Clue stick used

Posted by Tim Lambert on June 25, 2006
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A while ago I Wrote about the Bulletin and Tim Blair’s ignorance of basic statistics. Blair could not comprehend how random sampling could give more accurate crime statistics than police reports, while the Bulletin reported numbers from an Internet poll without noting that the poll also found that 66% of Australians were male.

Well, Blair is back for more, apparently believing that he wins the argument with a study from “the respected Crime and Society Foundation” finding an increase in homicides.

All right, he’s accepted the authority of the Crime and Society Foundation. Let’s se what Richard Garside, Crime and Society Foundation Director, said on the crime survey vs police reports question:

So, however useful police figures are, they tell us more about how good the police are at finding out about crime than they do about how much crime there really is.

To get a better picture of real crime you need to ask members of the public, and this is what the other set of figures – the British Crime Survey (BCS) – does.

Researchers for the BCS interviewed more than 45,000 people over the course of the last year, asking them about their experience of crime victimisation.

This kind of approach will pick up some crime that victims would not report to the police – as a result the numbers are bigger.

Now, there has been an increase in homicide in England and Wales, but homicide is a tiny fraction of total violent crimes which have been decreasing. The only new information in this latest study is the increase in homicides from 2004 to 2005. And most of that increase was the result of the London bombings.

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Comments

  1. #1 Ian Gould
    June 26, 2006

    Given the general quality of Tim’s comprehension, is it even worth pointing out to him that the British population has increased around 2.5% since Labour came to office making his comparison of gross murder figures rather than rates per 100,000 peoply simply wrong?

  2. #2 Bill Posters
    June 26, 2006

    Given the general quality of Tim’s comprehension, is it even worth pointing out to him that the British population has increased around 2.5% since Labour came to office making his comparison of gross murder figures rather than rates per 100,000 peoply simply wrong?

    No.

  3. #3 mark
    June 26, 2006

    Ah, excellent, another whack of the Piñata of Stupid that is Mr Blair and his Brains Trust.

  4. #4 Laser Potato
    June 26, 2006

    That piñata looks kind of worried.

  5. #5 Dennis Williams
    June 26, 2006

    My wife saw Deltoid in my favorites.
    “What’s that”, she queried (worried that it was porn, perhaps).
    “A blog”, said I.

    “Whose blog.”

    “Tim Lambert’s.”

    Ever inquisitive, she pressed on; “who’s he?”

    “Australian prof.”

    “Well, what does he talk about?”

    I said, “He calls Tim Blair and John Lott idiots, and then a bunch of sycophants go ‘woot, woot’ .”

    “Who’s John Blair and Tim Lott?”

    “exactly.”

  6. #6 tim
    June 26, 2006

    “He calls Tim Blair and John Lott idiots, and then a bunch of sycophants go ‘woot, woot’.”

    Best description of Lambert’s site I’ve ever heard!

  7. #7 Carl Christensen
    June 26, 2006

    you could pretty much say that about any blog:

    Lubos: right-wing Czech flaming about things he doesn’t know, and a bunch of sycophants go “woot woot”

    Steve Mac: right-wing Canadian with a boner over a (different) hockey stick, and a bunch of psychophants go “woot woot”

    etc

  8. #8 mark
    June 26, 2006

    “He calls Tim Blair and John Lott idiots, and then a bunch of sycophants go ‘woot, woot’.”
    Best description of Lambert’s site I’ve ever heard!

    Best description of Tim Blair’s site I’ve ever heard. Except Tim Lambert’s site is rather droll and informative and Tim Blair’s site … isn’t.

  9. #9 Eli Rabett
    June 26, 2006

    Since we’ve passed on to the silly season here, allow me to point out that Bill Posters WILL be prosecuted.