Please do not jump to conclusions and read the footnote which addresses that point explicitly: "drug seizure records, amounts seized do not appear to be the cause of this change."

I do not have access to the original paper, but author's assessment that the bunching is due to prosecutorial discretion is a little puzzling to me. If it is true that prosecutors are choosing to prosecute cases that are above the cutoff at a higher rate than those below, I would have expected everything above 280g to increase, rather than a solitary spike at 280g?

From Note 1:

> prosecutors can charge people for amounts that are not the same as the amount seized and then notes

If someone is caught with 500g you can simply charge 280g and make your life easier. If you charge 500g the defendant will argue it was just 450g, which even if irrelevant makes the case seem weaker to the jury--death by a thousand cuts. But if you charge 280g and present evidence of 500g, it makes the case seem more like a slam-dunk to the jury.

Ah interesting/makes sense - thanks for the explanation!

That seems to mean "if you assume that the drug seizure records are not falsified, you can conclude that the police are not lying or producing false evidence".

It means the police are not falsifying records of drug seizures to make them hit any of the statutory thresholds. They may be falsifying them in other ways but this can’t be verified one way or another by this data.

From the quote in the footnotes: "I do find bunching at 280g after 2010 in case management data from the Executive Office of the US Attorney (EOUSA). I also find that approximately 30% of prosecutors are responsible for the rise in cases with 280g after 2010, and that there is variation in prosecutor-level bunching both within and between districts. Prosecutors who bunch cases at 280g also have a high share of cases right above 28g after 2010 (the 5-year threshold post-2010) and a high share of cases above 50g prior to 2010 (the 10-year threshold pre-2010). Also, bunching above a mandatory minimum threshold persists across districts for prosecutors who switch districts. Moreover, when a “bunching” prosecutor switches into a new district, all other attorneys in that district increase their own bunching at mandatory minimums. These results suggest that the observed bunching at sentencing is specifically due to prosecutorial discretion"

If you had to work to parse it like I did, the TL;DR is that a minority (30%) of prosecutors are responsible for the "bunching" and it seems they intentionally are choosing to prosecute more cases at this level.

So, there may be police falsifying evidence, but the paper couldn't detect that and it seems more driven by prosecutors choosing to do "bunching" to get the amount of crack to hit the minimum.

IANAL so not sure what bunching means. Maybe instead of charges from separate arrests, they group them together as one large case?

i mean, it's the cops, what do you expect exactly