Or will these victims be counted separately from the victims of “conventional” murders?
Why would they include them? That would render any meaningful homicide rate comparisons to other years impossible. There’s no sense creating a statistic that isn’t useful.
Arjuna34
Playing devil’s advocate here, you can argue that the deaths should be counted in official homicide statistics. They certainly fit the definition of homicide, after all. (Think of the idiot in Arizona who just shot and killed a Sikh. Should that death be included in the homicide statistics? If that death is included, why exclude the WTC deaths?)
The mere fact that the numbers are horrendously high doesn’t mean they should be excluded. Just becasue your data contains outliers doesn’t mean the outliers are wrong.
I’ve poked around with homicide statistics in the past, and I know that some countries track terrorism deaths and “regular” homicides separately. And all countries try to differentiate between casualties of war and regular homicides. It’s easy to think of cases that blur the distinctions between the categories, though. Accounting for murder is a tricky business.
This is kind of a ghoulish discussion, but in any event, it seems to me that Major League Baseball’s concept of the “asterisk” would be appropriate here.
(As to what is actually done, I tried to find NYC homicide statistics from 1993, but a couple quick searches didn’t reveal anything.)
lucwarm has is right, I think. When there was a mass murder by arson at the Happy Land Social Club in 1990, all 87 victims were counted as homicide victims.
Sadly, at the time 87 wasn’t enough murders to make 1990 look particularly out of whack, but when people tally the stats, they generally include a reference to the arson.
I suspect that the victims of the WTC horror will be counted similarly.
I wasn’t saying the outliers are wrong, just that it’s questionable whether including them is useful. Is it meaningful for the NYPD to report a 1000% increase in murders one year, followed by a 1000% decrease (hopefully!) the next year? If you do include them, and then use a disclaimer every single time the statistic is used (whether by itself or in some larger stat) then it might be easier to just leave them out to start with.
I don’t know enough about the actual use of these stats to know what the answer is. If I were comparing crime rates in different cities to decide where to live, I doubt I would want them included.
Arjuna34
I understand where you’re coming from, Arjuna. I’m just trying to suggest that a stat that includes the WTC deaths may be more useful to many people.
For example, take the NYC police. The WTC demonstrates that the exception can sometimes be more far important than the rule: the attack raised the city’s homicide rate by almost an order of magnitude. Surely this will affect the level of spending on the police and how funds are allocated within the department. Leaving the deaths out of the official homicide stat would in many ways distort the city’s decision-making process.
I see your point regarding rates in different cities if you’re only interested in comparing “normal” homicides. But when it comes to the question, “which cities are more dangerous?” I would argue strongly that the WTC should be included. Let’s face it, terrorists are far, far more likely to target NYC or Washington than Kansas City or Portland.
It all comes down to whether we view this attack as a one-time-only occurance, or simply as a rare event. We all hope and pray it never happens again, but sadly there are already many countries where terrorism is a regular occurance. And even if there are no more attacks right away, you don’t want people a generation or two from now to forget what happened. That’s lead to disasterous decisions about everything from building bridges to going to war in the past. I would go with lucwarm and manhattan’s plan: include the numbers, but add a footnote explaining the circumstances.
Check the NYPD’s CompStat data on Monday (09/24) to see how they classify last week’s events.
Looking at the updated stats in toadspittle’s link, they did not include the WTC deaths.
So how do you count the deaths of the people in the hijacked planes? In New York? In the state the flight originated? What about the flight crew members killed befor imppact?
If a baby is born on a plane where is it’s birth considered to be?
Wumpus said, “Looking at the updated stats in toadspittle’s link, they did not include the WTC deaths.”
However, I think that most of the victims have not yet been declared officially dead.
Slate has been running a daily “diary” by NYPD detective Lucas Miller. His entry for Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2001 includes the following:
Judging by one quote from Det. Miller (“The victims were New Yorkers, some only temporarily…”) I think all would be counted as homicides in New York’s jurisdiction. If you kill a foreign tourist in Manhattan, you commit murder under the laws of the State of New York, and in the jurisdiction of the NYPD.
I don’t know about crew members or passengers who might conceivably have been killed in the airspace over Massachusetts or of some other state. I imagine there would be federal offenses here as well.