Friday, March 29, 2013

Next time someone brings up the 'wonderful' British crime rates,

point them over here:
Why? It is a matter of policy. As Chief Inspector Colin Greenwood points out here, the Home Office believes it unfair to brand a man a murderer until he has been tried, convicted, and exhausted his appeals.

As a result, murders that have not been solved are not included. If indications in the Telegraph are correct, that would substantially reduce the homicide rate in itself. Murders that have resulted in an arrest but no conviction are not counted. Convictions that have not been appealed are apparently not counted. And the number of minorities reported as murder victims is far below either the demographics or of reason. 

If the media reports of a total of 4,760 “violent fatalities of interest to the police” from 1 January 2011 to 30 November 2012 are correct, the murder rate is 4.7 per 100,000 population, the same as our much more inclusive homicide rate, and substantially higher than the United States murder rate.


1 comment:

Keith said...

I think 10% of British homicides making the criteria for going into the reported figures sounds a little bit optimistic.

Whatever the figure, it makes a lot of sense for the British Homicide rate to be higher than the US - all other confrontational crimes have been more than twice as high in Britain as in the united state, since the mid 1990s or before.

Rape, mugging, assault, burglary...

all are higher in Britain than in the united state - about twice as high.