The legalization of recreational cannabis in Washington state (I-502) and Colorado (A-64) created a natural experiment with ancillary unknowns. Of these unknowns, one of the more heavily debated is that of the potential effects on public health and safety. Specific to public safety, advocates of legalization expected improvements in police effectiveness through the reduction in police time and attention to cannabis offenses, thus allowing them to reallocate resources to more serious offenses. Using 2010 to 2015 Uniform Crime Reports data, the research undertakes interrupted time-series analysis on the offenses known to be cleared by arrest to create

Current understanding of victimization of those in rural settlements compared to other types of settlements is limited by inadequate classifications of settlement types. The typical approach—one based on the incorrect use of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s classification of metropolitan areas—may mask important variations in the incidence of violent victimization, and in part explain mixed results related to this issue. To investigate this, we detail problems with following the typical approach, and then describe an alternative measure of settlement type. We next use this alternative settlement type measure to estimate the incidence of intimate partner violence (IPV) against women from 1992–2015 National Crime Victimization Survey data. Over the period examined, the incidence of IPV was highest for women living in small towns (11.4 per 1,000). In contrast, women living in dispersed rural settlements (7.9 per 1,000) shared rates with those in suburbs (7.9 per 1,000) and exurbs (7.1 per 1,000) while reporting rates lower than those of women residing in the urban core (9.7 per 1,000). These results provide clarity to earlier research on the incidence of IPV across settlement types and they call into question the salience of geographic isolation as a determinant of IPV in nonmetropolitan locales.

Ethnographic research from the United States on gender-based violence showing that rural isolation exacerbates intimate partner violence (IPV) is at odds with estimates from nationally representative victimization surveys which indicate that the incidence of IPV in settlements conventionally characterized as rural is similar to or less than the incidence for urban settlements. One possible reason for this discrepancy—that the conventional metropolitan statistical area–based measure of settlement type fails to distinguish isolated rural areas from other nonmetropolitan places—is put to test in this study. Pooled data from 578,471 women interviewed a total of 1,672,999 times in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) between 1994 and 2015 were used in this study to consider the risk of IPV across a measure of settlement type that differentiates nonmetropolitan settlements into dispersed rural areas or residentially concentrated small towns. Logistic regression estimates of semiannual IPV prevalence were modeled using generalized estimating equations and robust standard errors to compensate for repeated measures and for the complex sample design of the NCVS. After adjusting for age, race/ethnicity, year, and time in sample, these analyses indicated that women from dispersed rural settlements had a lower semiannual risk of IPV (2.31 per 1,000 [95% confidence interval [CI] = [2.02, 2.64]]) than women from small towns (3.30 per 1,000 women [95% CI = [2.82, 3.87]]) or women from the urban core (2.60 per 1,000 [95% CI = [2.44, 2.77]]). Contrary to the ethnographic record, the results of this study indicate that women living in rural isolation are at a lower risk of IPV victimization relative to other American women and that women from small towns—the urbanized portions of nonmetropolitan counties—have been most at risk of suffering physical violence committed by an intimate partner.