No Grubby Coats on their Crime Beat

If a rising average age is attributed with the falling crime rates in the US, why the same crime rates be rising faster in much of Europe where the average age is higher and rising more quickly? Fjordman has pointed out that reported rapes are six times higher the more tightly socially managed city of Oslo than in New York.

Brussels Journal commenter Ernest Baert has more:

The International Crime Victim Survey, sponsored by Leiden University, is a survey based on interviews with a random sample of the population. There have been three such surveys in the last 20 years, the latest one in 1995. Respondents are asked which crimes, from a standardised list ranging from bicycle theft to assault and theft, they have personally experienced during the previous year. The most obvious crime missing from the ICVS list is murder, since victims are unable to take later interviews.
Violent crime, and in particular murders, is reported to police more often. For instance, it can be assumed that apart from underworld murders and missing persons, almost all murders in the developed world are reported to the police. Still, even for reported violent crime, a better source than statistics from individual countries, which are distorted by differing national crime definitions, are international comparative statistics by Interpol, which are said to be based on more standardised definitions of crime categories. However, intriguingly, Interpol's international crime statistics have recently been removed from its website. Clearly, such information needs to be hidden from ordinary citizen (who are paying Interpol with their taxes) to prevent them from reaching any wrong judgments about their governments ability to perform the most important task : protect citizens from violence. Luckily I have a copy of some of the 2002 Interpol data, but I am unable to link to what has apparently become a state secret.

As if not knowing was itself a cure, or even a palliative. It isn’t. It never is.