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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Would you accept a European source, or would you say it's irrelevant to the conversation you're having in America?

I think immigration dynamics tend to be pretty different in Europe vs the US, for whatever reason.

But yes you can post it.

Didn't have time to do this earlier. Here's a spreadsheet (I tested it from a few browsers - it should be persistent) with the data from table 7.2-T03 (page 91) of the report ("Non-German suspects by nationalities – total offences excluding offences against foreigners’ law"), and table 12521-0005 from the German statistics office (for total population sizes for 2020).

Might do the same with the data from your study, if it has this level of detail.

UPDATE: Oh shit, I fucked up!

I didn't notice that the % share of suspects the report provided is the % share of non-German suspects, skewing the overrepresentation numbers pretty massively. Though not changing the conclusion that certain minorities are still waaay more criminal than the Germans / other minorities. The spreadsheet is updated, and here's the screenshot with the updated correct numbers:

https://www.themotte.org//images/17268257393208947.webp

Here's the old screenshot for historical purposes:

https://www.themotte.org//images/17267681316119363.webp

@Jesweez, @quiet_NaN , Just so no one misses the correction, I'm adding this as a comment. The broader point is unaffected, but I originally overestimated the numbers by a lot.

I am a bit amazed by Italians and French, there, with crime rates 4.75 and 5.91 times the German citizens ones.

From a US perspective, we are all close neighbors, it would be like if people from Utah committed crimes in California at five times the rate of the natives.

France is a close economic ally and Germany has a few big joint ventures with them, so I would expect most of the French in Germany are not drug mules or the like. Heck, they are more over-represented than Russians.

For immigrants from European countries much poorer than Germany, my priors would be that higher prosperity attracts a lot of small-time criminals. Breaking and entering is likely more lucrative in Germany than in Romania. I would also assume that Switzerland has more small-time German criminals than their native base rate for exactly the same reasons.

A general caveat with police statistics is that they generally tell you about the activities of the police, not the criminals. Especially with crimes where no party has an incentive to report them, like the drug trade, police reports are only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to know how much people are using, analyzing the wastewater is much more reliable. Murder is a good tracer, by comparison, because most murders get detected (unless they get misclassified as a natural death or stuck at the level of disappearance because no corpse surfaces) and solved.

Another caveat is that while offenses against the foreigners' law (which Germans can mostly not commit) are excluded, that law might still be the initial reason for investigation of non-EU nationals.

Oh, and the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person, not 'number of suspects'. If most of the French suspects are accused of crossing as pedestrians on red, that paints a very different picture from them being accused of aggravated assault. Of course, IT-shy justice system is likely utterly incapable of aggregating the convictions for crimes committed in 2015 by nationality.

I am a bit amazed by Italians and French, there, with crime rates 4.75 and 5.91 times the German citizens ones.

From a US perspective, we are all close neighbors, it would be like if people from Utah committed crimes in California at five times the rate of the natives.

If you tracked interstate migration the same way each country in the EU tracks their migration, patterns like these might very well show up, though personally I'd be more suspicious of Californians rather than the Utahns.

As for the French, they have their own high-crime minorities, fully equipped with French passports, thanks to their colonial past. I can't tell you what is the deal with Italians, though.

Heck, they are more over-represented than Russians.

Russians have a long way to travel, and are not part of the Schengen Zone, so that's hardly surprising.

A general caveat with police statistics is that they generally tell you about the activities of the police, not the criminals.

I'd be more than happy to limit the data to crimes with incentive to report, like murder, assault, rape, etc. I even remember some internet autist going over the German crime by nationality stats. I don't know if that's something they used to publish but stopped, or he had to FOIA them to get it, but if you click on the pdf from my other comment you can see they present the numbers on each type of crime, as well as on suspects by nationality, so they very clearly do have the data on the activities of criminals, they just choose not to aggregate them in a way that would be useful to this conversation. This has nothing to do with them being "IT-shy", European governments can hardly be described this way to begin with, and you can rest assured all this data is already stored in a digital database, and it's only a question of writing the right GROUP BY statement. Most likely this information is not published deliberately, for the exact same reason Germany hasn't published the full crime report since 2020.

Another caveat is that while offenses against the foreigners' law (which Germans can mostly not commit) are excluded, that law might still be the initial reason for investigation of non-EU nationals.

  1. And this is why I came out against "uh, source?" and "data would be what we use to see if that intuition is correct or not" in my other conversation with Jesweez, and why I think Rationalist movement is either a complete failure, or a deliberate effort to sabotage sense-making. You can play these sorts of games forever, and no one who insisted that the data showing immigrants are less criminal than American citizens should be taken as-is, will ever show up here to criticize you for looking for an out in the unpublished parts of the data.
  2. Yes, it could be that the police is finding other crime while investigating illegal immigration, but what you've left out is that it could also be the opposite - the police doing their best to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration, but inevitably running into it in the process of investigating violent crime. Which leads me to:
  3. I'm not saying things are quite as bad as the opposite side of the spectrum I outline above, but if you think Germany, or any other country in the EU, is in crack-down mode against illegal immigration qua illegal immigration, you're posting from a parallel universe.

Oh, and the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person.

Nah. I'll take "convicts" over "suspects", but the length of conviction is a silly metric, if you know what they've been convicted of. Especially given certain European judges proclivity to let gang-rapists off with a slap on the wrist.

the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person, not 'number of suspects'. If most of the French suspects are accused of crossing as pedestrians on red, that paints a very different picture from them being accused of aggravated assault.

Doesn't this start having issues if judges have different levels of leniency for different demographics of offenders, or other confounders that vary between demographics (like age or wealth)?

I think you'd want to instead do it by the average sentence length for the crime they were convicted of, regardless of what they were actually sentenced to. That should eliminate the confounders while maintaining a relative scoring that roughly maps to society's view of the crimes' severity.

If you're worried that those numbers don't match up, that there are crimes that carry a sentence of 5 years but no one's ever given more than 6 months, you could instead use the average actually-given sentence length for all people convicted of that crime.

The big difference between the US and Europe is that the US has a native high-crime subgroup which is large enough (unlike European gypsies) to materially skew the crime statistics. A group of immigrants can commit more crime that white Americans and still commit less crime than heritage-Americans as a whole, who are 15-20% black. And in fact this appears to be true of by far the largest group of immigrants (i.e. Mexicans) - if you don't trust the MSM or academia then the most recent analysis on this point from an unquestionably right-wing source is Ron Unz.

There may be specific high-crime subgroups of immigrants who are worse than ADOS blacks, and Haitians in Springfield may even be one of them (although nobody in Springfield is saying this). But the only cat to have been eaten was eaten by a mentally ill ADOS black woman.

In the America that actually exists, poor Mexican immigrants make cities like LA safer by displacing poor blacks, and their US citizen children elect Democrats to local office who don't feel white guilt about black crime.

It's actually quite similar. Pre-selected immigrants generally have unusually low crime rates, free and in particular illegal immigrants have unusually high crime rates. This is true for both europe and the US. It's just that a mexican in europe is more likely than not legally pre-selected, highly educated and highly conscientious, while the opposite in the US. It's vice versa for other groups, such as eastern europeans.

The Germans used to have a "crime by nationality" chapter in their annual crime report, where all the stereotypically criminal minorities turn out to be actually criminal. Though the last in year for which the full report seems to be available is 2020.

I think immigration dynamics tend to be pretty different in Europe vs the US, for whatever reason.

I think this was true in the past moreso than it is now, though obviously you have different nationalities coming over, which might have it's own impact.