At 09:00 AM 5/03/01 -0600, Chuck wrote:
>>http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=21902
>>Britain, Australia top U.S. in violent crime
We've been through this before. The page says, e.g.:
>Amazingly, armed robberies
> have climbed nearly 45 percent.
> In the Australian state of
> Victoria, gun homicides have
> climbed 300 percent.
Amazing! 300 percent! Who would want to live there?
There are two towns near here. Freetown has a policy where people dash
across the street whenever they like, and drivers may run them down if they
feel like it. Last year, 1010 people were killed crossing the roads in
Freetown, a rise of a mere one percent over the previous year, negligible
really.
In nearby Lighttown, traffic is strictly regulated by traffic lights. Last
year, there was a truly shocking rise of 300% in the number of citizen
killed! Up from 1 in the previous year.
There's also that very baroque claim heading the page:
>Twenty-six percent of English
> citizens -- roughly one-quarter of the
> population -- have been victimized
> by violent crime. Australia led the
> list with more than 30 percent of its
> population victimized.
What the *hell* are they talking about? People getting rudely jostled in
queues? Are they counting the huge number of immigrants from brutal wars
who might claim that in their whole lives they had indeed been `victimized'
at least once? This might seem inconsistent with:
>the International Crime
> Victims Survey notes that overall
> crime victimization Down Under
> rose from 27.8 percent of the
> population in 1988, to 28.6 percent
> in 1991 to over 30 percent in 1999
but still that might be some sort of cumulative figure. Now it's true that
I contributed to one of those data a few years ago when my bike, chained
outside the local library, was stolen. I never got it back. Very
irritating. But I ain't never been killed in no drive-by shooting, bro.
Damien Broderick
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