Dangerous

Crime

[sorry this post is late — I set it to appear at 6pm, not 6am]

Apparently, the U.S. is not a safe place to be — in fact, there are 127 countries safer than ours.

I guess that it all depends.

Here in Plano, I see sights like this every morning in the pre-dawn hours — dozens of them, mostly jogging all by themselves, and I seriously doubt that you’d see much of this in, oh, Qatar (#31) or Oman (#69), let alone in Jamaica (#83).

Of course, I wouldn’t imagine you’d see many of the above in the South Side of Chicago or in Detroit, either, which just proves how dangerous averages can be.

What comes to mind immediately, by the way, is that according to the study, San Salvador and Honduras are ranked higher than the U.S. — begging the question as to why, then, thousands of their citizens are supposedly fleeing crime and persecution and flooding our southern border.

Actually, I call bullshit on the whole thing.  Reason:

South Africa is ranked one place higher than the U.S., at #127.

While there may be safe and unsafe places in the U.S., there are no  safe places in South Africa whatsoever.  As I said:  bullshit.

12 comments

  1. One of the tricks is to use self-reported stats – and let the countries themselves define the terms.

    For example, you might decide to keep your “homicide rate” low by only defining “homicide” as “someone murdered someone else and was found guilty in a court of law.” As opposed to “someone was murdered.”

    Quite a few of the “safe” places do that sort of thing. They also do the same with other violent crimes, which makes them look great (“we’ll put it in the stats when someone gets charged”), while the citizens know better.

    1. yeah. Which is how the Dutch government comes to ever declining crime rates.
      They just count only crimes that were reported AND where there was an investigation launched.

      As people have come to expect that a crime they report isn’t going to get investigated anyway, most crimes no longer are reported, and those that are quite often not investigated but as a matter of procedure filed as unsolved and forgotten about unless maybe someone is arrested for something else and admits to them.

      Take the 7 times my tyres were slashed (in front of my home) about 20 years ago, the same era people tried to kick in my front door and destroyed my garden fence.
      When calling the police I was told to not bother calling them for “kids playing”.
      I then got told to just file a report online at their crime reporting website instead, which leads to an email 5 minutes later that the report has been filed as unsolved…

      Or take Amsterdam, where the mayor (also chief of police under Dutch law at the time) declared that car theft would no longer be considered a crime because “if you leave something on the side of the road and someone takes it it’s not stealing”.

    2. “Defining “homicide” as “someone murdered someone else and was found guilty in a court of law.” As opposed to “someone was murdered.” = The UK.
      Defining “homicide” as were the investigation starts out as a homicide even if dropped after one second = The USA.

    1. Elaborating on Phelps comment about the source of the problem:
      A few years ago I was wading through the FBI crime statistics and wandering the web comparing similar stuff around the world.
      “Complex studies” may put the US way down on the list at 128, but remove the data from black, Democrat run areas in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, East St. Louis, Newark, Washington, DC in the USA and we rose to #3, IIRC.
      Blacks are about 13% of the USA’s population, about half are males, about half of them are ages 15-40; IOW, about 3.5% of our population commits ~70% of the violent crimes in our country.
      Recently, a retired Chicago cop posted a list of people shot and killed by the Chicago PD over 2015-2019 defending the Chicago cops, in the face of a black politician blaming the cops for shooting “unarmed African Americans.”.
      Of 31 killed, 26 were black , 3 were Hispanic and two were white. All but one were armed with a deadly weapon, mostly guns, and the only one unarmed was a bystander in the wrong place with the wrong people.
      I have no more sympathy for “African” Americans. For fifty-five years America has bent over backwards to atone for slavery and Jim Crow. There are very, very few Americans alive now who practiced even the latter, while blacks have, for the most part, squandered the cornucopia of benefits thrown at them. I have a couple of friends who call themselves black Americans who have contempt for the appellation “African American”, but as far as I’m concerned, these so-called “African” Americans can go the hell back to Africa if that’s how they want to identify. It’s past time to lance the boil of whitewashing black criminality.

  3. From the first paragraph:

    “The world has gotten a little more peaceful, according to the 13th annual Global Peace Index, a complex study that ranks 163 nations on factors such as homicide and incarceration rates, the presence of small arms, military expenditures, ongoing conflicts, terrorism, the overall economic impact of violence and even climate change.”

    Presence of small arm?
    Military expenditure?
    Rates of incarceration?

    So all we need to do is give up our guns, disband the military, and release everyone from prison and we’ll be perfectly safe.

    Pardon me whilst I throw the bullshit flag.

    Mark D

  4. “according to the 13th annual Global Peace Index, a complex study that” That’s all I need to hear to know any study , Forecast , or model is completely bogus. ” Complex” just means we added more rules and filters until we got the results we had predicted. Give me a big pile of random data, let me know what the results need to be and any good analyst can make the data model tell you what you want hear. Just don’t look under the hood very carefully. Just like your basic “Climate model”. Put in any data you want and the result will always be the same.

    Always look at the source. I’ve yet to see someone publish a study that didn’t support whatever their cause was.

    1. again validates the expression “figures don’t lie but liars figure”. Some consultants, after establishing who signs off on payment for services, have been known to ask that principle “just what is it you wish to prove”?

  5. Well if that was you that took the pic you know you probably scared the crap out of her. Good thing she didn’t pull out her hawgleg and commence to ventilating the car.

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