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Comment by tristor | Hacker News Reader

Which is an interesting comparison because these are not the only immigrant populations that do this, there are large groups of immigrant populations in Texas who are largely unbanked or underbanked or have cultural penchants for using gold and silver as stores of value, but there has been no concerted effort to burglarize them, because strings of home invasions in Texas usually end up with the home invaders in a body bag regardless of who they decide to target.

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Can you help my understand why this article cites a higher per capita burglary rate in Texas than California (it claims the data is from the FBI)? https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/burglary-statist...

Why does Texas has so many reported burglaries though?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/232539/burglaries-report...

Probably because these statistics are based on reported burglaries as opposed to the actual number of burglaries. It's my impression from various threads and news articles that people in California have given up on reporting all sorts of crimes due to the lack of prosecution.

Must be the same situation in Florida then?

California is a big place with a lot of varying community attitudes... that sounds like quite a big assumption.

Because stolen guns are very valuable and the owners have to officially report them stolen to avoid all the possible criminal charges.

People report gun theft in order to make possession of it unambiguously a crime same as with cars and other serialized property.

Nobody with a brain actually thinks the police in the next state over are gonna seriously suspect them of something when their handgun inevitably gets recovered in an unrelated crime.

1: The data is obviously completely bogus unless you believe there were only 11 burglaries in Florida in all of 2021. You can't draw anything from it.

2: Texas is the second most populous state, so total # has little value. You need the per capita number to understand whether their might be some deterrence happening. Unfortunately the Statista data is garbage, so it isn't worth calculating.

So where is a good source of data?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/232580/burglary-rate-in-...

Statista is proven untrustworthy, so I'd start with the FBI UCRs:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s

Thanks for that link. Looks like its a mixed bag between Texas and California. Out of the 9 crime statistics, California is better for 5 while Texas is better for 4. And sometimes the differences are small. For example for burglary, the rate is 392.8 for Texas while 392.8 for while 386.1 for California.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

This is false.

Texas and California are roughly tied in burglaries per capita, 370.7 and 369.7 per 100,000. New Mexico has the most, at 648.8/100,000. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/232580/burglary-rate-in-...) Interestingly, New Mexico has a bit more than three times as many guns per capita as Texas. (https://www.statista.com/chart/21894/firearms-in-each-state/)

Property crime rates are going to be suppressed in Texas among the (undocumented) immigrant population because of a justifiable lack of trust between them and police. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pam.22221) The NCVS should give better data, but I'm damned if I can find it.

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