially reported that the citywide murder rate was 2,245 people (17 fewer than the NYPD’s since-updated figure) and said 25.7% of those crimes were drug-related. So if Bratton’s comparison is true, more than 561 people will be killed in New York City this year, and they will all be tied to marijuana.
In 2014, there were 333 homicides.
If marijuana is playing a significant role in the city’s crime rates, it is not close to what people experienced decades earlier.
