Kevin Tarr wrote:
>
> I found a web site which had an excel file with international crime data:
>
> http://www.aic.gov.au/stats/international/
>
> Hardly a rigorous study: I took the data and did some things with it. I
> divided each incident of crime by the population, averaged each crime
> statistic and 'normalized'* the crime average for each country to the
> average homicide rate. Then I averaged the crimes for each country.
>
...
>
> England & Wales 8.37% 7.77% 7
> U.S.A. 5.61% 8.08% 6
>
> *I took the average of the crime statistic, divided the homicide average,
> then multiplied by the specific country's rate for that crime.
> _______________________________________________
Kevin-- Please explain your procedure a bit more clearly. What do you
mean by "average", anyway? The original table has overall numbers, and
(at least for homicide) per capita incidence.
You produce some counter-intuitive results. I'm just
looking at the U.S. and England above. As one might expect, the U.S.
has over 3 times the per capita homicide rate of England. But its
rate for "Table 1 crimes" is almost 3 times less. To me, this
means that different countries put different crimes on "Table 1".
That is supported by footnote (1), which says exactly that.
I bet one would obtain much more useful results by simply
extrapolating the number of "serious crimes" from the number of
homicides. That is, just comparing based on the per capita incidence
of homicides.
---David Hobby
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