Hacker News Reader

Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

I’m sorry your family have been a victims of violent crime. I’ve never been a victim of a violent crime, though I did have my car broken into over 20 years ago.

My anecdote would suggest there’s no crime, but we know that’s not true and why we have statistics.

View on HN

You're not listening to what he is claiming, which is that crimes are going underreported and so the statistics are not accurate.

The claim is anecdotal and thus insufficient for statistical analysis, as expressed by the previous response. What did they miss exactly?

The claim that statistics are flawed is not something you can respond to with by saying that the statistics say otherwise.

But the claim specifically, was that the statistics are flawed NOW with an implication that they were not flawed before.

Not sure you can do much with that in a discussion/argument when there is no proof of that provided other than a personal anecdote.

Edit: Actually maybe I misread it, they are saying its always been flawed. But still the general point of the thread still holds I think.

People always claim statistics are inaccurate when the statistics contradict their subjective experience or sincerely held belief.

One proxy for crime statistics is homicide. Any other stat can be juked, but homicide cannot because bodies stink. To someone who was insisting to me that the UK crime rate has increased over time, I pointed out that it was possible, but unlikely. Homicide is at a multi decade low in absolute numbers, and much lower in per capita numbers. That’s likely to be correlated with violent crime.

So in the case of the UK both homicide and violent crime have followed a gentle downwards trend line, and we can trust the first line completely. Therefore, the second is likely to be true.

Did it convince the guy I explained this to? No it did not. “You don’t live in a rough area like I do”. Ok then.

Crime is often hyper localized. In some areas of some cities, crime may be going up while the overall rate of the city or country is going down. These intensive areas can also change over time. I am not aware of any analysis of the localization of crime and how it changes over time. There are a lot of choices to be made in doing that analysis, but if a reasonable local analysis across a country did that and found that in all localities crime went down, then that would seem reasonable to dismiss that guy's actual experience. The localization should probably on the neighborhood level, maybe on the order of 1000 people instead of 10000 or more.

But the overall crime rate is lower no? Less people experience or are affected by crime if the average goes down.

Which is why I didn’t deny his subjective experience. I only disagreed with him extrapolating his local experience to the whole country. His area might have become rougher, but the UK as a whole is seeing less crime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com