Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
It's worth noting that our black murder rate is about the same as the US white murder rate, and that high-volume violent and property crime is still at less than a quarter of the 1990's peak when measured by victim surveys (which are not affected by declining police reporting) which have used a comparable methodology throughout the period. Knife crime is probably up (it's hard to measure accurately because it isn't common enough to show up in victim surveys or serious enough to be reliably reported to police) but that isn't what the burghers of Hadley Wood are complaining about.
Crime is always out of control according to the media. Crime is always out of control according to the "children, nowadays" crowd. Crime was out of control according to the media and the "children, nowadays" crowd right through the dramatic drop in crime in the nineties and noughties. Media coverage of crime being out of control tells you nothing unless backed up by some form of reliable numbers. And even then you can cherry-pick numbers - the same people claiming that the police-recorded numbers showing falling burglaries are fake are citing police-recorded numbers to prove that violent crime is increasing despite victim surveys showing the opposite.
As far as I can tell, clearance rates for burglaries in the UK are around 5%. If that's the case then crime is literally out of control, in that there's no credible police ability to punish traditional criminals, as opposed to political offenders. Even if they do go to prison, they might just get let out again due to overcrowding.
Since the ONS moved to Newport I understand they shed a lot of their most talented staff and their output has been suspect ever since. It may be that they're right and victimization did fall since the 1990s. Even so, getting away with property crime 19 times out of 20 is pretty bad. Private police spontaneously materializing to meet unfulfilled demand is pretty bad.
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Is this what the kids call "mask off"? Implicit in the statement seems to be the belief that black people will always be more criminal, and therefore things can't be all that bad in the UK if even black people have a lower crime rate than white people in America. That's cool and all, but I was always under the impression that the population being complained in the UK about came from South Asia or thereabouts, plus maybe the Middle East, in a mirror image to what's happening in the US where they wagged their fingers at Europe because they never had that much of an issue with Muslims in America.
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