Measuring crime rates isn’t easy. If citizens don’t trust the police to go after criminals they report less crimes.
The article you linked to along with many other source therefore use the murder rate as a proxy because presumably most murders get reported to the police. That’s problematic because better emergency medicine decreased the death rate among people who get shot.
One standard explanation is that good news isn’t news—only bad news is. A murder or a famine is news; their absense isn’t. Hence people listening to the news gets a skewed picture of the world.
It’s stronger than that. Over time newsrooms in a lot of countries have made the decision to spent more time reporting crimes.
No doubt there is something to that. In this post I want, however, to point to another mechanism that gives rise to a pessimism bias, namely the compound effect of many uses of what I call the Argument from Crisis. (Please notify me if you’ve seen this idea somewhere else.)
Naomi Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine” might be relevant.
There’s Rahm Emanuel with “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
There’s Rahm Emanuel with “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
Robert Higgs wrote “Crisis and Leviathan”, chronicling the growth of government power through crises. People who want government to grow have an interest in creating actual or perceived crises.
The media is overwhelmingly populated by the party of ever bigger government. And they coincidentally peddle crisis after crisis.
That’s problematic because better emergency medicine decreased the death rate among people who get shot.
Took me a while to connect the dots. You’re arguing that the supposed decrease in crime is actually an artifact of decreased reporting to police and increased effectiveness in hospital trauma care? Wouldn’t attempted murder rates go a long way toward clearing that up?
Robert Higgs wrote “Crisis and Leviathan”, chronicling the growth of government power through crises. People who want government to grow have an interest in creating actual or perceived crises.
The debt ceiling is used as a crisis to shrink government. Regardless of your goals, if you want political change in our Western democratic culture a crisis is useful.
You’re arguing that the supposed decrease in crime is actually an artifact of decreased reporting to police and increased effectiveness in hospital trauma care?
I think that it likely that over the last decades overall crime rates went down. On the other hand some of the change in crime numbers we see is likely through other effects and whenever you have the debate about the subject you should be aware of those factors.
You should always be a bit skeptic that the numbers that you have actually describe reality fully.
Wouldn’t attempted murder rates go a long way toward clearing that up?
If you count crimes, counting murder rates has the advantage that if there’s a shot dead body, it’s quite obvious that a person was killed. There might be some issue with separating manslaughter from murder, but a dead body nearly always triggers procedures in the official bureaucracy.
The same is not true with attempted murder. In a community where the police isn’t trusted by the population some attempted murders won’t be reported. That’s why arguments such as the one linked in the OP are often made via the murder rate.
We do have another tool for determining the amount of crime: Victimization surveys.
But they also aren’t perfect.
The debt ceiling is used as a crisis to shrink government.
They’ve tried again and again and again. Government gotten smaller yet?
The debt ceiling itself is not a tactic of “crisis”. It is an attempt to put limits on government spending. Leaving it to a “crisis” is the successful tactic of those who would and have blown through it time and time again.
I believe the republicans are in full capitulation on this point. Maybe with both chambers of congress they’ll feel that they can control the narrative by putting a bill on the president’s desk for him to sign or not. But I doubt it.
but a dead body nearly always triggers procedures in the official bureaucracy. The same is not true with attempted murder.
Yeah, but I would think people are pretty motivated to report actual attempts to kill them.
You should always be a bit skeptic that the numbers that you have actually describe reality fully.
I certainly agree with that. Conscious of abstration, etc.
I think the key difference is that you made the argument here about mechanism that convince individuals while Klein and Emanuel focus on systematic feature of our Western democracy.
I would expect the strategy of talking in terms of crisis to be a lot less effective in China to create political change than it is in the West and thus less used.
If you want to imply that the rates may not fall as clearly as indicated that is probably not going to work. Almost all counts are pointing straight down—except for steps upward when the rules for counting cases are changed. The data for Germany is publicly available (apparently reported more or less since the 1950s) and provides lots of indicators to look at:
What’s tracked in your links is cases. That means crimes that come to police attention.
Crimes that come to police attention isn’t the same thing as crimes.
If you put more policemen on the streets the amount of crimes goes down but the amount of crimes that come to police attention goes up.
Programs for raising awareness of domestic violence makes victims come forward and report crimes to the police. That raises official crime rates but there no good reason to assume that it raises the actual rate of crimes.
I’m not sure what you are driving at. Reported and actual rates are clearly shown in my linked sourced and overall both go down over a wide range of incidents except for apparent jumps when case counting rules change.
You have written actual because you think “actual”. It’s not.
If you take your first link and actually read the paper you will find: “The unlawful (criminal) acts dealt with by the police, including attempts subject to punishment, are recorded in the Police Crime Statistics. This also includes the drug offences handled by the customs authorities. ”
Police Crime Statistics is the name of the report. It doesn’t include crimes not dealt with by the police because nobody reported the crime and the police has no other way of knowing about it.
We know enough to know that statistics like the one you cited shouldn’t be treated as being the actual values and that was the main point I was making above.
Measuring crime rates isn’t easy. If citizens don’t trust the police to go after criminals they report less crimes. The article you linked to along with many other source therefore use the murder rate as a proxy because presumably most murders get reported to the police. That’s problematic because better emergency medicine decreased the death rate among people who get shot.
It’s stronger than that. Over time newsrooms in a lot of countries have made the decision to spent more time reporting crimes.
Naomi Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine” might be relevant.
There’s Rahm Emanuel with “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
Robert Higgs wrote “Crisis and Leviathan”, chronicling the growth of government power through crises. People who want government to grow have an interest in creating actual or perceived crises.
The media is overwhelmingly populated by the party of ever bigger government. And they coincidentally peddle crisis after crisis.
Took me a while to connect the dots. You’re arguing that the supposed decrease in crime is actually an artifact of decreased reporting to police and increased effectiveness in hospital trauma care? Wouldn’t attempted murder rates go a long way toward clearing that up?
The debt ceiling is used as a crisis to shrink government. Regardless of your goals, if you want political change in our Western democratic culture a crisis is useful.
I think that it likely that over the last decades overall crime rates went down. On the other hand some of the change in crime numbers we see is likely through other effects and whenever you have the debate about the subject you should be aware of those factors.
You should always be a bit skeptic that the numbers that you have actually describe reality fully.
If you count crimes, counting murder rates has the advantage that if there’s a shot dead body, it’s quite obvious that a person was killed. There might be some issue with separating manslaughter from murder, but a dead body nearly always triggers procedures in the official bureaucracy.
The same is not true with attempted murder. In a community where the police isn’t trusted by the population some attempted murders won’t be reported. That’s why arguments such as the one linked in the OP are often made via the murder rate.
We do have another tool for determining the amount of crime: Victimization surveys. But they also aren’t perfect.
They’ve tried again and again and again. Government gotten smaller yet?
The debt ceiling itself is not a tactic of “crisis”. It is an attempt to put limits on government spending. Leaving it to a “crisis” is the successful tactic of those who would and have blown through it time and time again.
I believe the republicans are in full capitulation on this point. Maybe with both chambers of congress they’ll feel that they can control the narrative by putting a bill on the president’s desk for him to sign or not. But I doubt it.
Yeah, but I would think people are pretty motivated to report actual attempts to kill them.
I certainly agree with that. Conscious of abstration, etc.
I hadn’t thought about Klein and Emanuel’s ideas, though they do seem somewhat related. Good!
I think the key difference is that you made the argument here about mechanism that convince individuals while Klein and Emanuel focus on systematic feature of our Western democracy.
I would expect the strategy of talking in terms of crisis to be a lot less effective in China to create political change than it is in the West and thus less used.
If you want to imply that the rates may not fall as clearly as indicated that is probably not going to work. Almost all counts are pointing straight down—except for steps upward when the rules for counting cases are changed. The data for Germany is publicly available (apparently reported more or less since the 1950s) and provides lots of indicators to look at:
German Crime Statistics since 1999 (English)
dito detailed cases since 1987 (German)
You ignored the second sentence.
What’s tracked in your links is cases. That means crimes that come to police attention. Crimes that come to police attention isn’t the same thing as crimes.
If you put more policemen on the streets the amount of crimes goes down but the amount of crimes that come to police attention goes up.
Programs for raising awareness of domestic violence makes victims come forward and report crimes to the police. That raises official crime rates but there no good reason to assume that it raises the actual rate of crimes.
I’m not sure what you are driving at. Reported and actual rates are clearly shown in my linked sourced and overall both go down over a wide range of incidents except for apparent jumps when case counting rules change.
“Actual rates” is not something that we now and can list in a statistic. We can only use different methods to get a proxy of that value.
Yes yes. Any measurement has an error. I shouldn’t have written “actual”. But what are you driving at? Do or don’t you agree?
You have written actual because you think “actual”. It’s not.
If you take your first link and actually read the paper you will find: “The unlawful (criminal) acts dealt with by the police, including attempts subject to punishment, are recorded in the Police Crime Statistics. This also includes the drug offences handled by the customs authorities. ”
Police Crime Statistics is the name of the report. It doesn’t include crimes not dealt with by the police because nobody reported the crime and the police has no other way of knowing about it.
It’s not like we don’t know anything about the dark figures. The first rigorous approach seems to be this one:
Dunkelfeldforschung in Bochum 1986⁄87 by Hans-Dieter Schwind
This is in German, but an executive summary in English can be found on page 290 ff.
We know enough to know that statistics like the one you cited shouldn’t be treated as being the actual values and that was the main point I was making above.