Imagine two countries: Syldavia and Borduria. In Syldavia, if your home lacks private security, it has a 1 in 3000 chance of being burgled; in Borduria it has a 1 in 3 chance. In Syldavia, if you wander the streets alone at night, you have a 1 in 3000 chance of being mugged; in Borduria you have a 1 in 3 chance. These statistics make behaviour very different in the two countries. In Syldavia, almost no one has private security for their home, and almost no one travels at night exclusively by registered taxi. In Borduria almost everyone does both. As a consequence, the actual crime rate is about the same in the two countries. In some years, Syldavia even has a higher crime rate than Borduria, because some Syldavians become too blasé about how wonderfully crime-free their society is.
What’s the point of my example? Even if the two countries have near-identical crime statistics, it’s obvious Borduria is the more fearful place to live. We’ve all heard the refrain that the fear of crime is worse than the likelihood of experiencing it. But this misses the point that, where people have a reasonable fear of crime, they modulate their behaviour to minimise risk. Syldavians learn to behave like Syldavians, and Bordurians like Bordurians. If a Bordurian behaves like a Syldavian in Borduria, he’ll likely be burgled and mugged. After that learning experience, he’ll change.
Detection rate? Something around 5% isn't it? Conviction rate for things like burglary? Somewhere approaching zero% isn't it? British justice - if defined as being on the side of the law-abiding and a fearsome deterrent to the criminally minded - is doing an appallingly bad job. It's difficult to imagine how it could be doing worse. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
Good question. Grooming gangs would obviously come under sexual offences, which as I mentioned are among the "major exceptions" to the trend of falling crime. Yet we don't really know whether sexual offences have risen, due to "changes in reporting trends".
Another thing to note is that, as of 2020, only around 500 people had been charged for grooming gang offences over the period from 1997 to 2015 – which is 25 per year, on average. Of course, this number would presumably be higher if authorities had not been afraid of appearing "racist", and it corresponds to perpetrators not victims.
What's more, despite Muslims being massively overrepresented among grooming gang perpetrators, Asians aren't overrepresented among sexual offenders in general. In fact, they're underrepresented. So it's possible that grooming gang offences don't make up a large share of all sexual offences.
Finally, grooming gangs have typically operated over several years, or in some cases more than a decade, so inclusion of all the "missing" cases might not substantially affect the trend. Since the Times' expose in 2011, there have presumably been fewer grooming gang offences; the peak may have been in the early 2000s – around the same time as the peak in violent crime.
Turning a blind eye to grooming gangs for reasons of political correctness clearly represents a huge failure of policing, though it may apply more to the 1990s/2000s than to recent years. Here's the article I wrote about grooming gangs back in April: https://www.noahsnewsletter.com/p/the-demographics-of-grooming-gangs
I imagine you would have got a good fee from the Express, the Mail, the Sun or the Telegraph for placing it with them. More seriously, why not The Guardian?
Imagine two countries: Syldavia and Borduria. In Syldavia, if your home lacks private security, it has a 1 in 3000 chance of being burgled; in Borduria it has a 1 in 3 chance. In Syldavia, if you wander the streets alone at night, you have a 1 in 3000 chance of being mugged; in Borduria you have a 1 in 3 chance. These statistics make behaviour very different in the two countries. In Syldavia, almost no one has private security for their home, and almost no one travels at night exclusively by registered taxi. In Borduria almost everyone does both. As a consequence, the actual crime rate is about the same in the two countries. In some years, Syldavia even has a higher crime rate than Borduria, because some Syldavians become too blasé about how wonderfully crime-free their society is.
What’s the point of my example? Even if the two countries have near-identical crime statistics, it’s obvious Borduria is the more fearful place to live. We’ve all heard the refrain that the fear of crime is worse than the likelihood of experiencing it. But this misses the point that, where people have a reasonable fear of crime, they modulate their behaviour to minimise risk. Syldavians learn to behave like Syldavians, and Bordurians like Bordurians. If a Bordurian behaves like a Syldavian in Borduria, he’ll likely be burgled and mugged. After that learning experience, he’ll change.
Detection rate? Something around 5% isn't it? Conviction rate for things like burglary? Somewhere approaching zero% isn't it? British justice - if defined as being on the side of the law-abiding and a fearsome deterrent to the criminally minded - is doing an appallingly bad job. It's difficult to imagine how it could be doing worse. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
How do Grooming gangs fit into this?
I have hard times believeing stats seeing the sheer scope of the Grooming gans
Good question. Grooming gangs would obviously come under sexual offences, which as I mentioned are among the "major exceptions" to the trend of falling crime. Yet we don't really know whether sexual offences have risen, due to "changes in reporting trends".
Another thing to note is that, as of 2020, only around 500 people had been charged for grooming gang offences over the period from 1997 to 2015 – which is 25 per year, on average. Of course, this number would presumably be higher if authorities had not been afraid of appearing "racist", and it corresponds to perpetrators not victims.
What's more, despite Muslims being massively overrepresented among grooming gang perpetrators, Asians aren't overrepresented among sexual offenders in general. In fact, they're underrepresented. So it's possible that grooming gang offences don't make up a large share of all sexual offences.
Finally, grooming gangs have typically operated over several years, or in some cases more than a decade, so inclusion of all the "missing" cases might not substantially affect the trend. Since the Times' expose in 2011, there have presumably been fewer grooming gang offences; the peak may have been in the early 2000s – around the same time as the peak in violent crime.
Turning a blind eye to grooming gangs for reasons of political correctness clearly represents a huge failure of policing, though it may apply more to the 1990s/2000s than to recent years. Here's the article I wrote about grooming gangs back in April: https://www.noahsnewsletter.com/p/the-demographics-of-grooming-gangs
Excellent piece of writing, thank you.
I imagine you would have got a good fee from the Express, the Mail, the Sun or the Telegraph for placing it with them. More seriously, why not The Guardian?
Firstly, I say great. Lower crime. Then I ask, how much lower it could be without EU style immigrants.
How about u take a long walk on a short pier?
I suspect population ageing is a major cause of the decline in crime.