h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Akshully...the social researchers - and, give them their due, the UK government - look at something called The British Crime Survey. http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/bcs1.html This is an independent survey which, basically, asks people whether they have experienced (or commited!) a crime. Thus it gets the unreported as well as the reported crimes. And...the recent trend is downwards.

Other researches have looked at public perceptions of crime. Whenever they ask 'How likely do you think you are to be murdered/ mugged/ burgled....etc. etc.?', people routinely think thay are many times more at risk than they really are.

It's a funny old business, crime policy. It's one of those areas, like immigration, where public opinion - and hence government policy - is fed by myth rather than evidence.

i agree that public perception of risk is higher than the reality. this is only my opinion for i have no way of verifying it. i base the opinion on the likely effects of media beatups. it is self evident that the media sells copy on alarmist crime reporting. additionally, it has become a platform of democratic centerist parties of the blair ilk in an effort to capture what has traditionally been a conservative position. 'tough on crime' rides on the media bandwagon and wins votes because it both feeds off an perpetuates the sense of fear in the community. for governments it also gives reason to ramp up big brother. witness the patriot act in the usa.

as for reporting of crimes experienced from both ends as it were, the accuracy of this sort of methodology is wholly reliant on participation from those surveyed. i seriously doubt this is reliable since the alienated sections of society most likely to be involved in crime as both victims and perpetrators cannot be assumed to be both honest and comitted to attempts to understand what is happening. it is easy to imagine for example a person exaggerating their criminal activity, even anonymously. that wonderful character from the fast show (whose name escapes me) is funny for a reason. also, since we know that insurance fraud is on the rise, it is reasonable to assume that false reporting is likely affected also. the point is it is impossible to quantify.

thanks for posting to my page btw. i was beginning to feel like robinson crusoe.

You're welcome!

Yes, of course any crime-measuring methodology will always be flawed. The BCS is routinely attacked by those with a vested interest in opposing the evidence that crime seems - by and large - amongst the segment of the population targetted by the political parties - to be decreasing. Certainly any social sciences measurement tool will always have a large margin of error.

On the other hand...there's no evidence that I'm aware of that crime is *increasing*. I think that - on balance of proababilities - it will be stable at very worst.

Or...maybe there is a relatively stable relationship between the number of crimes committed by and upon a community and its (relative) living standards. Then we'd expect crime to correlate with living standards. This seems reasonable. The counter position might be that society is in moral decay, and crime is getting worse irrespective of living standards.

I wonder what evidence we might look for to distinguish between these two alternatives?

i think the underlying assumption in your post is that crime is a corollary of social and economic alienation; hence the reference to living standards. apologies if i have misread you.

this itself is a sterotypical view propogated by the media, conservatives and reformers alike, tho all for differing reasons. it also ignores that crime is not confined to the underprivileged. anecdotally, women's shelters report that spousal abuse is at least as widespread among the 'professional classes' as it is among the poor.

even the identification of 'crime' itself is problematic. what was a crime 20 years ago might not be so today, and vice versa. hence comparisons over time are subject to distortions. identity theft could not have existed as it does today for the techology to do so was not available. and crimes such as public drunkeness are not enforced in the same way as they once were.

one of the reasons the us appears to have such a high crime rate is that it would seem more things are crimes and folks are more likely to be incarcerated as a consequence. i am not convinced they have a higher rate of criminality in an objective sense. and sometimes criminality itself might be argued to be a good thing. jefferson and franklin would have argued so in the proper context.

i am unconvinced that crime 'rates' can be measured in the way that has been suggested because what is crime itself is changing; crimes themselves might not be bad even if they remain unchanging from a legal standpoint, and because supra judial measurements rely on the honesty and participation of those involved with crime from both the pov of victim and perpetrator and i have trouble accepting that the motivation of assisting researchers is sufficient to guarantee the integrity of the responses.

my own opinion is that crimes of violence are decreasing because they are less socially (as distinct from legally) acceptable, but that white collar crime is exploding, for no better reason than that it is easy.

>>one of the reasons the us appears to have such a high crime rate is that it would seem more things are crimes and folks are more likely to be incarcerated as a consequence

That's an excellent point! Crime is manufactured. I'll have to check the details with my wife - she's the one who's just been awarded an MSc in Criminology - but it's also a theory adhered to by some criminologists. It could also be argued that all economic crime is manufactured by the structure of the economy.

I think that one thing we have to consider is that we're talking about something multivariate. There's no one thing called 'crime' - and there are many different causes.

Anyway...whatever, if we want to deal with crime(s) we have to think about what causes it. And there's no one size fits all solution.

well personally i think some folks are wicked and the only thing separating them from a crime is opportunity.

i favour a sociobiological explanation. aristocrats are, after all, just descendents of the best thieves.

the working classes are descendents of the worst criminals. worst in the sense of not being very good at it. hence they get caught more. *w*

Hmmm. I'll have to think about that. In particular...if some people are simply bad uns, why not everyone?

But I'm a namby-pamby pinko liberal at heart. 'The perfectability of man' and all that.


This social worker was walking down the road. She comes across someone lying in the gutter, bruised and bleeding, clearly having been turned over. She kneels down aand says to him, 'My God! This is terrible! The person who did this to you really needs help!'

*chuckle* i once heard john cleese tell a very similar joke involving a group of psychiatrists and an elevator. (lift)

why not all? because co operation and conflict are BOTH succesful survival strategies. most people should display a mix of the two traits in varying ratio. i also supect at the heart of social power is the understanding by some conflict orientated individuals that the co operative tendencies of others can be harnessed for the former's benefit. douglas adams suggests a similar thinking when he wrote that anyone who sought the office of presidency was unfit to hold it. (can't recall which book). i'm pretty sure he pinched this line btw (was it jefferson?)

crime as a construct might be said to be the opposition by those that already hold power to attempts by others to disturb the current status quo. violence and property being a power exercised exclusively, or at least exclusively sanctioned by, the existing power. which for us is the state.

crime is competition with the state perhaps.

Very likely the answer is 'Yes' - to everything.

So...I wonder what proportion of people have an innate tendency towards badness? Can we identify it? Can we mitigate it? And...if we fail to mitigate it, can they be blamed?

Consider, some people have a tendency to coronary heart disease. They shouldn't eat certain foods and should take exercise.

Some people have a tendency towards selfishness as a survival tactic. They should be...given enough money so they don't have to steal? Educated to become altruistic? Banged up for life so they don't have the opportunity? Tolerated?

no science to this opinion at all, but i have a rule of thirds.

a third of any large group would help you in any way they could if they had the opportunity and means.

a third would harm you if they had the opportunity and means.

the middle third could go either way but mostly want to be left alone. (itself a survival strategy)

i believe this is separate from actual need. being only able to sleep in one bed at a time doesn't seem to deter people from wanting to own more than they can ever spend or use. and kicking people to death doesn't seem to have an economic component at all. the urge to dominate, in some, is primal and genetic.

hopefully, intelligence moderates these primal impulses. what remains disturbing is that some of the more violent societies in recent years have been the most educated. nazi germany. modern america.

i think the strongest moderator of criminal tendencies is another primal urge that is unmistakeably powerful. peer pressure. i would suggest that (for example) wife beating doesn't change because laws are made, but because other men consider it cowardly and are prepared to say so.

Hmm. I'm not convinced that in all societies, people don't commit crime simply because of peer pressure or fear of getting caught.

Are some societies not just 'nicer' than others?

And wasn't Nazi Germany nastier because it little-by-little eroded its moral framework?

legislation doesn't appear to have much impact upon an event occurring. i think this is one of the great myths of the crime debate. not to be confused with the odds on getting caught of course. whether it's prohibition or the war on drugs or anti speeding laws the result is usually the same. what appears to be needed is campaigns to make a particular crime socially unacceptable.

why? because criminals undertake a crime without the expectation of getting caught.

yes, some societies are nicer than others. culture is, after all, codified peer relations.

what are you referring to with regard to germany's 'erosion of its moral framework'?

Welll...The Final Solution didn't just happen. First of all they adopted a quiet policy of euthanasia...then gradually extended it to get rid of the 'unproductive' mentally infirm...and so on. And they established a policy in which political repression became more and more acceptable, to the point that people thought of it as a patriotic necessity. Plus, streetfighting thugs were put into positions of power, legitimising their violence. And Jewish civil rights were stripped away little by little.....

I'm not sure where (if anywhere) I'm going with this...but it's not as if a) everyone was under the tight grip of a small group of evil men or b) everyone all of a sudden turned evil.

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you are correct about (a). this stuff doesn't happen from the top down.
(b) is problematic. these are the people who produced goethe, beethoven, and indeed a substantial slab of the world's cultural and scientific canon. they were also probably the best educated people on the planet. if education and civilisation are seen as moderators of the baser parts of the human aspect; then germany in the 30s stands as stark rebuke. as does the usa today.

what i suspect happens when societies become violent is that the balance is tipped. that is, when good men do nothing or not enough, or do it badly.

and this is the heart of my point: that the range of dispositions to violence and/or co operation are displayed across any large population in varying ratios.

as such, the good people in germany didn't suddenly become bad. nor was german society inherently bad. what happened was that those human agencies disposed to malevolence became ascendent.

in some senses ceding social authority to the state thru law, can accelerate this process because it leads to an abdicratic response to negative social change on the part of the larger society otherwise capable of resisting it. in this sense i am also arguing that a strong state can itself lead to increased criminality. i believe this is historically consistent.

agreed

Who said that?