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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I was mostly going off of SSCs infamous neoreactionary post, which claims it was about 100x lower back then. Maybe different sources say different things?

"Indictable offences known to the police" rose about 40x from the Edwardian period to the 1990s crime peak after adjusting for population. (The 100x is a mistake due to trying to read a horizontal line near zero on a small graph).

The question of how much this is an increase in real crime, how much of it is the creation of new indicatable offences (particularly ones relating to drugs), and how much is increased reporting is hugely controversial. But it is fair to say that crime in the 1990s was at least 10x Edwardian levels, and probably more.

Violent and property crime is now (as determined by victim surveys with consistent methodology) at around a quarter of 1990's levels. The graph used by the neoreactionaries cuts the data off in 2000 for a reason. [This crime drop is consistent with the lived experience of anyone who grew up in the 1990s - it isn't a case of rigged statistics]

Didn't the Edwardians also have a lot of weird crimes that wouldn't be considered crimes today? Most infamously "sodomy" was illegal. But I'm really not an expert on Edwardian crimes.

I do agree that crime was way worse around 1990 than it is now. That said, there's a lot of minor property crime now that probably never gets reported.

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