The Home Office have released a quarterly update on crime statistics:
Recorded drug offences for October to December 2007 increased by 20 per cent compared with the same period in 2006. Recent increases in drug offences are largely associated with increased police use of powers to issue cannabis warnings.
Context from the BBC, and again here where they focus on reaction from the Conservative leader David Cameron:
“If you look at the crime figures, what you see is drug crime up, gun crime up, and worryingly with drug crime, that’ll lead to further crimes in the future.
“The government always like to talk about the British Crime Survey figures but look across the last 10 years at the recorded crime figures – they’re up. Look at violent crime, doubled; gun crime almost doubled.”
Filed under: Conservatives, cannabis , BCS, drug offences
How strange that warnings for cannabis should be up, when we are constantly being told its use is down.
Even stranger, when one considers that many senior police officers, including Sir Ian Blair, is on record as saying that his officers are too busy to deal with cannabis possession, prefering instead to focus on cocaine and heroin. Somehow tha’s gone wrong too, there’s more cocaine and heroin on the streets of London and at cheaper prices than ever before, whilst the number of dealers aprehended are at an all time low.
Who’s kidding who?