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[Reelya]

Well, i wouldn't put too much faith in Nationmaster statistics to compare crime rates, other than homicide, nationmater claims many less crimes committed in Venezuela than the UK, so one would have to take those sorts of comparisons into account.

Venezuela also prosecutes a lot less individuals than UK, so the extensiveness of police coverage and crime reporting is also an important factor in the perceived crime rate.

UK is a small place, with very prevalent surveillance cameras, and an efficient well-trained national police force. They probably catch a lot more criminals in the act than places with lots of wide open space.

[Leafsnail]

GreatJustice... both your reasoning (or ability to read?) and your source are flawed.

Britain has a massively inflated rate of "violent crime", "total crime" and assaults because police count fights in which noone was injured as a "violent crime", where almost no other country does.  Those are pretty damn common so they boost the crime rate enormously simply due to different definitions.  That is why you compare things that are actually defined in the same way in different countries.  Your own source acknowledges that it's a poor measure due to it reflecting the definitions of crimes, the willingness to report and the willingness to investigate crimes rather than just how many crimes happen.

Rape rates tend to be a lot more about whether the legal system is able to prosecute them, something the US is notoriously terrible at (the UK has serious problems there too but the point is the statistic wouldn't necessarily reflect the actual prevalence).

Other than that your own source suggests that the US has over 10 times the rate of youths committing murders (all murders, not just firearm murders), which is pretty concerning.

183,419 per 100,000 people

In addition I'd like to question how the fuck they came to this number.  Is everyone in the UK in prison on drug offences or do a small minority of the country get charged with hundreds of offences at once?  In any case this particular statistic is clearly comparing apples to oranges.

Second, so far as gun crime goes, it's worth mentioning that the UK has always had extremely low gun crime even before it introduced most of its gun control laws, and violent crime with guns actually increased after laws introduced restricting ownership.

I would love to see a source for this.  The total firearms offences went up but that's because if you ban something you have to prosecute people who are breaking that ban.

[Reelya]

EDIT: I was wondering about that drug crime figure, that should be about 120 million drug offences per year, when in fact ....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7050409.stm
"There were 55,000 drug crimes recorded from April to June [2005], up from 48,300 during the same period in 2006.". 55000 for a quarter = ~210000 per year, or 350 per 100,000 people.

That implies the 183419 figure was for ALL of England in the relevant year. Makes you wonder what other mistakes are in that database.

===

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/17_07_08_crime_statistics_200708.pdf

Hmmm BCS surveys show that drug use in UK has fallen steadily and is at it's lowest recorded level ever (since 1995 when they started BCS surveys). But at the same time "drug offences are up 18%". So less people report using drugs, but more people are prosecuted. Thus showing the flaw in estimating crime prevalence based on reporting or conviction rates.

In fact, victim surveys have shown crime in all catergories declining quite a bit since the mid-90's.

The BCS and police recorded crime differ in their coverage of crime, but both
show that overall crime has fallen in the last year. All BCS crime has fallen by
10% and recorded crime by 9% compared with 2006/07; and most crime
types have shown decreases.

[Starver]

Right off the bat, you'll notice that per capita, the UK has higher crime statistics in just about every category except gun crime (which I'll get to in a bit). Its rather sad that a country nearly six times smaller than the US has a little over half as much crime.

Six times smaller...  Hmmm...  Population, yes?  CIA Factbook[1] gives us "63,047,162 (July 2012 est.)" against "313,847,465 (July 2012 est.)", so I'd put that at around a fifth of the population.  Which is virtually the same, I'll concede.

But what about land area.  CIA Factbook helpfully says "slightly smaller than Oregon".  Imagine what that does to our population density.  Which means that all those people here who aren't robbing/murdering/piraticising each other are all either pretty good at being standoffish and not involving ourselves with others' business (London) or very friendly and look out for each other (everywhere else, but especially The North). 

All I'm saying is that it's going to be a whole lot more complicated.  (And because CIAFactbook has changed and ruined its ease of use, I don't feel like trying to compare what it says about our relative crime statistics, so no idea whether that's better or worse.  Please feel free to tell me.)


Anyway, in a topical "armed conflict in the UK" example, reported on the news earlier...  A grenade attack.  (Two in quick succession apparently by the same suspects, in fact, resulting in one fatality.)  Well, it's an interesting outlier to the statistics!


Fakeedit: The other, intervening, challenges to the Nationmaster site also apply, but I decided to go for something simple.  And then got distracted by the aforementioned problems with my previously 'first benchmark' source-site.

[1] Urgh.  They've changed the site...  Looks horrible now.  Used to be easy to dip into and compare, but can't be bothered to work out how to do it these days.

[palsch]

Some not entirely related UK crime data.

There has been a recent, massive decline in violent crime and especially gun crime in the UK. Lots of speculation around what pushed this down, and I do feel that the main factors mentioned there (increased police presence and focus, plus improved medical response for trauma patients) are significant, but I also feel that the availability and cultural differences between the US and UK helped make those factors viable.

For one thing, the Economist article mentions strong anti-gun drives combined with a very limited gun supply. These make even obtaining a firearm a pretty bad idea, given how likely you are to get caught buying and how likely it is that firearm is already hot from a past crime. These factors are simply impossible in the US. Even introducing strong anti-gun laws would have a limited effect on the gun supply for years into the future, as the clean weapon supply is far vaster than the 30,000-40,000 illegal firearms floating around the UK, even on a per-capita basis. Getting down to that sort of level, on a per capita basis, from the current estimated number of guns in the US would require 999 out of 1000 guns being removed from the general population. Remove any legal exceptions and you are still talking about removing something like 90% of the guns in the USA to even come close to the level where UK strategies are applicable. That simply isn't going to happen unless American culture shifts massively overnight.

Which is to say much of what Starver said, but I think that these recent moves are an interesting lens to view it through. Specific and working crime reduction measures that depend heavily on the UK's lack of guns.

[Leafsnail]

There's a nice comment there about the problem with comparing "violent crime" statistics between different places too.

[kaenneth]

How many people (an livestock) are killed by wild animal attacks in the UK vs. the US?

[Nadaka]

How many people (an livestock) are killed by wild animal attacks in the UK vs. the US?

I am pretty sure that America has more per capita crocodile, mountain lion, bear and rattlesnake attacks than the UK by a significant margin.

[Loud Whispers]

I am pretty sure that America has more per capita crocodile, mountain lion, bear and rattlesnake attacks than the UK by a significant margin.

100%

[Frumple]

I'd imagine considerably more than just 100%, though UK's rates probably aren't zero (exotic pets, etc.).

[GreatJustice]

Britain has a massively inflated rate of "violent crime", "total crime" and assaults because police count fights in which noone was injured as a "violent crime", where almost no other country does.  Those are pretty damn common so they boost the crime rate enormously simply due to different definitions.  That is why you compare things that are actually defined in the same way in different countries.  Your own source acknowledges that it's a poor measure due to it reflecting the definitions of crimes, the willingness to report and the willingness to investigate crimes rather than just how many crimes happen.

So you can say "The UK's gun laws work" from looking at these statistics, but you can't say "The UK's gun laws don't work" from the exact same statistics? It works both ways.

Rape rates tend to be a lot more about whether the legal system is able to prosecute them, som]ething the US is notoriously terrible at (the UK has serious problems there too but the point is the statistic wouldn't necessarily reflect the actual prevalence).

Source?

I would love to see a source for this.  The total firearms offences went up but that's because if you ban something you have to prosecute people who are breaking that ban.

The particular chart/table I had a while ago has vanished, and I can't seem to find it. It recorded UK gun crime from 1950-1970 or so to present day, and showed basically no drop whatsoever. I know that doesn't stand for much, but I'll keep looking for the original unless someone else has seen it before and can provide it. Failing that, however, there are some acceptable sources that will suffice...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Leafsnail]

So you can say "The UK's gun laws work" from looking at these statistics, but you can't say "The UK's gun laws don't work" from the exact same statistics? It works both ways.

I have no idea what you're saying.  If statistics show something then they must also show the opposite thing at the same time, apparently?  No, they don't.

I was pointing out why the indicators you pounced on are flawed (the drugs one is clearly a database error, the "violent crime" arises because the UK counts a lot more crimes as violent, while "crimes" is similarly a meaningless statistic since it depends on what the country regards as crimes) and pointed to some other indicators that seem more comparable (both countries have pretty much the same definition of murder and murder is not often left unreported or uninvestigated).  I don't see why this means the statistics should magically start pointing in both directions.

Source?

It's not a particularly difficult thing to find information on: http://harvardjlg.com/2012/02/taking-rape-seriously/ suggests that the rate in America is 2-9% while this one suggests the UK rate is about 13% (not directly comparable ones but you get the idea).  I'm not really here to argue about which one is higher or lower but it's clear that that particular statistic could potentially swing hugely based on how the police handle the crime, making it not very useful a comparison.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A slight fall in the rate of gun ownership (with a nicely misleading set of axes to suggest it's a huge drop) accompanied by a slight decrease in the rate of increase of violent crime is meant to prove your point how exactly?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I have no idea what I'm meant to be looking at here, or what piece of legislation you're trying to show the effect of.

[penguinofhonor]

I knew there was something up with that graph. Measuring two different things on the same axis just doesn't work.

From '88 to '92, the rate of violent crime rose from 429 to 554, or a 29% increase. During the same gun ownership dropped from 2059 to 1611, or a 22% decrease. Actually... neither of those seem particularly small.

[Scelly9]

The hell do you even read that thing?

[Leafsnail]

The rate of change seems to decrease slightly though - it's kindof difficult to tell considering the graph doesn't go on very far due to being 17 years old.  You can't expect a minor gun control measure to suddenly and instantly reverse a general trend (which includes plenty of crimes that are completely unrelated to guns) within 4 years.

22% is a fair amount I guess but the axes are still horribly misleading.