Violent crime fell 1.9 percent in '08, FBI says

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Violent crime dropped for the second year in a row in 2008, according to an annual FBI crime report released Monday.

The FBI's annual crime report is based on statistics provided by almost 18,000 law enforcement agencies.

The total number of violent crimes nationwide dropped 1.9 percent compared with 2007, the FBI reported. Murders and non-negligent manslaughters declined 3.9 percent, aggravated assaults dropped 2.5 percent, and forcible rapes fell by 1.6 percent.

The 89,000 estimated forcible rapes in 2008 was the lowest reported total in 20 years.

Racial minorities suffered disproportionately as victims of some of the most violent crimes. Almost half of the country's 14,000 murder victims, for example, were African-American.

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New FBI Report: A Pot Arrest Every 37 Seconds in 2008

By Jeralyn,

The FBI today released its report (available here) on arrests for 2008. Here's the table (jpg) for all drug arrests. Ryan Grim at Huffington Post has reviewed the report and writes:

Someone is arrested in the United States for a drug-law violation every 18 seconds, an FBI report released Monday shows. More than four-fifths of those arrests were for possession only and nearly half were for possession of marijuana. Of the 847,863 marijuana arrests -- one every 37 seconds -- 89 percent were for possession alone.

We're wasting vast amounts of money busting drug users. No wonder we're going broke and can't afford health insurance. Remember this report (pdf) by a Harvard University economist finding that legalizing and regulating drugs would inject tens of billions a year into the U.S. economy?

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Doesn't sound to me like the "war on drugs" is winding down. Tom