A survey completed by Pew Research Centre has found that more than two-thirds of United States’ police officers think marijuana should be legal for either personal or medical use. Looking closely at the data it is clear to see that this statement, if not read carefully could be seen to be misleading. With 69% of police officers agreeing that marijuana should be legal for certain things it appears that well over half of the US police force believe marijuana is wrongly illegal. However, further on in the article it states that the survey found that only 32%, just one-third of the survey, believe marijuana should be legal for BOTH medical and recreational use, whereas 37% of the survey believes the substance should be legal for medical use only.
During the survey, the research centre used a sample of nearly 8,000 officers nationwide. While this may seem like a reasonably large sample, considering there are around 1.13 million full time police officers across 50 different states, it may not be large enough to be able to generalise to the country as a whole. Taking this into account and assuming that the survey sampled an equal number of officers in each state, they would only have spoken to around 160 officers in each state, damaging the representativeness of the survey.