criminology
neurophilosophy | November 6, 2010NEW York City in the 1920s and '30s was a hotbed of criminal activity. Prohibition laws banning the production, sale and distribution of alcohol had been introduced, but instead of reducing crime, they had the opposite effect. Gangsters organized themselves and seized control of the alcohol distribution racket, smuggling first cheap rum from the Caribbean, then French champagne and English gin, into the country. Speakeasies sprang up in every neighbourhood, and numbered more than 100,000 by 1925. When prohibition was abolished in 1933, the gangsters took to other activities, such as drug…
tlambert | October 25, 2008
Back in 2006, Tim Blair declared
I'd lean towards the official police figures myself (although jerked-around crime counting methods make comparisons problematic), mainly because they're, you know, official police figures. The British Crime Survey is just a survey.
Alas, he backed the wrong horse, as this story from the BBC proves:
Police miscount serious violence
A number of police forces in England and Wales have been undercounting some of the most serious violent crimes, the government has admitted.
It means figures for serious violent crimes rose by 22% compared to last year - rather…
tlambert | June 11, 2007Via GrrlScientist I find the latest story claiming:
What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument--whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.
However, there is little new since the last time I wrote about Donohue and Wolfers' take down of those studies. They found that the results of those studies were not robust -- simple changes to the models made the…
tlambert | June 27, 2006
Tim Blair has added a slew of updates to try to bolster his case against the accuracy of the British Crime survey.
The most interesting things about these updates is the way he introduces his sources:
Ex-Labour councillor and academic Dr David Green:
Barrister Rehman Chishti quits Labour:
Now, if one of these guys was an expert criminologist, mentioning it would strengthen Blair's case, but why mention their associations with Labour? The answer seems clear. It's all about politics to Blair. He thinks that people decide on whether police numbers or crime survey numbers based on which…
tlambert | June 25, 2006
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…
tlambert | March 7, 2006
Because if you don't you might end up like Tim Blair:
Big call from Tim Lambert: "Crime and violent crime in Britain peaked in the early 90s and [have] since plummeted." His source? The British Crime Survey, an annual affair which asks some 40,000 Brits if they've been encrimed during the previous year. Is it trustworthy? Depends which side you're on:
The political discussion about crime is often a numbingly boring argument about statistics. Overall crime recorded by the police seems to have risen (so the Conservatives rely on this statistic) while crime reported by the public seems…
tlambert | March 6, 2006When I wrote about David Frum's voodoo criminology in support of the death penalty, I didn't mention any of the recent research that purports to find a deterrent effect for the death penalty because Frum didn't cite it. That research has always seemed suspect to me -- since a very small fraction of murderers are executed in America, it seems unlikely that any effect could be detected above the noise of all the other factors that affect the crime rate. Now a paper by Donohue and Wolfers has been published that is absolutely devastating to the papers that found deterrence. Donohue and Wolfers…
tlambert | March 1, 2006Tim Blair links to some interesting articles in this week's Bulletin. First up is a page on John Howard with the intriguing title "The hosue of Howard". It's a fearless, hard hitting complete suck up to Howard. Apparently, after a decade of power and privilege as prime minister, Howard hasn't lost touch with the common folk. Why not? Because he owns a regular, simple house. He doesn't live there or even in the Prime Minister's official residence -- he lives in a mansion with multi-million dollar harbour views, but just owning that house is enough to stay in touch with the little people…