How bizarrely counterintuitive is that? Perhaps I have (even in passing) been listening to our Conservative "hard on crime" politicians too much. Does anyone have comparable statistics from other countries?
How weird would it be if it turns out the US had the same pattern (although I doubt it...though I would like to be pleasantly surprised)?
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I wonder how meaningful the statistics are. With low-population areas, it takes very few crimes to make a big impact.
I would suggest that you don't need population density to have criminal behavior, you just need any population. In other words, you are as likely to have crime with 100 people living in the same area as with 100,000. If you have a very few incidents of crime in the small population, it amounts to a very high crime rate per capita.
Also, police are much less likely to stop any particular single crime, than they are to stop some crime in general. Add in the idea that big cities expect more crime, so have more preventative measures in place, and it starts to make more sense.
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Actually, that really doesn't surprise me. At least in the United States, it's been economic policy for decades to convince rural people to move to the cities. At this point, many rural and small town economies are so devastated that many of the people that are left are desperate.
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Strider: Its in the article or the study summary summary at Statscan.
Mightycow: Thats entirely possible. Although, I would point out that the statistics are per capita. The assertion that population itself simply causes crime cannot explain all the data since there would then be no difference between the rural/small-urban and large urban populations.
In addition, I also do not think it just a random spike caused by an abnormal number of crimes that year due to the sentence, "Taking population into account, the homicide rate of 2.5 homicides per 100,000 people in rural areas was actually higher than the rate of 2.0 in large urban areas and the rate of 1.7 in small urban areas. This pattern has held constant over the past decade."
In general though, I'm more commenting on the perception that the large cities, Toronto in particular, is seen as a haven for crime (if you listen to the media and politicians) when it turns out its not really the case.
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Farmgirl: Its linked to the summary at Juristat
Turns out, it answers one of my questions:
quote: The major difference between the two countries was for homicide. By far the highest rates in the U.S. were found in the large urban areas, while in Canada they were in the rural areas. This may be related to the prevalence of firearm homicides in large American cities. A recent study has shown that urban areas in the U.S. have experienced almost twice the firearm homicide rate of most rural counties.
quote:Originally posted by FlyingCow: Also, the differences in reporting rate may be a factor.
And this:
quote: The GSS collects reporting rates to police for each of the eight offences included in the survey. For seven of these eight offences, there were no significant differences in reporting rates between small urban residents and large urban residents. The only offence with significantly different reporting rates was “theft of personal property”, where small urban residents reported incidents to police much more frequently (40%) than did residents of large urban areas (28%). Therefore, reporting rates to police do not appear to explain the differences in policereported crime rates between these areas.
quote:Originally posted by Mucus: Mightycow: Thats entirely possible. Although, I would point out that the statistics are per capita. The assertion that population itself simply causes crime cannot explain all the data since there would then be no difference between the rural/small-urban and large urban populations.
Actually, that was my point. I would suggest that any time there are at least two people, crime is possible. There is an extreme lower limit to crime, so that if there is a town of two people, and one person takes the other person's shoes, that town has a 50% per capita rate of theft. It is very unlikely that in a city of a million people, half of them will be thieves.
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Interesting, Mucus. Though, I'm always interested in how they come up with reporting rate numbers.... I mean, how can you tell what percentage of something isn't reported?
If there were five rapes reported, for instance, in a given month - how do I know there weren't actually 10, or 15, or 40? Or maybe there were 10 assaults reported - how do I know there weren't 20, 40, or 100?
If it's not reported, how can you make a statistic about it?
I mean, 28% reporting rate means that 72% of the victims supposedly didn't report the crime. If they didn't report the crime, how do we know the crime happened to count it as part of the 100% total?
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In anthropology back in school I read about the !Kung San of Southern Africa -- former herdsmen who had become gatherer-hunters -- and they had a pretty high per capita homicide rate. Their small numbers meant that if someone in the tribe or a neighboring tribe was killed, that might be the "only" person killed during the average person's lifetime... but it would mean for a pretty high homicide rate.
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