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From JohnGalt's 2nd link -
The study, based on telephone interviews with victims of crime in 21 countries, found that more than 2,000 Scots were attacked every week, almost ten times the official police figures. They include non-sexual crimes of violence and serious assaults."
Two thousand a week is roughly 100,000 a year. Scotland has a population of 5 million. If the US, with its 300 million population had the same percentage of attacks, that would give the US 6million attacks a year, or 500,000 a month. There are about 300 cities in the US with a population of over 100,000. In just those cities alone, that would mean about 50 "attacks" a day. Depending on the definition of "attack", I think most of those cities would meet that figure easily. I've worked in bars that could count on at least one fight a day, and it wasn't a big bar. I think someone is trying to compare apples to oranges with the comparisons made by the newspaper.
Chief Constable Peter Wilson, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland, questioned the figures. “It must be near impossible to compare assault figures from one country to the next based on phone calls,” he said.
“We have been doing extensive research into violent crime in Scotland for some years now and this has shown that in the vast majority of cases, victims of violent crime are known to each other.
Extrapolate those percentages of attacks to the US population, and I think a realistic view would be that the US easily has more "attacks". There are about 300 cities in the US with at least 100,000 population. If there were 50 bar fights in each og those cities every day, just those cities alone would meet Scotland's numbers. I live in a a town with a 30,000 population, and have worked in a a tavern that averaged a fight a day. I think that the newspaper was comparing apples to oranges.
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| Posts: 16662 | Location: Lincoln Place, Granite City, IL, USA | Registered: 06-03-02 | |
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Diamond
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A problem with the Scotland claim is the 'methodology' We are to understand that making some phone calls to some people and then multiplying the number up to make the total of the Scots population gives a better result and is more accurate than police figures of reported crime, which latter show one tenth the figure.
What's more in England and Wales ( I imagine no difference in Scotland) we report overall figures for assault of all degree. So the British Crime Survey showed an estimated 1,002,000 'assault with no injury'(!) in their total of 2,471,000 ['all violence: number of violent incidents against men and women'] for 2006/7
PS The policeman quoted notes that the majority of cases involve people who are known to one another. True of England and Wales: of the above estimates just cited, 407,000 were listed as 'domestic' and 845,000 were 'acquaintance'. 894,000 were 'stranger'.
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| Posts: 7693 | Location: Newmarket, UK/ Antibes, S.France | Registered: 07-14-02 | |
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Platinum
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quote: Originally posted by FredPuli:
A problem with the Scotland claim is the 'methodology' We are to understand that making some phone calls to some people and then multiplying the number up to make the total of the Scots population gives a better result and is more accurate than police figures of reported crime, which latter show one tenth the figure.
What's more in England and Wales ( I imagine no difference in Scotland) we report overall figures for assault of all degree. So the British Crime Survey showed an estimated 1,002,000 'assault with no injury'(!) in their total of 2,471,000 ['all violence: number of violent incidents against men and women'] for 2006/7
PS The policeman quoted notes that the majority of cases involve people who are known to one another. True of England and Wales: of the above estimates just cited, 407,000 were listed as 'domestic' and 845,000 were 'acquaintance'. 894,000 were 'stranger'.
"Crime figures a sham, say police."--Ian Henry and Tim Reid, The Electronic Telegraph (April 1, 1996). "Police are accused of fiddling crime data."--Tim Reid, The Electronic Telegraph(May 4, 1997). "Police figures under-record offences by 20 percent."--John Steele, The Electronic Telegraph (July 13, 2000). "Officers said that pressure to convince the public that police were winning the fight against crime had resulted in a long list of ruses to 'massage' statistics."See supra note (Crime figures a sham...) Sgt. Mike Bennett says officers have become increasingly frustrated with the practice of manipulating statistics. "The crime figures are meaningless," he said. "Police everywhere know exactly what is going on."Ibid. "Officers said the recorded level of crime bore no resemblance to the actual amount of crime being committed."Ibid. "One former Scotland Yard officer told The Telegraph of a series of tricks that rendered crime figures 'a complete sham.' A classic example, he said, was where a series of homes in a block flats were burgled and were regularly recorded as one crime. Another involved pickpocketing, which was not recorded as a crime unless the victim had actually seen the item being stolen."See supra note (fiddling) "Suppose that three men kill a woman during an argument outside a bar. They are arrested for murder, but because of problems with identification (the main witness is dead), charges are eventually dropped. In American crime statistics, the event counts as a three-person homicide, but in British statistics it counts as nothing at all. 'With such differences in reporting criteria, comparisons of U.S. homicide rates with British homicide rates is a sham,' [a 2000 report from the Inspectorate of Constabulary] concludes."--Dave Kopel, Dr. Paul Gallant and Dr. Joanne Eisen, "Britain: From Bad to Worse," NewsMax.com (March 22, 2001) |
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Diamond
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Nice try, JG. Now tell us how we've massaged the 49 deaths from shooting, recorded in the twelvemonth to September 2007 [see my above post], since you claim that the comparison with your homicide rates and ours are a 'sham'.What's more, we've pulled off this trick for many years  By the way, if you believe we don't record a deliberate shooting in a bar as homicide, just because we don't get a conviction, or can't, you'll believe anything. It gets recorded as one murder. |
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| Posts: 7693 | Location: Newmarket, UK/ Antibes, S.France | Registered: 07-14-02 | |
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