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Comment by xxdarrenxx | Hacker News Reader

Misleading article. I'm from the netherlands and a lot of police interviews report lack off financial support and manpower.

Only criminals that get caught end up in jail.. Criminals who do not get caught are criminals nevertheless.. And they stil do criminal things.

Correlation =/= Causation.

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OTOH, the murder rate in 2015 was also the lowest in 20 years: http://nltimes.nl/2016/07/29/netherlands-murder-rate-20-year...

In loads of cases questionable deaths haven't been investigated on how they died. Meaning: lots of murders aren't being reported/seen as murder. Unfortunately do not have an article/reference for this, despite trying to find it.

What makes you think the percentage of questionable deaths has changed? If it hasn't, an all time low murder rate still stands.

Murder isn't the same as questionable deaths?!? I don't think that has changed. I said that in not enough cases they're checking if someone has been murdered or not. As such, you cannot trust that murder has gone down. This has been reported by Dutch news within the last 12 months I already mentioned I couldn't find that report via Google.

This is exactly the same as the crime rate. Less reported figures doesn't mean crime rate has gone down. For that one I gave elsewhere their own investigation which shows that crime rate went up.

Murder is usually the one crime stat that can't be fudged - the saying in public policy circles is "you can't hide a body". You can downgrade an assault to a public order disturbance, you can just fail to log thefts, but when someone dies it gets into too many databases to remove from the stats.

Most murders are not of the sort where it's unclear if it was murder at all. Someone's stabbed, beaten, shot, etc.

> Murder is usually the one crime stat that can't be fudged

Homicides generally, maybe, are harder to fudge (especially homicides + suicides as a single group) but breaking down into specific crimes (and non-crimes; not all homicide is criminal) certainly can be fudged.

A found a reference for this:

http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2017/01/a-low-crime-ra...

"A confidential report by the police and public prosecution office states that official figures do not reflect the real volume of crime in the Netherlands,"

A more extensive Dutch article (referenced in above): http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/39681/nbsp/article/detail/4447567/...

I have no idea what the the truth is, but it seems that members of most groups will anecdotally tell you they need more resources or support.

That's true everywhere. Nowhere solves 100% of its criminal cases. You must watch too many police procedural TV shows if you think the cops just march out of the office and catch the bad guy by the end of every episode. Lots of times victims don't cooperate with police, it's unclear what really happened, police can't find the perpetrator, the prosecutor decides there isn't enough evidence to pursue a trial, there's corruption involved, the perpetrator has significant financial resources to fight the case, or ultimately the judge or jury thinks the evidence is insufficient. Or most tragically, someone does get convicted and it's the wrong person! The perpetrator is still out there and an innocent person is unjustly punished.

>Only criminals that get caught end up in jail..

That's the same in every country.

The only interesting question is whether the netherlands have any higher crime rate, which I don't think is the case (compare to e.g. Britain).

If they don't arrest some guys doing some petty small stuff, it's no big deal.

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