Comment by Aurornis
2 days ago
> Anecdote is not data.
This is a situation where the data may not be capturing the reality, though.
An increasingly common tactic for decreasing crime statistics is to reduce reporting of crimes. The more difficult you make it to report a crime, the better the crime numbers look.
In one city I’m familiar with, it became so well known that reporting small crimes was a futile endeavor that people just gave up. It was common knowledge that you don’t bother calling the police unless it was a major crime. Not surprisingly, the crime statistics started to look better.
That’s why we have the national crime survey, performed by the ONS.
Correlating it with police stats and murder stats suggests that reporting and recording is actually going up as a proportion of crime. Petty crime like shoplifting has gone up, but relatively speaking most people would probably take that over stabbing and murder even if ideally we’d have neither.
There’s this weird trend that’s taken over social media trying to portray London as a lawless hell hole but few people who actually live here are experiencing it that way, and the stats back that up. It’s largely people outside London that are claiming the crime is bad here.
pretty hard to underreport homicide
Not sure homicide fits into “small crime” category.
No, but it serves as a sense check on the other data. If the official stats were bogus and crime were spiraling out of control in London, it would be somewhat surprising to see homicides going down. The fact that one of the most objectively measurable crimes is going down lends some additional credibility to the statistics indicating that this trend is also being seen across other crime categories.