What’s that you say?
Why is it then that so many Americans – and foreigners who come here – feel that the place is so, well, safe?
A British man I met in Colorado recently told me he used to live in Kent but he moved to the American state of New Jersey and will not go home because it is, as he put it, “a gentler environment for bringing the kids up.”
This is New Jersey. Home of the Sopranos.
Brits arriving in New York, hoping to avoid being slaughtered on day one of their shopping mission to Manhattan are, by day two, beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about. By day three they have had had the scales lifted from their eyes.
I have met incredulous British tourists who have been shocked to the core by the peacefulness of the place, the lack of the violent undercurrent so ubiquitous in British cities, even British market towns.
“It seems so nice here,” they quaver.
Well, it is!
Who would write such drivel?
“Can’t wait for your stats any longer folks. “:Ted.
It seems to Ted statistics provide the only evidence that counts. There are some problems with statistics and sometimes these problems are not made evident by other statistics.
For example; the murder rate is falling. Is it? or is it the fact that out Hospital Trauma Centers are a magnitude more efficient at saving life than they were 10 years ago and are getting steadily better each year. Is the crime and murder rate falling or are more stabbings, shootings, clubbings, etc, resulting in fewer deaths and fewer police reports? Is there really a big difference in murder rates between comparable centers in Canada and the US or is it the fact that in Canada a taxpayer paid ambulance rushes to the scene where in DC the private ambulance company knows they will not be paid for the trip. And once they do pick up the scumbag, they now have to find a trauma center who will take him for free.
Instead of letting statistics do our thinking for us lets introduce a little logic here with a scenario. I live in Vancouver where the home invasion rate is 1/3 of Seattle’s (it really isn’t but for comparison..). My cousin in Seattle can ward off his 3 home invasions with simply the sound of his winchester model 12 slide racking, behind his closed door. I have to suffer through my one home invasion because I am not permitted to do anything of the sort by law. Who is better off and safer?
And by the way, if it’s worth considering, I was the victim of a home invasion in safe old Canada back in good old really safe 1946 before we started this crime statistic thingy.
Ted: even if you are correct WRT gun crime and Liberal crime laws, I agree with Warwicks post. I will take my INDIVIDUAL RIGHT to preserve myself and my family before I trade that away for some (so called) marginal benifits. The ends NEVER justify the means.
Ted,
http://www.thefreeradical.ca/Violent_crime_statistics_Canada.htm
The youth stuff is further down. Think demographics all the way through.
Notice also that a lower percentage of youth criminals are charge now. The trend is pretty clear.
Not all of this stuff is useful. Stick to the facts that are footnoted and you’ll see that if you adjust for demographics, crime is up over the last 20 years when adjusted for demographics.
“south of here in Grand Forks and Fargo areas 66% as large as winnipeg they between them have 1-3 murders a year. While we have 18-33 for that extra 1/3 of the pop.”
The Peg is 10% aboriginal. Indians are vastly over-represented in all crime and particularly violent and sexual abuse crimes.
Oh, and Ted,
I once found a chart on the stats can site that showed the number of youth homocides whose trend was clearly up (it was absolute numbers of youth homocides, not percentages) but if you consider the fact that youth as a percentage of the total population is decreasing, that stat in percentage terms is even worse. There was a dip over the mid-2000’s but turned up over 06-07ish (and I go from memory.)
Maybe you can find it again but I don’t have the time.
None of which changes the fact that if your kid is raped or beaten or murdered you don’t give a flying f*** what the overall trend is. You only want justice and it’s the state’s job to provide it.
lets see? numbers are just numbers no matter what you attach them to. there was an intersting article at townhall .com on april26. doug giles was the author. the point of the article was as follows. when you can’t defend yourself you will eventually becomes someone’s target and that someone could be the people who are your rulers. 100’s of millions have died at the hands of their own governments because they were stupid enough to register their guns (smell that canadians) after registeration it is easy to take you guns away, on any pretext by the way. the u.s. second amendent is one of the best constitutional statements ever. try to crush the people and the people can shoot back. wow. what a great control on human nature.
oh, by the way. all liberal socialists are dangerous to the individuals freedom.
Ted’s just making noise to be annoying. Consider yourself the winner Ted, I’m annoyed. I hate it when intelligent people refuse to talk sense.
Ted, I lived in Toronto -before- it was dangerous up at Jane and Finch, I watched it grow to the home of trouble that it is today. I lived in Phoenix, I lived north of New York city, I lived oin a one cow town in Minnesota, and I live in Hamilton.
The ONLY place I’ve ever been assaulted is Hamilton. The ONLY place I’ve ever had my car broken into and stuff stolen out of it was Toronto. The ONLY place I’ve ever had drunk/stoned kids puking in my back yard and trying to COME INSIDE at 4:30am on a Sunday morning is right here in F##%&@(ing Hamilton.
You know what the cops did to the kid when they finally showed up? THEY DROVE HIM HOME. His punishment was they were going to wake his mum up and tell on him. See if you can imagine what would have happened to ME if I’d smacked his head while he was trying to get inside. Lawyers, maybe jail for a day or two, second mortgage to pay for the lawyers…
At the risk of repeating myself, in my personal experience I’m safer on a street corner in the worst, crappiest part of South Phoenix than I am in my house in Hamilton. The one reason for that is Liberal Crime Policies.
The rest of you guys can finish dealing with Ted, I’m going to go work off my irritation beating a piece of metal or something. Gad!
Cjunk, the answer to your question appears to be NO, dinosaurs are not becoming more intelligent. If Ted is any indication, they’re using their intelligence to increase the rate at which they become stupider.
The nationmaster data, while intriguing, is meaningless. Wholly worthless. The lists provide a good example of what is wrong with much sociological data. The inherent problem with this kind of ranking data is that the devil is in the details, as it were.
There is no discernible correlation between the reported occurrence results and the causation of those results. Simply, dissimilar sample groups are being compared and ranked without any structural procedures to identify and eliminate local bias that will affect both the occurrence of the risk, and the reporting of it. This isn’t to say correlations don’t exist – it simply says that it is impossible to discern any.
At best, the ranking data indicates that the bias factors between close rankings may be narrow in type and proximity, but even then, any correlation to any specific factor is absent.
Even if you were to pick adjacent ranks to study in detail, you’d be hard pressed to isolate the specific factors/biases that account for the difference. Its extremely difficult to do even within a population subset within a country( say, all WASPS living in a radius of 100 miles of the Centre of the Universe), let alone between countries. No normalization of biases can occur that will allow you to compare these statistics and draw any correlation.
Even explaining trending results within the same subset is nearly impossible, again because of the inability to adequately normalize biases across the sample, especially over time.
In short, the list doesn’t answer the question as to “are you safer in downtown London, New York, or Riyaud?”, because your safety doesn’t depend on the rank of the country in the list, but in your location (factored N-dimensionally, ie place, time, culture, circumstance, etc.) in each of these cities.
This is because the events themselves used to compile the statistic are not random, and each event individually has a unique set of causative factors, which, while similar to those of other events, are nonetheless not the same. Its cluster analysis of the most difficult kind, suitable mostly only to those with agendas, rather than programs of enlightenment.
Ted
I have chewed on a fair bit of US stats, most of the homicide in the US are in clusters centred in certain urban areas, (in fact if I recall 7 counties in the US account for a huge portion of the homicides), which distort the overall picture. At the very least gun ownership has been shown to be inconclusive in regards to crime, crime rates are affected by many factors, one of the biggest is the number of young males. The FBI however have stated (2004 I think) that over 2 million crimes were thwarted by armed citizens, this is considered a conservative number.
The statistical approach has an inherent flaw either way. It’s an attempt to apply characteristics of the group to the individual. For instance, whether or not the crime rate for (pick your crime) is 8% or 2% in a given area, it’s meaningless if the criminal lives down the street from you and is terrorizing you and your family, vandalizing your car and breaking into your house. Equally, if walking the street at night risks an assault, then crime is a problem regardless of its incidence. The only value the statistics have is as a measure of tax funding which needs to be dedicated to policing and enforcement.
The criminal act, the criminal and the victim are all discrete entities. The problem for you is not one of “How do I lower the crime rate for our community?” it’s “How do I get this particular perp apprehended, prevented from repeating the crime against me, and obtain compensation where feasible?” The problem is more akin to one of insurance. Once the criminal begins his life of crime, the cat’s out of the bag. It’s not as though everyone of your neighbours spends 0.3% of their time breaking into your house, it’s that one of your neighbours spends all of his time breaking into houses. The remedy is to apprehend, punish and prevent recidivism either by making the punishment sufficiently distasteful to act as a deterent, or keep the perp incarcerated until the criminal urges dissipate. Meanwhile the risk of a discrete criminal act should be high enough to act as a real deterent, and the victim should be sufficiently empowered (how’s that for a good liberal term?) to be able to resist crime without any more fear than that inherent in the discrete confrontation, i.e. the “insurance policy” has to actually kick in when it counts. The right to use force in defence against a house intrusion without fear of additional legal consequences would be an example of being able to enforce the insurance policy.
Warwick: Thanks. I will look that up. I appreciate the effort to back up your statements with some evidence.
testing
Stats for the USA …
USA 1979-2006 Crime stats
I’ve been fishing around some old posts and have not come up with the supporting docs yet…. But a I can tell that the British Home office doctors their crime stats by changing the classifications of crimes and also the reporting rules for local districts.
Basically British crime and especially crimes against persons is well into double digit increases for any time after the early 1990s.
Anyway isn’t the point of the British expat’s revelation that he’d been subjected to nothing but propaganda about the nature of life in the US?
Isn’t that also the root problem with our home grown leftards and America haters?
People should really get the hell out of their basements (or their parent’s basements) and go talk to real live people once in a while.
From an old post: http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/006365.html#c170627
Some people try and avoid acknowledging the reality of the British handgun ban policy failure by arguing weapons definitions (blaming the increase on imitation handguns, for example), category misdirection (imitation versus air weapons, handguns versus firearms/weapons, etc.), and changes in reporting standards (the April 2002 alteration to the National Crime Recording Standard – the NCRS). What does a brief straightforward review of the appropriate government documentation reveal?
Consider the Home Office Statistical Bulletin – Violent Crimes Overview, Homicide and Gun Crime 2004/2005, found at http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs06/hosb0206.pdf. Look at Fig. 3.1 on p. 72: crimes reported in which a firearm was used, category ‘all weapons EXCLUDING air weapons’ – every year from 98/99 (the year after the handgun ban) to 04/05 (latest data) has seen an increase, rising from ~5,000 to ~11,000 over this period. While the population grew by some ~2% over this reporting period (~0.3% per annum average growth rate), this firearms crime rate category more than doubled.
The NCRS (altered reporting standard) was implemented on April 2002, and affected the data from 02/03 onwards. It purportedly increases the 02/03 stats over the previous standard. Looking at Fig. 3.1 again (‘all weapons excluding air weapons’), the increase is near-linear from ~5,000 in 98/99 to ~10,000 in 01/02 (doubling in the three years after the handgun ban, under the old standard), “jumping” to ~10,500 in 02/03 and ~11,000 in 04/05.
Is the “Oh, it’s not handguns!” argument valid? Consider Fig. 3.4 on p. 75, which lists the firearm offenses by type of principle weapon: For handguns alone, in 98/99, there were ~2,700 reported cases, rising to ~5,900 cases in 01/02, and then the cases reported immediately began to steadily decline under the new standard to ~4,300 in 04/05. The ‘all weapons excluding air weapons’ category includes imitation weapons. BB guns constitute the bulk of such weapons, although the category includes include soft air weapons, deactivated firearms and blank firers. Their use has increased steadily, linearly from ~500 in 98/99 to ~1,200 in 01/02 under the old reporting standard, with faster growth to ~3300 in 04/05 under the new standard (see Fig. 3.4 on p.75). This growth roughly mirrors a matching decline in the reported handgun that began the year the NCRS was implemented.
It is transparently obvious that big yearly increases in reported firearms crimes happened (or continued) after the handgun ban. Clearly, the ban either worsened the situation, or had little effect (one would need to analyze pre-ban data to distinguish between these two options). Oddly, no statistically significant reported change happened after the new standard was introduced (10,000 and 11,000 are statistically equal). In the absence of any social or policy change since the “doubling period” that preceded the standard change, the more recent data are suspect in their uniformity, calling into question the process by which they are generated.
If you find now yourself questioning just what constitutes a firearms crime, and hope that a “proper” definition will restore the rose tint to the spectacles, I invite you to consider Table 3b on p. 76. This table reports firearm crimes by degree of injury. Interestingly, the incidence of injury for crimes involving air weapons has no apparent trend (1900 plus/minus 400 per year). Non-air weapon injuries, on the other hand, have increased from 864 in 98/99 to 3,856 in 04/05 – an increase greater than a factor of four!
We can now stop the experiment, OK?
didn’t mark twain get it right when he said….”There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
now i can see the use of stats when running an insurance company but linking anti-gun legislation to a decrease in violent illegal behaviour reminds me of predicting the future with bird entrails. on the upside for ted – i can state that temple interpreters enjoyed 50/50 odds in being right and they would be held in respect until they hit a bad streak in their predictions. ted – i get the impression that you’re feeling pretty lucky. me too – i’m lucky i don’t live in a slum in bogota.
Others show, for example, that Calgary and Edmonton are more violent than Toronto or Montreal.
Not surprising. Criminals go where the money is.
ol hoss, yes they do! More to the point, they go where the permissive environment is. And that, right there, is the central misunderstanding that makes the Liberal concept null and void.
Liberals consider the “root causes” of crime to be economic. Marxism 101. This ignores the basic facts of human nature, A) no matter what you have you’ll always be wanting -something-, and B)no matter how much you have you’ll HATE it if somebody steals from you.
Exceptions to these basics are considered saints. They are to be emulated, but to expect whole populations of human beings to act as the saints do is to be forever disappointed.
The root cause of crime is thus clearly not economic. Crime, be it theft, assault or what have you, is not an autonomic response to an economic stimulus. Its the voluntary response of a thinking person, excepting the extreme examples from the annals of psychology. Generally people steal, sell drugs, whatever because its EASIER.
Drug dealing particularly is a great gig. Set your own hours, cash business, super duper high margin product, zero overhead, highly motivated buyers, low taxes (bribes). What’s not to like? Oh sure it kills people, but considering the -type- of people it kills one could almost consider that a public service.
So obviously hordes of morally challenged lazy scuts want to do this. In areas where government obligingly protects sales margins by banning the drug and protects salesmen by adopting a Liberal “root causes” social welfare policy, hordes of them do. End result is multitudes of drug damaged retards and suppliers with a vested increase in growing that multitude as fast as possible. Lots of hard cash available to corrupt the cops, business is booming!
One problem, people hate living in that. Its dangerous. So in areas where the government does not DIS-empower the residents by forbidding them weapons and self defense, paying off the cops isn’t enough to keep the business booming. Smart businessmen move away from hostile areas.
When you see Britain having the trouble they are with street crime, you don’t need to look any farther than their policy on personal self defense for the cause. If only the police are authorized to use force, that’s not much of a deterrent to anything. Add the race-based “special deals” for certain groups, and you get London. Or Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton. Or the two year old armed standoff in Caledonia Ontario for that matter. That’s nothi8ng more or less than a protection racket for the cigarette smugglers, enabled by Liberal Crime Policies.
No brainer, really. Well, unless your pride is tied up with being a Liberal I suppose. Then you’ve got to prove up is down and water isn’t wet.
I would also say that crime stats for Canada are diluted somewhat by a lack of reporting. In SE Alberta, the RCMP don’t even bother to investigate B&E’s unless some heinous crime was committed. They are too busy dealing with drug addled losers who are on the catch and release program. So, why report a crime? Most people will just deal with the damage and try to go on.
The resentment lingers however, and we yearn for a way to get back at the scumbags. Home defence seems like a nice start.