Why crime statistics are misleading

Watch the video link embedded at the top of the CNN news clip where the Monks say the international community is wrong and it is not genocide.

However, the United Nations took a stance by calling it genocide and calling for the end of it. Misusing statistics can happen all the time, and sometimes it is intentional, others accidental. When we think back to the example of my grandfather, he would just cite stats out of nowhere.

However, he had never really studied any of the issues and his sources were unreliable. As a child, I often wondered how he knew this? He did not intend to spew inaccurate facts but accidentally did to us because he listened to someone who thought they had knowledge.

It is important to be able to distinguish this. In some cases, findings reverse, then reverse again. In the early nineteen-eighties, the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment found that the mandatory arrest of offenders reduced the incidence of further violence against the victims by a third.

Many states enacted laws requiring domestic-violence arrests. In the following decades, though, six replication studies in different cities found mixed effects; some even suggested that arrests encourage revenge against the victims. They discovered that their colleagues in the eighties had been on the right track: the policy worked after all.

Beyond measuring crime and determining its causes, a third difficulty lies in predicting the effects of interventions. Neighborhoods, cities, and states are different. Legalizing pot in one state, for example, could reduce theft there while increasing drug trafficking somewhere else.

Even in a single location, decreases in one kind of crime can create increases in others. Because detecting marijuana requires a blood or saliva test, which are often administered in a hospital, rather than a breathalyzer, effectively policing the roads has become more time-consuming and expensive. Such indirect effects of changes in the law are hard to predict.

Such research might provide politicians and voters with a more contextual view of proposed crime-fighting measures. In February, , for example, a paper in the American Sociological Review looked at the effect of the N.

The study found that, although the operation probably led to a reduction in crime, it significantly reduced the test scores of African-American boys, who are stopped on the street by police officers more than any other group. They affect society as a whole. Criminologists may disagree on questions of causality, but they agree that outsiders underestimate the complexity of criminology. You have to really look at it hard to see how confusing it is.

Why does someone commit a crime? Was it peer pressure, poverty, a broken family, broken windows, bad genes, bad parenting, under-policing, leaded gasoline, Judas Priest? We like simple stories—and we prefer some stories over others. A study in the European Journal of Social Psychology showed that people found explanations for events such as forest fires more satisfying when those explanations involved people.

In , researchers at Duke University asked some gun-control supporters to read an article containing fake evidence that guns often help homeowners during home invasions. After reading the article, which seemed to justify gun ownership, they lowered their estimates of how often home invasions occur. Crime is morally charged, and so our stories about it are, too. Perhaps, whenever someone offers up an especially compelling explanation for a rise or fall in crime, we should be wary.

We might recognize that criminology—a field with direct bearing on many charged issues—is also slow and confounding, with answers that may come decades late or not at all. The moral and social complexity of crime makes simple accounts of it all the more appealing.

In hearing an explanation for its rise or fall, we might ask: What kind of story is its bearer trying to tell? Some use the app to avoid trouble spots and get earthquake updates; rubberneckers use it as a go-to guide to crime scenes and rampaging squirrels.

By Antonia Hitchens. A group of volunteers is helping incarcerated people negotiate a system that is all but broken. Data reporting is voluntary. The most comprehensive source of nationwide data comes from the Federal Bureau of Investigations, which collects crime statistics from law enforcement agencies across the country through its Uniform Crime Reporting program.

There's a long wait for numbers. There is also a significant delay between when data is released and the timeframe it covers: The FBI won't release its full report until September of this year. Compounding this problem is the FBI's recently changed reporting system, which is more detailed but harder for agencies to compile, and may negatively impact the amount of data the agency releases this year.

We don't track gun ownership or sales. While we know that US residents bought guns in record numbers last year, gun ownership data is incomplete at best. The FBI tracks pre-sale background checks, but there is no federal database of gun sales, and there's no way to account for guns that may have been acquired illegally.

Because of the inconsistent availability of data, it's hard to know how closely a surge in gun purchases are tied to a rise in homicides.

While groups like the Gun Violence Archive, AH Datalytics and others have started compiling much of this information on their own, crime analysts say that federal data infrastructure must be improved in order to gain a better understanding of homicide.

The pandemic eroded the social safety net. We likely won't understand the impact that the pandemic has had on violent crime for several more years, but it's important to keep the extraordinary circumstances of the past year in mind. Gun violence disproportionately affects lower-income communities of color , which have been hard-hit by Covid and the job losses and lockdowns that resulted. Roman pointed to the effects of economic instability on young men in particular:.

And you're staying home, you've had a ton of trauma in these areas and now there's new trauma from the pandemic The role of police funding. Law enforcement officials across the country have pointed to the 'defund the police' movement, bail reform and a demoralized force as the drivers behind increased crime, but data suggests that it's more complicated.

The movement to reduce police budgets, for example, has struggled to gain traction across the country. Many of the cuts came amid larger, citywide budget reductions due to the pandemic.

It's also not clear from available data that budget cuts are directly tied to higher crime rates. What happens next? The jump in homicide rates appears to be slowing in several major cities. In Chicago, shootings year-to-date are flat between and In St.