In his reply (03 Nov 2003 02:22:27 -0800) Lambert writes:
Homicides make up a very small fraction of violent crimes. Changes in
the number of homicides will have virtually no effect on the total
violent crime rate.
True enough, but homicides
are somewhat more important than a bloody noses from fistfights, otherwise
we would spend less time discussing the right of the people to keep
and bear arms and more time about taking away fists and feet. Moreover,
the BCS counts as violent crime purse snatching.
and:
Page 6:
"The BCS measures both reported and unreported crime. As such the BCS
provides a measure of trends in crime that is not affected by changes
in public reporting to the police or police recording."
Generally random sampling provides much more accurate results than
trying to count the entire population. Police figures in England may
be better, but Maltz's examination of the quality of UCR crime figures
in the US led him to discount Lott's findings on these grounds alone.
See
http://timlambert.org/guns/files/maltz.html
for a summary
You should know the BCS is not random by any stretch. In addition to not accounting for murders and other crimes where the victim is no longer available for interview, the BCS ignores crime among the homeless and other categories of outcasts in society. Included in those outcasts are the young victims -- under 16 -- a significant component of crime victims in the United States. Also, the BCS does not measure violent crime against the institutionalized.
Surveys, such as the BCS, are just another measure of crime which permit checking police performance in accounting (politically motivated jiggling of crime figures in the US in police departments is certainly one justification for surveys), but surveys have their problems too. In particular, purely random sampling is not a good way to measure crime when the experience shows crime tends to be isolated to narrow geographic regions (a methodological limitation if they don't do importance sampling and weighting). I don't know how the BCS samples were taken, but I'll trust homicide numbers and, if you really want to press it, I can dig out a British official analysis claiming robbery counts are accurate.
Your characterization that British violent crime has decreased since 1997 isn't true for important categories of violent crime -- important violent crimes have increased including violent crimes with firearms in England and Wales.
Phil Lee
