Police Chief Robert Contee addressed the crime wave in a lengthy press conference on Friday, citing a number of contributing factors, including the pandemic, too many guns in the city, and insufficient resources for officers.
“When you have something where people get high reward and can make a lot of money by selling illegal marijuana, and the risk for accountability is very low, that creates a very, very, very, very, very bad situation,” Contee said.
So while, as Contee says, there’s very little accountability for dealers walking around with less than two ounces of cannabis, there’s also very little accountability for those robbing these dealers who, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser pointed out on Twitter, are unable to go to the police.
Politico noted in 2019, however, that the reason for this has a lot to do with the “piecemeal” nature of cannabis laws, where it’s legal in some states and illegal in others, while being prohibited at the federal level.
The other reason the black market has persisted is, as Politico put it, “slow-moving regulators having trouble building a legal regime fast enough to contain a high-demand product that already has a large existing criminal network to supply it.” Regulators may be moving slow, but states are legalizing cannabis more rapidly than ever.