Carl Bialik has this post at 538 Blog on crime statistics and why they can be confusing and manipulated. It's a useful post on the technical aspects, but the "spin" aspect of it is annoying. Bialik tries to soft-pedal the increase in homicides. A 14% jump in a single year is huge.
Bialik says, "For what it's worth, homicides are up -- though probably by less than what you've read." What's with the "probably"? Is he implying that most news media have exaggerated the increase? From what I have read, most media are fully complicit in the soft-peddling.
"So-called justifiable homicides don't count toward the FBI definition." So-called? They are called that because they are that. Would you point at an oak tree and say it is a "so-called oak"?
Bialik discusses the problem of crimes being defined differently in different jurisdictions, which is indeed a huge problem in crime statistics. (It's even worse when you go international.) He talks about the NYPD's reporting of "shootings" and the FBI's UCR category of "aggravated assault." He quotes a criminologist saying (correctly), the latter is more deserving of confidence. Then he tosses in, "Unfortunately, the FBI doesn't separate assaults by firearm from other assaults for individual cities in the data it reports." Why unfortunate? If you need to choose between classifying assaults by harm caused and classifying them by weapon used, it seems to me that harm caused is by far the more important. Ideally, you could classify them both ways, but resources limit what you can do, so the ideal is rarely achieved.
Bialik says, "For what it's worth, homicides are up -- though probably by less than what you've read." What's with the "probably"? Is he implying that most news media have exaggerated the increase? From what I have read, most media are fully complicit in the soft-peddling.
"So-called justifiable homicides don't count toward the FBI definition." So-called? They are called that because they are that. Would you point at an oak tree and say it is a "so-called oak"?
Bialik discusses the problem of crimes being defined differently in different jurisdictions, which is indeed a huge problem in crime statistics. (It's even worse when you go international.) He talks about the NYPD's reporting of "shootings" and the FBI's UCR category of "aggravated assault." He quotes a criminologist saying (correctly), the latter is more deserving of confidence. Then he tosses in, "Unfortunately, the FBI doesn't separate assaults by firearm from other assaults for individual cities in the data it reports." Why unfortunate? If you need to choose between classifying assaults by harm caused and classifying them by weapon used, it seems to me that harm caused is by far the more important. Ideally, you could classify them both ways, but resources limit what you can do, so the ideal is rarely achieved.
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