A detailed analysis of the US's lower crime rates:
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.13948/pub_detail.asp
Extract:
America's streets are becoming safer, even as crime has exploded in Europe. Decentralized control of policing efforts has enabled the United States to catch more criminals, while long prison sentences prevent them from striking again. European law enforcement agencies would do well to emulate those practices.
After he beat an eighty-year-old grandmother, took a mother with a stroller hostage, and robbed eleven London banks in broad daylight, Michael Wheatley was finally nabbed by British police in late April. Dubbed the Skull Cracker for his habit of pistol-whipping victims, Wheatley had transfixed the London tabloid press with a series of dramatic, violent crimes. Scared Londoners, however, had more to worry about than just the Skull Cracker: In April alone, one gang used a battering ram to steal $14,500 of merchandise from a jewelry store near the city's commercial center, another took to ramming cars into storefronts, and teenage thugs robbed pedestrians of their mobile phones all over the city. Last year, London saw more serious assaults, armed robberies, and car thefts than New York; 2002 could see London's murder rate exceed the Big Apple's.
The same pattern can be seen throughout Europe-indeed, in much of the developed world. Crime has recently hit record highs in Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Toronto, and a host of other major cities. In a 2001 study, the British Home Office (the equivalent of the U.S. Department of Justice) found violent and property crime increased in the late 1990s in every wealthy country except the United States. American property crime rates have been lower than those in Britain, Canada, and France since the early 1990s, and violent crime rates throughout the European Union, Australia, and Canada have recently begun to equal and even surpass those in the United States. Even Sweden, once the epitome of cosmopolitan socialist prosperity, now has a crime victimization rate 20 percent higher than that of the United States.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Jules,
Mr. Lehrer pulls the rug out from beneath his own feet, if you read parts of the article you didn't cite:
"While our homicide rate is still substantially higher than most in Europe, it has sunk to levels unseen here since the early 1960s."
If he admits homicide rates are still substantially higher than Europe's, how can he provide basis for the argument that the police and justice systems in the USA are better than those in Europe??
I looked up 10 or 12 different websites for information on world crime rates. Some statistics were from the early 1990's, some from the late 1990's, some from the early 2000's and some from the last couple of years. Although figures varied somewhat, all consistently showed crime rates per capita - especially homicides - as higher in the USA than in any European country, by a fair margin.
I also confirmed that (as I already knew) Colombia had the highest homicide rate in the world in the early 1990's, while I was working there. In fact Medellin was dubbed the murder capital of the world in 1991/92 with between 80 and 120 murders per week in a population of 2.4 million; when you take into account the fact that around 99% of murders are of men between the ages of 20 and 50, and that 1/3 of the population is under 15, so that this demographic group must make up under 25% of the city's total population, this figure translates to a murder rate of over 1% per annum for this group of inhabitants... Needless to say, we were highly recommended not to travel to Medellin on our time off. However, Bogota wasn't all that much better - that was the time the guerillas were regularly (once a week or so) detonating enormous car bombs in random parts of the city during peak hours, each one killing 60 to 120 people (on top of the already high crime rate that Bogota normally had)...
Marcus
Post a Comment