There is a reason why we focus on homicide when we discuss violent crime. There is a body that the police and the statistics have to do something with. With other crimes, people might not report it because they don't think the police will do anything. This is a complicating factor for reports of rape, certainly. There is an interplay of female reluctance to report, police willingness to prosecute, and legal system sympathy for quick and neat solutions for fair ones. Maybe the police won't care if Blacks get into fights, or maybe they'll care more and prosecute, telling the white boys to just go home and cool off.
Still, those other crimes are there, and there are other statistics that capture some of it. Even though the numbers may vary by county, there are victimisation reports that are consistent across counties. These numbers are softer, but they ain't nothin'.
John Lott, who draws eye-rolls* from gun-control advocates who claim he has been debunked even though said debunkings only pay off at 30 cents on the dollar, has an interesting and controversial claim that Canada and Australia have much more violent crime than America. America's high homicide rate is important, but it is a small percentage of overall crime and is most related to drug turf. Also, suicide is a large part of the "gun-death" numbers and presumably requires separate discussion and interventions.
While the United States still leads in some categories, on the whole it has significantly less violent crime per capita than those two nations.
I might have expected that the numbers were closer to America's than people think. I didn't think there was any world where those countries exceeded our violent crime rate. In round numbers, victimisation reports yield estimates that 60% of violent crimes in the US makes it to a police report, while less than 40% make it to the official statistics in Australia and Canada. Look for yourself and see if you think he deals with the data fairly.
*And Lott, the much-despised, he tore the cover off the ball..."
1 comment:
When I lived in Atlanta there was a DA whose opponent was campaigning against him because he had a poor conviction rate with rape cases. He pointed out that he prosecuted rape whenever it was alleged, even if the case was unlikely to succeed from lack of evidence or what have you, whereas others with higher success rates refused to take the women seriously if the evidence was not strong.
There is also a problem with international comparisons arising from the fact that laws differ so much. Lately I’ve seen it pointed out several times that Canada loses more citizens to MAID than the US to gun violence; and that the EU nations often do to heat deaths than the US loses to gun violence. But MAID and environmental regulations that cross into the range of fatalities are legal in those nations.
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