UCLA

In the past decade, marijuana laws have come under scrutiny with Los Angeles serving as an epicenter and testing ground for regulations concerning the use and distribution of marijuana. The topic is polarizing, acting as a divide amongst the inhabitants of Los Angeles. In this paper, an analysis of crimes near legal marijuana dispensaries is pursued through a few modern statistical tools. This paper is motivated and built upon the 2011 research conducted by RAND authors Chang and Jacobson which sparked a commotion amongst supporters of anti and pro marijuana laws. An alternative view of Chang and Jacobson's result is pur- sued through the quantification of temporal sources of variation in the sampling distribution of a key regression parameter as well as classical spatial statistical tools. Further, we will make use of Voronoi tessellations in two ways. First, we will provide an alternative spatial regularization when interpreting crimes clus- tered around the marijuana dispensaries. Lastly, an application of the Voronoi Estimator, which estimates the intensity of an inhomogeneous point processes, will be implemented.