Crime DECREASING in UK?

I recently posted an Answer on Quora regarding a Tweet by British police, showing a lot of ordinary, kitchen implements, turned over to police to be “disposed of correctly & safely”, wondering what that said about such a society. This led to a vigorous defense of British culture by a stalwart, English gentleman. Of course, I rebutted, and actually missed an obvious counter to one of his arguments. In spite of that, I think I presented a credible rebuttal. What say you?

S***** T*****
what kind of commentary is it on a society when the citizens consider a lot of ordinary kitchen implements, something that needs to be “disposed of correctly & safely

I think it says that a society with a murder rate only 20% of your own country’s will often have social attitudes about risk and weapons which appear incomprehensible to people who are comfortable with a five times higher murder rate.

Such a level of crime reduction isn’t achieved without changing people’s fundamental attitudes.

ME
The problem is, crime is not reduced, it is increasing. When knives are gone it’ll be cricket bats. When cricket bats are gone, it will be sticks and stones, or tooth and nail. The problem is not with weapons, it is with people.

S***** T*****
Violent crime’s actually at a historical low; it’s just started going up again slightly which has people worried after many years of decline. Most people in the UK blame reductions in police spending and manpower since 2010.

The problem is actually people with weapons. An angry man with a gun can shoot a dozen people. An angry man with a knife can stab one person. An angry man with just his fists can punch someone in the nose. Same number of angry men in all three cases, but a much lower level of violence when weapons are removed from the equation. You can never eliminate violence entirely, but you can certainly reduce its seriousness.

ME
You do realize, or perhaps you don’t since all you know is what you see in media, but mass shootings in the US really are responsible for a very small number of deaths. There are more deaths attributed to bare hands, annually, than there are to mass shootings.

Now, this graph from ONS(dot)UK(dot)GOV is difficult to read, and seems to be be saying opposite things at the same time, but note the bar graph at the bottom…

This bar graph seems to agree with this graph…

S***** T*****
The CSEW is an official survey which asks people if they’ve been victims of crime. Police recorded crime is the number of crimes reported to the police.

If the CSEW is going down and police recorded crime is going up, that’s good. It means that there are fewer violent crimes, and the police are detecting and acting on proportionately more of them.

According to the Wikipedia page there were 387 people killed in mass shootings in the USA in 2018. In England & Wales that year there were 285 people killed with knives and 106 with guns, total. (And there were no mass shootings at all. There have only been two in the last 30 years.)

ME
Actually, from what you describe, the CSEW is public perception of crime, while police reports are the actual numbers of reported crime… Sounds like folks are lying to themselves in spite of the facts.

S***** T*****
No, the CSEW is not ‘public perception of crime’. It’s an annual interview-based survey of 50,000 people per year that asks them, in confidence, what crimes they’ve been a victim of that year. It’s probably a more accurate account of the total amount of crime than the police figures, since it picks up on the crimes people didn’t report to the police.

Public perception of crime surveys inevitably show that people think crime is worse than it really is.

ME
Leads one to wonder wonder why crime is not reported. Generally in surveys such as this, one would expect it to mirror the police reports unless even in the polling, people are under reporting crimes. I am sorry, given a solid statistic against a blind poll, the actual statistics carry more weight. Ask any statistician worth his salt. This looks quite like a high rate of polling error. Typically, you would expect a poll to exceed measured data with a similar trend, which I expect might describe your public perception poll.

Pretty good responses, but I would pick apart his statistics about “387 people killed in mass shootings” (a complete lie which Bill, Ben Shapiro, and others have thoroughly debunked: the lie is in expanded definitions and substituting people “killed” for “involved”) and then a per capita comparison of total deaths attributable to violence. Is that what you were referencing in your intro?

Second, I would dig into the statistics of the murder rates in London during the spike in knife attacks.

Also, I think it would be worthwhile to investigate his initial claims about people’s attitudes, which is a cultural claim (“my culture is superior to yours”), and compare violent crime rates in immigrant enclaves in Britain vs. low-income government-funded projects (“estates” in British) inhabited by at least second-generation native-born Britons.

Oh, I just thought of one more thing that might be your “obvious” note from your intro: Knife attackers, both here and in Britain, can and do stab or slice multiple people, not just one person, comparable to someone with a handgun. There was a case at a Texas junior college a few years ago. And then there is the issue of driving vehicles into a crowd.

2 replies on “Crime DECREASING in UK?”

Actually, the point I didn’t go into about the CSEW is that overwhelmingly in England, folks are reticent to say anything negative about immigrants. While folks are reporting crime at a higher rate, it is fairly evident in the CSEW that when asked, they do not mention even the unreported immigrant crime, perhaps (likely) for fear of being labeled a “racist”.

I avoided the whole “mass shootings” issue, except to note that they are fewer than bare hands homicide, because “mass shooting” now has so many different definitions as to be almost a meaningless label.

As you point out, the point I admittedly missed, is about the intentional, vehicular homicides, bombings, and gas attacks.
BTW, about knives, look into Chinese rampage attacks…

2 replies on “Crime DECREASING in UK?”

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