Violent Crime Rates in UK vs US

[GMDino]

Not to take a meme to seriously but we've had this discussion before so rather than hijack that thread I'll just post this here.



http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jun/24/blog-posting/social-media-post-says-uk-has-far-higher-violent-c/

Quote:The meme includes a lot of figures, so we started out by looking at the United Kingdom and the United States.

As we were conducting our research, we stumbled across a thoughtful critique of this claim on a blog called the Skeptical Libertarian that was written by Daniel Bier, a master’s degree candidate in economics at Rutgers University. (Bier fact-checked a claim that’s similar, though with slightly different wording than the meme we’re checking.)

Bier’s primary concern about comparing crime rates in the United Kingdom and the United States is that the definitions of crimes in each country are significantly different. This was not reflected in news coverage in British newspapers that appear to have been the source of the meme. This oversight produced a misleading comparison.

As Bier put it, "The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports defines a ‘violent crime’ as one of four specific offenses: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault." By contrast, "the British definition includes all ‘crimes against the person,’ including simple assaults, all robberies, and all ‘sexual offenses,’ as opposed to the FBI, which only counts aggravated assaults and ‘forcible rapes.’ "

Once you know this, Bier wrote, "it becomes clear how misleading it is to compare rates of violent crime in the U.S. and the U.K. You’re simply comparing two different sets of crimes."

We thought Bier’s points were reasonable, so we tried to replicate his approach. We looked at the raw violent crime numbers for each country, using statistics for England and Wales for 2012 and for the United States for 2011, in a way that sought to compare apples to apples. (We should note that the United Kingdom includes Scotland and Northern Ireland, but the numbers in the meme appear to be based only on crime in England and Wales, which are calculated separately.)

For England and Wales, we added together three crime categories: "violence against the person, with injury," "most serious sexual crime," and "robbery." This produced a rate of 775 violent crimes per 100,000 people.

For the United States, we used the FBI’s four standard categories for violent crime that Bier cited. We came up with a rate of 383 violent crimes per 100,000 people.

This calculation suggests that there is a higher rate of crime in England and Wales, but the discrepancy is not anywhere near as wide as the one cited in the meme.

However, before we put too much credibility on these calculations, we should note that criminologists say there is actually no good way to compare violent crime rates in these two countries.

Our rough effort to equalize the definitions improved the quality of the comparison, but what we did is not enough to fix the comparison entirely, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. "Once you get away from clearly defined terms like homicides, all kinds of problems come in," Fox said. "You have to take comparisons not just with a grain of salt but with the entire shaker."


For instance, the vast majority of violent crimes are aggravated assaults, and this is a category that isn’t as well defined as homicides, rapes and robberies. Many aggravated assaults don’t result in an injury, Fox said, and even police in the same country don’t always use the same standard in counting this particular crime.

Another problem is that aggravated assaults, rapes and robberies are victim-reported crimes, so whether the crime gets reported varies widely, depending on such factors as the victim’s trust in the police. This difference shows up in comparisons of FBI crime data, which consists of crimes reported to police, and the far higher rates of crime victimization found in a survey of Americans by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. The survey counts all crimes that respondents say they have experienced, not just those they reported to police.

The International Crime Victims Survey, conducted by an arm of the United Nations most recently in 2005, shows the difference between reported crime and all crimes committed by conducting polls that ask people if they've been victims of specific crimes. Polling data showed that England and Wales had 2,600 cases of robbery per 100,000 population and 8,100 cases of "assaults and threats" per 100,000. While those figures are even higher than the meme suggested, the U.S levels are also much higher -- 1,100 cases of robbery and 8,300 cases of assaults and threats per 100,000. And the rate of sexual assault is actually about 50 percent higher in the United States than it is in England and Wales. So this data set doesn’t support the thrust of the meme, either.

"Recorded crime data are problematic due to definitional issues, reporting rates and other concerns," said Shane D. Johnson, a professor in the University College of London Department of Security and Crime Science. "There may also be considerable variation across counties, or states."

When we presented the Skeptical Libertarian blog post and our own research to the source of the meme -- Adam Kokesh, a libertarian activist -- an aide to Kokesh sent us the original link from the Daily Telegraph and said, "We appreciate the close eye on that post and all the research."

Our ruling

The meme said "there are over 2,000 crimes recorded per 100,000 population in the U.K.," compared to "466 violent crimes per 100,000" in the United States. Our preliminary attempt to make an apples-to-apples comparison shows a much smaller difference in violent crime rates between the two countries, but criminologists say differences in how the statistics are collected make it impossible to produce a truly valid comparison. We rate the claim False.

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

Scotland and Northern Ireland are part of the UK, why were they not included in the UK for purposes of this debunking? I'm not saying that their inclusion would prove the claim true, but anytime there's such a blatant omission it makes one wonder does it not?

[StLucieBengal]

Also the metrics on which crimes are considered violent. There is a big difference between the U.S. and the UK.

[SteelCitySouth]

(07-02-2015, 02:47 AM)StLucieBengal Wrote: Also the metrics on which crimes are considered violent.   There is a big difference between the U.S. and the UK.

correct...the US uses less categories of crimes than the UK...and thus have fewer crimes through omission.

[Belsnickel]

(07-02-2015, 06:33 AM)SteelCitySouth Wrote: correct...the US uses fewer categories of crimes than the UK...and thus have fewer crimes through omission.

[GMDino]

(07-02-2015, 02:24 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Scotland and Northern Ireland are part of the UK, why were they not included in the UK for purposes of this debunking?  I'm not saying that their inclusion would prove the claim true, but anytime there's such a blatant omission it makes one wonder does it not?

From the same link:

Quote:We thought Bier’s points were reasonable, so we tried to replicate his approach. We looked at the raw violent crime numbers for each country, using statistics for England and Wales for 2012 and for the United States for 2011, in a way that sought to compare apples to apples. (We should note that the United Kingdom includes Scotland and Northern Ireland, but the numbers in the meme appear to be based only on crime in England and Wales, which are calculated separately.)

[SteelCitySouth]

(07-02-2015, 07:37 AM)Belsnickel Wrote:

[*michaelsean*]

Wait is this actually a thread to debunk a meme? You don't need a thread. We all know the US sucks. It always finishes like 27th on lists of anything good and always behind countries like Rwanda.

[GMDino]

(07-02-2015, 09:53 AM)michaelsean Wrote: Wait is this actually a thread to debunk a meme?  You don't need a thread.  We all know the US sucks.  It always finishes like 27th on lists of anything good and always behind countries like Rwanda.

Not so much to debunk it or say the US sucks...more that we discussed this on the old board so it popped in to my head when I saw the meme.

The US is pretty bad at a lot of things.  Being violent isn't one of them.  

[*Nately120*]

(07-02-2015, 09:53 AM)michaelsean Wrote: Wait is this actually a thread to debunk a meme?  You don't need a thread.  We all know the US sucks.  It always finishes like 27th on lists of anything good and always behind countries like Rwanda.

The meme was just so smug, wrong, and not funny that it had to be debunked!  Er, right?

[GMDino]

(07-02-2015, 11:25 AM)Nately120 Wrote: The meme was just so smug, wrong, and not funny that it had to be debunked!  Er, right?

Eh, statistical memes are rarely 100% accurate.  That one (or a similar one) has popped up and it was fresh in my mind.

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(07-02-2015, 08:19 AM)GMDino Wrote: From the same link:

Yes, I can read thank you very much.  Perhpas you can't as it doesn't answer my question, why were they omitted?  The reason given is a spurious one at best and seems patently arbitrary.  So, once again I'll point out that when someone omits obvious data from a study or comparison it's almost certainly because that data doesn't support their argument. 

[fredtoast]

(07-02-2015, 09:58 AM)GMDino Wrote: Not so much to debunk it or say the US sucks...more that we discussed this on the old board so it popped in to my head when I saw the meme.

The US is pretty bad at a lot of things.  Being violent isn't one of them.  

Don't waste your time responding to him.  He has proven that he has no interest in having a grown up discussion about this.  Why else would someone make a post like he did?

[GMDino]

(07-02-2015, 12:07 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Yes, I can read thank you very much.  Perhpas you can't as it doesn't answer my question, why were they omitted?  The reason given is a spurious one at best and seems patently arbitrary.  So, once again I'll point out that when someone omits obvious data from a study or comparison it's almost certainly because that data doesn't support their argument. 

Really?



Anyway they said they omitted them because they were omitted from the meme they were talking about.

So they didn't want to add anything if it wasn't already added.

As they said (and I'm sure you read) they knew it would add to the crimes...but since those weren't counted in the first place to make the claim why count them now?

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(07-02-2015, 12:18 PM)GMDino Wrote: Really?



Anyway they said they omitted them because they were omitted from the meme they were talking about.

Now I have to question your reading comprehension because what they actually said was;

Quote:We should note that the United Kingdom includes Scotland and Northern Ireland, but the numbers in the meme appear to be based only on crime in England and Wales, which are calculated separately.

They "appear" to be?  How so, care to explain how that is?  Probably not because, as I already stated that reason sounds like a steaming cup of horse shit.  Soooo, my question stands.

Quote:So they didn't want to add anything if it wasn't already added.

As they said (and I'm sure you read) they knew it would add to the crimes...but since those weren't counted in the first place to make the claim why count them now?

Probably because they have no way of knowing if they were already counted or not.  Now, common sense would suggest that when you compare the US and UK you would use all of the US and UK.  I think they should have omitted the statistics from Chicago, Baltimor and New York because I think they didn't include them in the comparison based on a very careful study of the numbers involved.  Oh, and they also omitted the entire state of Alaska, I just decided that as well.

[*michaelsean*]

(07-02-2015, 12:12 PM)fredtoast Wrote: Don't waste your time responding to him.  He has proven that he has no interest in having a grown up discussion about this.  Why else would someone make a post like he did?

Where did that come from? Proven how?  Because I was wondering about needing to debunk a meme?

[*Nately120*]

(07-02-2015, 01:02 PM)michaelsean Wrote: Proven how?  Because I was wondering about needing to debunk a meme?

Depends on your preferred definition of "meme"



noun: meme; plural noun: memes

1. an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.
   • a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc. that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.
     

If the humorous aspect of it is key, then positing misinformation that makes gun control look like a government plan to turn a country into Mad Max (beyond Thunderdome, or otherwise) is just a blatant spread of misinformation that people (unfortunately) use to shape world views and (possibly) act upon. I think the world is crap, but I'm also cynical enough to believe that at least one person saw this meme, or one that is like it and went out and bought an assault rifle, or something. Not saying said person will go postal, but people believe stuff. Oh, how they believe stuff (they want to believe). Either way, it stimulates the gun economy, I guess.

I personally think memes are better when they aren't to be taken seriously, and this one looks as though it aims to be taken at face-value...and that face-value hain't so legit.  Then again, it could qualify as a meme in the sense that it's just meant to be passed along willy-nilly and any misrepresentation of fact by the right-wing gets retroactively labeled as "satire" anyways.

Zing!

[Beaker]

"This calculation suggests that there is a higher rate of crime in England and Wales, but the discrepancy is not anywhere near as wide as the one cited in the meme."


Doesn't this suggest that the premise of the meme was correct, just that the actual numbers were wrong? When the re-calculated they found there was a difference in the numbers, just not as high a difference as the numbers in the meme. I must have missed an earlier post/thread on the subject, but what is the argument/debate here?

[fredtoast]

Funny that no one has mentioned that the murder rate in the United States (4.7 per 100K) is almost 5 times higher than in the UK (1 per 100K).

Even if violent crimes occur at a higher rate in the UK than in the US they don't end up in death as often because they don't usually involve guns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

[*Nately120*]

(07-02-2015, 02:44 PM)fredtoast Wrote: Funny that no one has mentioned that the murder rate in the United States (4.7 per 100K) is almost 5 times higher than in the UK (1 per 100K).

Even if violent crimes occur at a higher rate in the UK than in the US they don't end up in death as often because they don't usually involve guns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

Right, it's deceptive stat shifting.  It's like the US wanting to make welfare rates "go down" so they shifted more people into "disability" so they can trumpet the successes in a relative sense.  The fact that a violent crime can mean a bop on the nose to a limey and having a shotgun unloaded into you to a yank illustrates the difference.