Need stats on crime: UK vs US

Factual Questions
1

Help, dopers! My father in law today made the rather surprising assertion that because guns are banned in the UK, the entire nation is now a hotbed of lawlessness, with a rate of crime higher than that in the US. He cites one of his NRA publications.

It took a bit for my jaw to get up off the floor, and I was left with the witty rejoinder “um, I don’t, uh, think that’s true”. Then I took him to prison. But the guards made me take him back out again. I’ve not had time to research stats on my own (what with entertaining the in-laws and finding the presents their dogs leave on our floor).

So I beseech you, can someone provide me with the straight dope? They leave tomorrow, 4PM central, so anything before then would be nice. And if sources of data such as the “International Liberal and Pinko’s union for the overthrow of the NRA, goodness, niceness, and God Association” could be avoided, that would be helpful too.

2

Believe it or not, there seems to be some truth to it (at least to the statistics; whether guns are a major factor, and even in which direction they ought to correlate, is arguable as always). It depends on what you’re comparing, though. It’s well-known that the US has (and, apparently, has always had) exceptionally high murder rates relative to other Western democracies (everyone has his own opinion as to why); but in rates of other crimes it’s not so exceptional. And since murders are rare (relative to other crimes) if you consider total crime rates the (relatively) high murder rate doesn’t change the overall rate much.

Two quick cites:

It’s always difficult to do comparisons like this because of differences in reporting rates, etc., and the UK has changed its crime statistics quite a bit lately, so there may be some issues there. But the graphs in the ICVS Ch.2 are pretty surprising even if you take the UK out of the picture.

Here’s the table of overall victimisation rates (per 100 people; Ch.2, Table 6, p. 38) and “selected contact crime” (apparently robbery+aggravated assault+sexual assault) rates (percentage victimised; Ch. 2, Table 5, p. 33) for 1999:


                 overall  contact

Australia	    58      4.1
England & Wales	    58	    3.6
Netherlands	    51	    2.0
Sweden		    46	    2.2
Scotland	    43	    3.4
USA		    43	    1.9
Canada		    42	    3.4
Poland		    42	    2.8
Denmark		    37	    2.3
Belgium		    37	    1.8
France		    36	    2.2
Finland		    31	    3.2
Catalonia (Spain)   30	    1.5
Portugal	    27	    1.4
Switzerland	    24	    2.1
Northern Ireland    24	    2.4
Japan		    22	    0.4
3

Your FIL is smarter and/or better informed than you might think.

BBC article specifically addressing the issue you are arguing about

4

Debated at great length in this thread

Data presented there show “crime rates” and “violent crime rates” roughly equal between the United States and Great Britain, while the United States murder rate is more than twice as high. In that thread, you will also find a link to the Barclay report, organized by the British government, that looked at crime rates in Britain and the rest of Europe from 1995 to 1999. (The gun ban was passed in 1995.) Relevant results:

Total crime went down by 21 percent in Ireland and 10 percent in Britain, compared to 1 percent in Europe overall.

Violent crime up by 20 percent in Britain compared to 11 percent in the rest of Europe.

Britain still had murder rates well below the average for the rest of Europe.

Britain is lower than the European average on burglary, car theft, drug crimes, and several other categories.

As you can probably guess, most pro-gun sources focus on the violent crime statistics while ignoring the others. Most also nelgect to metion that the definition of what constitutes violent crime for the British measures has changed substantially. For instance, as we discussed in a thread that’s eluding my searches at the moment, grabbing a cell phone from someone’s hand is now a violent crime; formerly it wasn’t.

5

The Barclay report linked to in that thread only covers the years 95-99. For two more years of data, go here:

The bottom line is that between '99 and '01, crimes rates continued falling while violent crime rates continued rising, though in both cases not by very much. As of 2001 England still has a murder rate less than one third that of the United States.

6

Sorry to keep butting in like this, but this graph and this one are just too damn great to pass up. I think those will be my new favorite cites for gun control threads.

7

Another point about the methods of recording crime in England and Wales: Until recently, if (for example) a dozen cars on a street were all vandalised at the same time, it would be recorded as a single crime. Now, it’s recorded as 12 separate crimes, the reasoning being that there’s 12 separate victims.

8

Quick googling suggest that the NRA are indeed disingenuous in their discussion of overseas crime.

http://www.nraila.org/NewSite/Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?ID=78

What the hell does a lone psychopath have to do with gun control?

It’s also one of the most poverty-stricken, most drug-addicted, most segregated and with least movement of people between social classes. Again, nothing to do with guns.

…True, but this was while mobile phone ownership was also rising fast, and a quarter of London ‘muggings’ were actually schoolkids stealing phones from each other. Since then, it’s become much harder to reuse stolen mobile phones, and street crime is falling again.

9

Fascinating!

As usual, it seems that each side tends to cherry-pick the statistics that serve their agenda, and present them more than a bit out of context. But at least I have some (relatively) hard data, and can now say “well yes, they may have a point looking at it this way, but when looked at that way, I wonder how significant it is”.

Thanks so much!!

10

What I want to know is where I can join the International Liberal and Pinko’s Union for the Overthrow of the NRA, Goodness, Niceness, and God. Do you have any pamphlets, Qadgop?

11

ITR champion, looking at those two graphs I agree – something good happened in 1995. But it looks like it was basically undoing something bad that happened in 1991: there’s a big jump in 1991, rising to a peak in 1995, then dropping back to the original trend by about 1999. Any idea what caused that?

Also, in the Barclay report you link to, the tables seem to disagree with your assertion that

Annoyingly, most of the data in that report is given as raw numbers, not per capita statistics, but Table 2 (crime victimisation rates) has this (reordered to put England and USA next to each other for comparison):


               overall  contact auto theft burglary
**England & Wales   26      3.6     2.6       5.2**
**U.S.A             21      1.9     0.5       3.8**
Northern Ireland  15      2.4     1.5       2.5
Scotland          23      3.4     1.0       3.2
Belgium           21      1.8     0.8       4.1
Denmark           23      2.3     1.4       4.2
Finland           19      3.2     0.5       1.2
France            21      2.2     1.9       2.3
Netherlands       25      2       0.5       3.6
Poland            23      2.8     1.7       3.1
Portugal          15      1.4     1.2       2.5
Spain             19      1.5     0.5       1.9
Sweden            25      2.2     1.6       2.3
Switzerland       18      2.1     0.4       2.7
Australia         30      4.1     2.1       6.6
Canada            24      3.4     1.6       4.4
Japan             15      0.4     0.1       1.8

England is higher in all categories; in “contact” crimes (the Barclay report’s selection of violent crimes) England is nearly twice as high. Auto theft is five times as high.

Victimisation rates are not quite the same as crime rates (multiple crimes against a single person in a year are counted only once), so I made a spreadsheet to figure out the per capita crime rates for violent crime and burglary, using population figures estimated from the homicide data. (The report does give per capita values for homicide but not for the other crime categories.) Here are the results, for selected countries (others removed for lack of data):


             Homicides     Violent crime      Burglary
                     (per 100000, 1999-2001)         
**England & Wales  1.61           1445              819**
**U.S.A.           5.56            506              739**
Northern Ireland 2.65           1547              496
Scotland         2.16            535              647
Denmark          1.02            291              622
Finland          2.86            644              174
France           1.73            419              334
Germany          1.15            228              172
Netherlands      1.51            584              576
Norway           0.95            447              254
Poland           2.05            219              194
Portugal         1.17            194              207
Russia          22.05             66              245
Spain            1.12            310              582
Switzerland      1.12            116              891
Australia        1.87            959             1439
Canada           1.77            975              584
Japan            1.05             48              226
New Zealand      2.50           1157             1073

As I said in my first response, while homicides much more common (about 3.5 times as many, per capita) in the USA than in England, the homicide statistic seems to be the exception. In the broader “violent crime” category (much more common than homicide) England has about 3x the rate of the US, and it’s slightly higher in burglary. England also has much higher rates of car theft, the other category shown in the report (not listed here because I got tired of cut-n-paste).

Sorry if you think I’m cherry-picking, QtM. I’m using the best data I know about. Cross-country comparisons are pretty difficult to do well, as you can see from the number of footnotes in the original tables. And those are only trying to account for differences in categorisation across countries, never mind reporting differences; if you believe that Russia’s violent crime rate is as low as stated (safer than Switzerland!) I’ve a bridge in Vladivostok to sell you…

12

However, your second graph, which illustrates ‘violent crime’, specifically says this:

“Note: Violent crime, as measured by the BCS, includes common assault, wounding, robbery and snatch theft. It does not include homicide (as the victims cannot be surveyed) and other types of violent crime, like firearms offences.”

It seems to me that in light of the OP’s post, homicides and firearms offences would be too important to eliminate from the statistics.

13

Omphaloskeptic, my cherry-picking comment was directed at the spin the NRA put on the data, not your well-presented data! :wink:

14

Given that the number of violent crimes is shown as 2.8 million per year, and the number of homicides is about 1,000, then they can be eliminated as statistically irrelevant.

15

1997, actually. Dunblane wasn’t until 1996.

16

Whatever happened in 1995, it was not the handgun ban as that was in 1997. Looking at the graphs with that knowledge suggests that the handgun ban was irrelevant, which is not surprising as it removed only 160,000 weapons (or about 8% of the total legally-owned guns) in the UK.

17

Hmmm, good point. OK, now I’m curious about what happened in 1991 and 1995 in England. Anyone have any ideas what caused this short-lived spike? Did the yobs really dislike John Major (PM 1990-1997 though, so unless they got used to him that doesn’t work)…? Did the dissolution of the USSR have a big effect in England? Does anyone know of any good explanations for this?

18

The early nineties were a time of (relative) economic hardship. Crime rates rise when the economy falters, and vice versa. This isn’t an ideological statements, merely a reflection of what statistical trends show… The 80s saw comparative stability (the '87 crash disproportionately affecting the wealthier classes), and likewise the late 90s onwards.

19

OK, I might be able to believe this. I found a graph of UK unemployment rates over the same time period as the graphs, and has a vaguely-similar bump in the middle. The crime rate movements seem to lag the unemployment rate changes by at least a couple of years, though, which seems odd to me. Also the unemployment graph was not nearly as flat outside the 1990s as the crime-rate graphs. I’m also surprised at how large the changes were–the violent crime rate rose 65%!–but it still seems like a reasonable explanation for at least part of the behavior.

20

When I was in London in February, all the talk in the newspapers was about creating a “British FBI” to deal with the high crime rates there. Not only that, they’re bringing in the people from New York that implemented Guliani’s “broken windows” policy in NYC - which most everyone (with exceptions) agrees was pretty darn successful.

Anyway, what struck me was the the UK papers - both left and right - were lamenting the fact that even though the US has the reputation as being a gun-toting, lawless society, rates for almost every crime except murder were higher in the UK than in the US. I knew, for example, that “you are now six times more likely to be mugged in London than New York” (BBC link, above) but if you’re gonna get shot while getting mugged, it’ll be in the US, not the UK.