<story><title>Six Months After Legalizing Marijuana, Two Big Things Have Happened in Colorado</title><url>http://mic.com/articles/92449/six-months-after-legalizing-marijuana-two-big-things-have-happened-in-colorado</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danielweber</author><text>The linked data shows 19 murders in the first five months of 2013, 11 murders in the same period in 2014.&lt;p&gt;First, this is very noisy data to make any predictions from. (I guess it&amp;#x27;s a good thing to have so few murders that it&amp;#x27;s hard to make generalizations.)  March 2014 alone had 5 murders compared to three last year.&lt;p&gt;Second, this isn&amp;#x27;t a 52.9% drop, even if you exclude May, which makes the drop from 17 to 9.  It&amp;#x27;s a 47.1% drop.&lt;p&gt;This is a very low quality article.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DatBear</author><text>They just worded it wrong, really... It should say it&amp;#x27;s 52.9% of what it was in 2013, meaning it is a 47.1% drop.&lt;p&gt;But linking to data for 5 months and then only using the 4 you want to use to skew numbers seems pretty ridiculous to me.&lt;p&gt;And then in the same page there&amp;#x27;s data for drug&amp;#x2F;narcotics violations which isn&amp;#x27;t even mentioned because it is going up (21% more) even though there are supposedly plummeting marijuana convictions. Also they stated that the crime rate in Denver is going down, yet the data shows the exact opposite.&lt;p&gt;Whole article seems like cherrypicking at its finest.</text></comment>
<story><title>Six Months After Legalizing Marijuana, Two Big Things Have Happened in Colorado</title><url>http://mic.com/articles/92449/six-months-after-legalizing-marijuana-two-big-things-have-happened-in-colorado</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danielweber</author><text>The linked data shows 19 murders in the first five months of 2013, 11 murders in the same period in 2014.&lt;p&gt;First, this is very noisy data to make any predictions from. (I guess it&amp;#x27;s a good thing to have so few murders that it&amp;#x27;s hard to make generalizations.)  March 2014 alone had 5 murders compared to three last year.&lt;p&gt;Second, this isn&amp;#x27;t a 52.9% drop, even if you exclude May, which makes the drop from 17 to 9.  It&amp;#x27;s a 47.1% drop.&lt;p&gt;This is a very low quality article.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xyzzy123</author><text>Agreed. I&amp;#x27;m pro decriminalization and&amp;#x2F;or legalization, but a 52% drop in the murder rate due to the legalization of marijuana doesn&amp;#x27;t even pass the laugh test let alone the kind of analysis people are proposing here.</text></comment>