York, United Kingdom: A two-year-old British policy calling on police to verbally caution but not arrest individuals found in possession of small amounts of cannabis is only sporadically enforced by law enforcement, according to the findings of a study published this week by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
According to the report, British police issue warnings in fewer than half of all pot possession cases, despite the 2004 law change calling on law enforcement to cease arresting minor marijuana offenders unless they encounter special “aggravated” circumstances. The report also found that minorities were over-represented among those defendants arrested for marijuana violations.
Authors of the report state: “When cannabis was reclassified as a Class C drug [in January 2004], guidelines were issued advising officers to give street warnings for most possession offenses, arresting only in aggravated circumstances. [However,] we found that street warnings were issued for under half of possession offenses.”
They continued: “Over half of officers were against the downgrading and many said that cannabis arrests often led to the detection of more serious crimes. In fact, we found that this occurred in less than one percent of cases.”
Authors did note that despite poor police compliance, the guidelines had led to a decline in overall pot arrests, from a high of 84,000 arrests in 1998 to less than 50,000 in 2004. They estimated that the policy change had resulted in a savings of three-and-a-half million pounds ($690,000) or just over a quarter of a million officer hours among the 43 police forces surveyed.
In 2004, Parliament downgraded cannabis from a Class B to a Class C scheduled drug, marking the first substantial change to the nation’s 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act in more than 30 years.
For more information, please contact Allen St. Pierre, NORML Executive Director, or Paul Armentano, NORML Senior Policy Analyst, at (202) 483-5500. Full text of the study, “Policing cannabis as a Class C drug: An arresting change’ is available online from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation at: http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/details.asp?pubID=857.