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Wednesday, March 27, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

At Least One Person|Arrested (Maybe)

It's so disappointing when a headline doesn't mean what it says.

This headline appeared in the online version of The Washington Post last week:

"Every minute, someone gets arrested for marijuana possession in the U.S."

Wow!

Who could this person possibly be and why does he keep getting arrested?

Is he or she too stupid not to realize it's a bad idea to keep pulling out joints in front of uniformed people with handcuffs?

And why are the police focusing all their efforts on that one guy? Aren't there other people possessing marijuana?

This promised to be a really interesting story until I read it and found out that different people were being arrested every minute.

Or are they?

As far as I can tell, the Post blogger just divided the number of arrests in 2014 by the number of minutes in a year. My guess is that there were lots of minutes during the year when there were no arrests.

Of course, these arrests could be of one person. This is what the actual newly issued FBI report says: "The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program counts one arrest for each separate instance in which a person is arrested, cited, or summoned for an offense."

So it could be one guy and he may never have been arrested.

But I quibble (because it's so much fun).

There is one frightening statistic in the report. Check out Table 29 and look to see what category generated by far the greatest number of estimated arrests.

Yep. Once again, our greatest crime-problem area is "All Other Offenses."

Someone needs to do some investigative reporting.

What are these "other offenses" and how do we avoid becoming other-offense victims?

And, perhaps more importantly, why is the government covering up this crime wave by refusing to tell us what it is?

It's disturbing.

Favorite headline of the week: "Police lay trap for rogue cow in New Hartford."

Could those "other offenses" be animal crime?

I don't know, but this bovine criminal, according to the Utica Observer-Dispatch, "has been on the loose for several months."

A master criminal apparently has outwitted the authorities time and time again.

At this point, you may be wondering what a cow does when it goes rogue.

Well, according to the news report, she enjoys jogging on the local freeways - and then vanishing into the shrubbery before she's caught.

Picture police cars whizzing by while the miscreant chuckles in her hideout.

Why does this remind me of a Roadrunner cartoon?

Law School Defamation? I could be wrong but I think students at Yale Law School may have been defamed by, of all things, Science magazine.

Check out "The Distributional Preferences of an Elite" in the magazine's September issue.

The elite in question are Yale law students - who, I guess, could be flattered by being called elite. But the article then goes on to say that a study shows that the Elis don't much care about income equality even though most of them are Democrats.

This apparently is scientifically proven by the way they played a game.

It's kind of like predicting who will be the next Warren Buffet with a Monopoly tournament.

I see a class action defamation suit on behalf of Yale law students in the near future.

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