Nice and ongoing terror attacks in W Europe

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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
vimothy said:
"Factors like more crime being reported, more things being considered crime" - is there any reason to suppose either of these apply? How much of that rise do you think they could possibly account for, in the most extreme case?
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Maybe I'm being ludicrous, but I think these factors could possibly have a huge effect on the statistics.

It would help clear things up if we could see a breakdown of crime by type. For example the need to report burglary for insurance purposes offers an economic incentive to do so, which may have a significant impact on the number of reported burglaries. The way drug law enforcement changed over the the century is another example. Increased phone ownership and mobility might mean that more incidents are reported to the police, Etc.

Another point to add is that the graph isn't per capita.
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
This suggests that the homicide rate in England has been steady since the mid 1600's

img-11-small480.jpg


https://chs.revues.org/737?lang=en
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
sadmanbarty said:
How much of this is to do with factors like more crime being reported, more things being considered crime, technological advances helping to discover crime, etc.?
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Also the reliability of statistics.

e.g.: 'There are, of course, serious problems with official statistics of crime. How far might they be massaged by the police forces that collect and collate them? We know, for example, that it was practice in the Metropolitan Police until the 1930s to list many reported thefts as lost property.'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/crime_01.shtml

But surely population growth is the most significant factor to consider here, unless that graph accounts for it?
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Corpsey said:
But surely population growth is the most significant factor to consider here, unless that graph accounts for it?
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You can see the same trend on page 14 of the House of Commons Library research paper, "A Century of Change: Trends in UK Statistics since 1900". The graph shows the (per thousand of population) rate of indictable offences since 1900 (ending at the turn of the century). It looks how you'd expect: the same exponential trend with the amplitude scaled slightly to account for (moderate, linear) population growth.

Edwardian Britain was a stereotypically repressive society, relative to today. The Edwardians were nowhere near as liberal with regard to policing and criminal justice as their descendents. Consequently, and commonsensically, we would expect crime to be much lower, which is precisely what the data - which are not exactly ambiguous - suggest.

It seems that, when official statistics are thought to confirm one's prejudices (crime has gone down), their meaning is so clear that only a bovine anti-intellectual like Trump could misunderstand them; yet, when they seem to contradict them (crime has gone up), all sorts of rationalisations can be thought up for why they have no meaning whatsoever.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Mr. Tea said:
Still, it seems there was nothing pseudo about Breivik's status as a self-directed, self-equipped commando.
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I think the distinction the doctor in that article is trying to make is between the sort of people who have military training and experience and work as part of a genuine military (or paramilitary) organisation, like a seasoned Al Qaeda or Hezbollah guerilla, and the sort of unemployed narcissistic fantasist who spends his days in his mother's basement playing Call of Duty and reading Stormfront, like Anders Breivik.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I don't know much about the guy apart from what I've gleaned from a glance at his Wiki article, I admit, but it makes mention of alleged trips to Belarus for paramilitary training.

And without wishing to sound like I'm bigging him up or anything, the sheer scale of carnage he was able to inflict surely argues that he spent a lot of time figuring out how to commit a 'proper' terrorist attack - as opposed to playing CoD. I mean, it was in no way a half-arsed or farcical attempt (as some of the attempted Islamist terror attacks in the UK have been - driving cars into airports, failed chapati-flour bombs and so on).

So it looks like the only meaningful distinction is whether they're a genuine "lone wolf" type or a member of a cell or group of some kind.
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
vimothy said:
It seems that, when official statistics are thought to confirm one's prejudices (crime has gone down), their meaning is so clear that only a bovine anti-intellectual like Trump could misunderstand them; yet, when they seem to contradict them (crime has gone up), all sorts of rationalisations can be thought up for why they have no meaning whatsoever.
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On the other hand, you could argue that confirmation bias lies in blindly accepting the false equivalence between statistics that collect different data in different ways over a hundred year period.

It is much more methodically sound to compare crime data between 1990-2016 than it is to compare data between 1898-2009.
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
vimothy said:
It would certainly be an interesting act of desperation if this atrocity were spun as a right-wing act of terror, to deflect attention (and blame) from all the other acts of terror that seem to be occurring on a daily basis.
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German police investigating the mass shooting in Munich last Friday night in which nine people were killed have said the gunman was racist and a rightwing extremist who saw it as a “special honour” that he shared a birthday with Adolf Hitler.

Ali David Sonboly, 18, who was born in Munich to Iranian parents, boasted to friends that he was proud to be an “Aryan”, citing Iran as the land where Aryans originated and repeatedly stating his hatred of Turks and Arabs.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...aw-sharing-hitlers-birthday-as-special-honour
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It seems that, when events are assumed to confirm one's prejudices (non-Islamist murderers are mentally disturbed, not terrorists) their meaning is so clear that only a bovine anti-intellectual like Trump could misunderstand them; yet, when they seem to contradict them (an attack that is apparently right wing and political), all sorts of rationalisations can be thought up for why they have no meaning whatsoever.
 
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S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
sadmanbarty said:
It would help clear things up if we could see a breakdown of crime by type.
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Table 1 in this does just that:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/116435/hosb0812.pdf

The next step would be going through these offences to see 1) which one's would be illegal a century ago 2) which one's would be reported (insurance claims, victim blaming, 'lost property', etc.) and 3) how has technology and police procedure affected how many of these crimes are detected.

I can't be asked, but someone else is welcome to give it a go.

There's also still the question of how phones and other things have affected how much crime's reported.
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Don't want to derail the thread so I'll pack it in. I think I was initially trying to make a point with these tidbits, but can't think what the point was.

1) It just occurred to me that homicide rates probably wouldn’t be greatly affected by those variables I was talking about. I suppose there is a problem in that with increased medical advances, less attempted murders will succeed. Nonetheless:

I found this graph from ‘Our World In Data’, which is project set up by Oxford University, so I’m assuming its using sound information:

https://ourworldindata.org/wp-conte...tes-and-england-1900-2000-pinker-2011-jpg.jpg

I wonder how indicative this is of violent crime overall.

2) In 2011/12 there were roughly 4 million crimes recorded by the police.

Roughly a fifth of that was violence against a person. It’s a quarter if you add sexual offences to that.

A little over five eighths of it is property crime.

The rest is drugs and other miscellaneous crimes.

Maybe my point was that the rise in crime (assuming there was one) was down to the increased ownership of property and goods that get nicked and damaged.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Interesting that there's no talk yet of any kind of 'manifesto', message or whatever. Beeb is saying "The so-called Islamic State group has said it was behind the attack", but those wankers would probably take credit for blowing up the Hindenburg and sinking the Titanic if you asked them.
 
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