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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

The only major crime statistic that I’ll trust is the murder rate. It’s the only one that can’t be faked. Petty crime goes unreported. Arrest and conviction rates can be gamed. But you can’t hide people dying.

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Yes you can, just rule it a suicide or accident. I've seen a likely murder in mountain view misclassified as a diabetes-related accidental drowning.

Yeah, I've actually seen this happen enough times that I believe it's more common than people think. I don't have statistics, but I've noticed multiple people die under mysterious circumstances (including a close friend) and they were usually ruled a suicide, even when the family objected.

Example: Where I grew up if you didnt die within 24hrs or being shot it was not considered a murder, the gorvernment changed the way the statistic measures murders many years ago to lower the ‘murder’ rate.

Edit to add this link with the murder rates: https://www.statista.com/statistics/984823/homicide-rate-pue...

Have you considered getting in touch with an investigative journalist?

Well, that's a "technically" while still missing the point. It is much more difficult to meaningfully shift murder rate numbers via mass mis-reporting, compared to other statistics.

I don’t think you’ve meaningfully proved that claim. The point was that you can, in fact, quite easily game stats even for murder. I’ll add this[1] as another example.

[1] - https://www.vox.com/world/2015/12/13/9989250/japan-crime-con...

To steelman this argument, I'd say it's hard to hide "excess deaths" across all causes lumped together. Although during covid we probably even managed to do that by reducing miles driven and presumably # of road deaths.

Brazilian police: Hold my bear.

>The only major crime statistic that I’ll trust is the murder rate. It’s the only one that can’t be faked.

It absolutely can and has been. [1]

> Photos of the teenager’s corpse show a deep cut on his right arm, horrific bruising on his neck and chest. His face is swollen and covered with cuts. A silhouette of violence runs from the corner of his left eye over the cheekbone to his jaw, and his legs are pocked with small burns the size of a lighted cigarette. But police in Japan’s Aichi prefecture saw something else when they looked at the body of Takashi Saito, a 17-year-old sumo wrestler who arrived at a hospital in June. The cause of death was “heart disease,” police declared.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-nov-09-fg-autop...

Fortunately, murder is a rare occurrence - so only trusting this isn't going to help much unless you live in a major US city.

The murder rate in most areas of the US is under 5 in 100,000.

There's less than 50 police departments in the US where you can expect even 50 murders per year. With numbers that small, you'll run into a lot of noise.

We suffer this here. Toronto has roughly 40 - 80 murders each year. So each year comes with helpful headlines informing us the homicide rate has halved or doubled over the previous year, often with some commentary about what this regression/progression indicates for our society. If you average over a few years, you find out it's basically flat.

Statistics Canada has the Toronto Metropolitan Area averaging well over 100/year for the last 3 years:

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=351000...

You're just talking about two different areas.

Your data is for the Greater Toronto Area. The commenter above you was referring to the City if Toronto (which is one of several municipalities in the Greater Toronto Area).

"Murders up by 156%!!" (i.e. 20 more than last year)

Sadly many parts of the US (and other countries) have been hiding the death rate for our current pandemic with varying degrees of success, it's quite possible to hide murders too. You can disguise them as something else.

Other places are adding deaths to the covid list.

source?

One example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_COVID-19_nursing_home...

Wow, didn't hear about this til now.

Here's a more recent update: https://abc7ny.com/ny-nursing-home-deaths-kathy-hochul-andre...

murders go unreported/recorded all the time "NHI" "accident" "missing persons" and of course missing person implies there's some one who knows/is-willing-to-report that you're missing.

Murder stats only count the found bodies, and even then as others have stated the classification as murder vs. other causes can and will be gamed.

You absolutely can.

Murder rates don’t include “justifiable homicide”, because police departments are not required to report officer-involved shootings or killings to the federal government, nor the outcomes of any investigations into them. Which can also be gamed.

I’m not saying that radically transforms the statistic—I have no idea. But it’s a factor.

Even murder can be tricky because medical advancements or hospital shutdowns can really impact the survival of severely injured people

Yep, I learned this from The Wire!

Even the murder stats can be juked, like McNulty's arc in season 5 or the bodies in the vacants.

Yeah, like the cops have never gotten caught claiming someone accidentally fell on 43 bullets before. Or like there haven't been numerous cases of misattributing COVID deaths because they were inconvenient for the genocidal robber nihilists we have passing for a major political party. And that's just malfeasance, there's plenty of just plain error involved.

Having a deaths count -- which itself definitely has error bars, otherwise what the heck are missing persons estimates -- doesn't mean you have a correct attribution of those deaths. Never trust data in the absence of auditing how it got there.

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