Asymmetrical Information

You've mastered grammar. Time to work on spelling. :-)

Sadly, attempted murder is not stripped away from aggravated assault (in the US) and wounding (in the UK) to enable us to assess whether your guess is correct. But the UK's wounding rate is higher than the US's agg. assault and the US definition includes merely threatening with a weapon, which the UK crime obviously does not. On the other hand, more UK wounds are inflicted with knives than with guns, and so shock plays less of a part in those incidents than in the US, so increases in medical technology may have less of an effect in the UK. Nevertheless, the suggestion may help account for the difference between the UK's historically low (but rising) murder rate and the US's historically large (but falling) rate of homicide.

Christie Blatchford made the identical point in a column in Saturday's National Post regarding claims that Canada's gun registry is reducing gun deaths:

"Virtually no one, not even the staunchest gun-control advocate, accepts Mr. Rock's figures, and some of the decline in gun deaths that he credits to the registry is better attributed to a decline in the number of suicides who use firearms to kill themselves (but who still nonetheless kill themselves), and some of it may also be due to modern trauma medicine, which now routinely sees gunshot victims saved who would have perished from their injuries even a decade ago."

The NY Times Magazine covers this as the first idea in the "Year in Ideas" piece, here.

Here's 40% of it:

"Between 1960 and 1999, the proportion of criminal assaults ending in death -- what Harris calls ''the lethality rate'' -- dropped by 70 percent. (The steepest decline came in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when advances in battlefield surgery led to innovations in civilian emergency care.) In fact, Harris estimates that there would be 30,000 to 50,000 additional murders in the U.S. each year -- doubling or tripling the current rate -- without our current levels of emergency-care technology.

If he's right, the focus by criminologists on the stable or declining murder rate is actually masking a radical increase of violence in America, a fact that has unexpected consequences. For example, communities without access to the most advanced emergency medical services may have higher homicide rates. ''How much is the black-offender rate inflated?'' Harris asks. And there are strange implications for the criminal-justice system. An attempted murderer carrying out his crime in an area with poor emergency services is more likely to succeed than one operating near a high-tech trauma center. The former may be executed, while the latter spends just a few years in prison, their punishments determined not by any disparity in lethal intent, but by the unequal levels of local medical care."

I've long considered it odd that attempted murder carries with it a much less severe penalty than murder itself; "Well, Smith isn't nearly as good a shot as Jones, so, what the hell, let's let Smith out after a few years, but Jones? Throw away the key!" Yet another instance in which incompetence is rewarded....

The talkleft article is here. Some interesting links from it.

The UK doesn't really have a higher crime rate than the US when you take into account the fact that it's a much more urban nation.

Using the ICVS stats ( http://www.unicri.it/icvs/publications/pdf_files/key2000i/app4.pdf ), the U.S. assault with force rates went from 1.7 per 100 in 1989 to 1.2 per 100. So while the murder rate may have gone down in part due to better medical care, the total number of survived physical assaults went down, too.

And the England/Wales numbers for crime overall do merely reflect greater urbanization. But, even after that is accounted for, the rate for serious personal crime (roberry [theft directly from a person through force or threat of force], sexual assault, assaults with force) is much higher in England/Wales than the U.S.

Excuse me, dsquared? What does the urban nature of the UK have to do with the absolute statistics regarding victimisation? You may well have a point in that if Britain has a higher urban density than the US, and crime is more prevalent in urban areas, then the higher incidence of victimisation might have this as part of the causal explanation. But the level is still higher. It's like saying, John doesn't really make more money than me because I live in a country where things are cheaper. Sure, maybe you can buy more things with your x than John can with his 2x, but the fact remains: he still makes more money than you. The question is, in which country are you more likely to be a victim of violent crime? All the figures point to the UK.

(Anyway - I would like to see the comparative figures on percentage of population living in urban areas before I posited that as a causative mechanism).

I also seem to remember a forceful critique of the hypothesis that improved trauma care is masking a rise in homicide.

Much of Europe and the industrialized parts of Asia have higher population densities in their urban areas than the US, by quite a high margin in fact. That would, of course, likely decrease the distance between the average person in those cities and the nearest hospital. Actually, you might expect such increased population densities to have a dual effect in that manner. For an equivalent distribution of hospitals the average distance from a person to a hospital should be lower. However, the population density is higher so the hospital density is probably also higher.

Here're some stats on some urban population densities throughout the world. Notice how far down the US is on the list compared to Asia, Europe, and even Canada. For example, Hong Kong and Seoul are about 10x as densely populated as Los Angeles. Manhattan isn't listed in the table but it has a population density of 65,000 people per square mile (though only 1.5 million people live in Manhattan). Paris, London, and Munich (for example) each are about twice as dense, or more, as LA or Chicago. So you'd expect proportionally less deaths by assault by either approx. 1/2 (pop. density) or ~1/4 (pop and hospital density).

Hmmm, looking at the ICVS stats linked by Warmongering Lunatic one thing grabbed my attention. In the "reasons for not reporting to the police..." sections look at the percentages for "police couldn't / wouldn't do anything", especially for France, the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and, most shockingly, Belgium. The US rate (~8%) matches that of Japan, Canada, or Australia. The overall European rate seems to track about 50% higher, and the Belgian rate seems to be 4x higher (~40%)! Then look at the "reasons for dissatisfaction with the police..." table, the "did not do enough" reason is at 70% for Belgium. Other statistics seem to track the same trend for Belgium. Maybe it's just fluky stastical sampling, but I have to wonder what in the hell is going on there. Even Poland has a slightly lower rate in that area. Is Belgium going to hell in a handbasket or is this just some odd societal or perhaps statistical quirk?

Ummm David, your money analogy is not particularly apt. A better analogy might be, say, starvation vs. government corruption. If you live in a corrupt country where there are high rates of starvation then claiming that your country has no greater amount of starvation than, say, the US after you adjust for corruption is simply a lie. The harsh reality would be that starvation would be a serious problem in that country, regardless of its cause. Whereas the money thing is just paper and numbers if you don't take the local cost of living and related factors into account.

Now, perhaps you could say that if after "adjusting for urbanization as a cause" of crime in, say, England vs. America and the adjusted rates were similar then you could argue that neither nation is more inherently violent than the other. Though none of that would change the fact of the true difference in crime rates.

Why is everyone overlooking the obvious?
The US murder rate is NOT higher than the UK one if we equalize the racial factor. The US has more murder because it has more blacks -- that's all.
John Ray

John, that explanation doesn't quite wash. Adjusting for income levels the crime rate among blacks is no different than that among non-blacks.

Additionally, if you had read the discussion and looked at the statistics you would know that crime is not higher in the US than in Europe, or Britain specifically (currently the US has lower crime rates than much of Europe), only the rate of homicides (for likely several distinct reasons) is significantly higher in the US.

>>What does the urban nature of the UK have to do with the absolute statistics regarding victimisation?

It has to do with the fact that it's not worth comparing them on an unadjusted basis if you're interested in drawing conclusions from the numbers rather than simply memorising them to win pub quizzes.

Even if you adjust for urbanisation, by the way, you're still going to have significant statistical problems. Crime is partly dependent on the business cycle, and also has epicycles of its own, relating to prices in the drugs industry and relating to the waxing and waning fortunes of individual gangs. Many of the studies on British crime rates relate to a period in the 1990s during which aggregate statistics materially overstated the homicide rate for people who weren't associates of Curtis Warren and the other gangs in Liverpool. Controlling for crime cycles is very difficult statistics and tends to make it more or less impossible to rigorously demonstrate anything.

Bottom line; comparative criminology between different countries, or between the same country at different times, is a mug's game.

So, is the increasing homicide rate in
the UK less a failure of Scotland Yard
than it is a failure of the National
Health program?

>> The UK doesn't really have a higher crime rate than the US when you take into account the fact that it's a much more urban nation.

>> Bottom line; comparative criminology between different countries, or between the same country at different times, is a mug's game.

Yup - same poster.

FWIW, urbanization seems to have different effects in different countries. For example, Canada's murders aren't nearly as urbanized as US murder. (Even within the US there are huge differences. I remember that NY state's murders are more urbanized than GA's.)

From Jim's NYT Mag article: For example, communities without access to the most advanced emergency medical services may have higher homicide rates. "How much is the black-offender rate inflated?" Harris asks.

I may be missing something here, but most black communities are in urban areas. Granted that Harlem (say) may not be quite as well-served by modern medicine as Manhattan's Upper East Side, it's still way closer and better-served than most of the country.

In Maryland, too, the best hospitals are in Baltimore, which is also where the poor black community is centered. My guess, then, is that the black offender murder rate is not inflated much, if at all; an argument could be made that the rate may be understated, if proximity to advanced shock/trauma medicine is a major factor.

One of the best trauma hospitals in the world is in Houston, Ben Taub. It is one place that the military sends doctors to learn how to treat gunshot wounds. It's a public hospital that serves many poor people. It's located near a number of poor neighborhoods. I wouldn't go there for anything *but* a gunshot wound, but if I were ever shot, I'd be happy to go (and then transfer once I was stable).

Bolie IV

>>Yup - same poster.

Saying the same thing.

What's your point?

I've long considered it odd that attempted murder carries with it a much less severe penalty than murder itself; "Well, Smith isn't nearly as good a shot as Jones, so, what the hell, let's let Smith out after a few years, but Jones? Throw away the key!" Yet another instance in which incompetence is rewarded....

Well, lesser punishments for attempts has a really, really long history. I'm tempted to think it's something like a natural discounting of the "accurate conviction rate" or something; lesser average sentences because there's more innocent convictions.

>>Yup - same poster.

> Saying the same thing.

> What's your point?

Actually, no, not saying the same point. The first quote was comparative criminology; it described how one should compare certain numbers. The second claimed that comparative criminology was stupid.

If you want to argue about numbers, you can't claim that arguing about numbers is a mug's game.

Mr Goodfellow,

Belgium is suffering from a real lack of confidence in the justice system following an affaire in which the authorities were seemingly complicit in allowing a dreadful pedophile ring which kidnapped and enslaved children to continue operations. See here for more details.

Lord almighty, Andy, what gave you the impression that I wanted to argue about numbers? Someone made a statement about relative crime rates. I pointed out that the brute numbers were misleading, because of differing urbanisation. I then, unsolicited, out of the goodness of my heart, suggested that even if one allowed for urbanisation the numbers would still be misleading because of crime cycles. I then concluded by exhorting people not to try to use criminological statistics for international comparison (because, in my view, nobody here, including myself, has the statistical expertise one would need to have any confidence in being able to draw conclusions). Capice?

> Lord almighty, Andy, what gave you the impression that I wanted to argue about numbers?

The fact that Dsquared explained how to account for certain numerical differences certainly suggests that numbers are relevant.

I wouldn't be surprised if Dsquared doesn't want to get into an exhaustive statistical discussion, but that doesn't make such a discussion or comparative criminology "a mug's game".

Nevertheless, Dsquared is quite willing to argue that numbers and comparative criminology to support his position, which is also inconsistent with his "mug's game" characterisation.

'The fact that Dsquared explained how to account for certain numerical differences certainly suggests that numbers are relevant.'

He explained that the numbers were not directly comparable because of a difference: urbanization between the two countries. Then, in a follow-up message, he said that directly comparing the numbers of two countries is a "mug's game" because there's lot of differences like, oh, his previous example.

I'm not seeing the contradiction here.

Please, Andy, try to see the point I'm making. It's not that difficult.

Here's the main source of your error:

>>Nevertheless, Dsquared is quite willing to argue that numbers and comparative criminology to support his position

No I'm not. I have not done that. I have *specifically* not done that. I have made precisely two substantive posts on this thread, one saying that you can't use the statistics to make the statement that the UK has a higher crime rate than the US, and the other one, well, saying that you can't use the statistics to make the statement that the UK has a higher crime rate than the US. In as much as my "position" is that you can't use the statistics to make the statement that the UK has a higher crime rate than the US, I haven't used numbers or comparative criminology to support it. I haven't made any statements at all about any other "position" that might be supported with numbers or comparative criminology.

You don't even know what my "position" is. I, on the other hand, have a fair old idea of what your "position" is, and without any numbers or criminological evidence whatever, I would urge you to pull your head out and stand up straight before you do yourself a mischief.

A number of references have been made comparing Canada to the U.S. regarding crime. It is interesting to note that in the U.S. murder by long rifle runs at 1.9 per 100,000, in Canada it is 1.7. Virtually identical, yet the rate of handgun murders id increasing alarmingly.

The Canadian federal government declared a gun registry was required of all citizens. The cost of this program has grown from two million dollars Canadian to one billion. It has had no effect on the rate of murder by gun. In fact Toronto, one of Canada?s larger cities, is currently experiencing a spate of hand gun related murders. Christie Blatchford, of the National Post, has an excellent series of articles which breaks through political correctness to document how non-domestic murder in Toronto has as its largest single component gang warfare by Jamaican youths armed with hand guns. It has gotten to the point where some are now openly calling for a restriction on Jamaican immigration.

Canada, as with many Western jurisdictions, has sought to tackle crime with legislation rather than policing. Downsizing, downloading and cuts to civil institutions now mean we are left with fewer police per capita than we had two decades ago. To my mind it is not coincidental that as the murder rate in Toronto has climbed, so has the traffic fatality rate, doubling in the last couple of years.

Canada has also seen a rise in personal assaults to the point we now have more than in the United States, but less than Britain. A central theme in this debate seems not to be an alarm at rising crime in Britain and its former colonies, but rather that it seems to now exceeds, in many respects, the crime rate of a mythical gun totin? Western cowboy America.

Other than the ease with which hand guns are be smuggled in from the United States, the rise in crime in Canada is entirely of our own making. It?s suspected the same is true in Britain.

>>Christie Blatchford, of the National Post, has an excellent series of articles which breaks through political correctness to document how non-domestic murder in Toronto has as its largest single component gang warfare by Jamaican youths armed with hand guns.

In other words, a crime cycle. Net of the effect of the ebb and flow of business conditions in the crack cocaine industry, we have no way of knowing what has happened to the underlying murder rate in Toronto; it's rather like the UK example I cited above, where the murder rate of people not connected to John Ungi or Curtis Warren was entirely stable.

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