Exploding the myth of the falling crime rate: Crime - December 18
Interesting article on Guardian Unlimited.
The trouble with crime is that it’s illegal. What if the truth is that crime didn’t fall at all, that it was only the statistics that fell? At the end of that year, the politicians celebrated a fall in the crime recorded by police nationally of 122,344 offences. The only other source of crime statistics is the British Crime Survey. This is fundamentally compromised because it cannot record crime unless an adult victim tells one of their interviewers about it, so the survey misses all crimes against children (estimated by the Home Office at 600,000), all crimes against commercial victims (all bank robbery; So, the survey fails to record at least 11.3 million crimes and possibly as many as 33.6 million crimes, in addition to the 13 million which it does pick up. The one explanation which applies to all the developed countries which have seen their crime figures fall is that they have shifted their expanding population of black market drug users into committing a surge of invisible offences. So, for example, they are almost certainly right to say that in reality, burglary and vehicle crime have been falling: it must be significant that the same downward trend shows up independently both in the police figures and in the British Crime Survey. If you really want to understand the reality of crime in this country, the figures that matter are in the research which shows that just 1% of the population suffers 59% of all violent crime;
You should check out San Francisco Chronicle:
04:00 PST Washington — Senate Republicans blocked the expansion of hate crimes protection to women, gays and the disabled Tuesday, despite majority support for doing so in the wake of Matthew Shepard’s 1998 murder in Wyoming and the 1999 slayings of three female tourists in Yosemite. “The greatest hate crime of all we should be dealing with right now is the hate crime of terrorism against America,” Lott said. That restriction, supporters said, leads to bizarre results where a crime committed on a public sidewalk can be classified as a federal hate crime, but not the same crime committed in a private parking lot. Crime statistics collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation count 9, 300 hate crimes based on sexual orientation from 1991 through 2000 and show the number of incidents rising. Opponents argued that all violent crimes are hate crimes and should be treated equally under the law. Gay rights lobbyists praised Ashcroft’s move but contend that the Rice indictment illustrates the need to expand hate crimes law, because the special provisions were available to federal prosecutors only because the killings took place on federal property.