American vs. European Crime Rates
Posted By John Moore on July 26, 2003
A German lawyer, in response to another blog entry (German Justice: 2 Days Per Murder), repeated the common European belief that the United States has a much higher crime rate than major European countries. The facts are quite different…
[UPDATE 8/15/2003 - For sources, see end of article]
[Warning: this article is politically incorrect. If you are likely to be offended by this, you need to read it!]
Here are Interpol 2001 crime statistics (rate per 100,000):
- 4161 – US
- 7736 – Germany
- 6941 – France
- 9927 – England and Wales
Thus the US has a substantially lower crime rate than the major European countries!
Here are the Interpol 1995 crime statistics (rate per 100,000):
- 5278 – US
- 8179 – Germany
- 6316 – France
- 7206 – England & Wales
Hence the trend in the US is towards a lower crime rate, while the trend in Europe (except Germany) is towards an increasing crime rate.
It is true that we (USA) have a high murder rate, mostly of criminals killing criminals, but a distressingly large number of people killing their spouses in anger, and the rate of “stranger killings” is rising.
However, the homicide rates have been dropping dramatically as we have been increasing penalties:
Homicide Rate/100,000 by Date in US:
- 1980 – 10.2
- 2000 – 5.5
Also, our murder rate is high largely due to the multicultural nature of our society. Inner city blacks, members of a distinct subculture, have a vastly higher criminal and victim homicide rate than our society as an average:
Homicide Offender Rate/100,000 by Race in US (2000):
- 3.4 – White
- 25.8 – Black
- 3.2 – Other
It is often hypothesized that blacks are overrepresented in murder statistics due to racism on the part of police and the justice system. If this were true, one would expect that the race of victims would have significantly different distribution than the race of the perpetrators, but this is not the case:
Homicide Victim Rate/100,000 by Race in US (2000):
- 3.3 – White
- 20.5 – Black
- 2.7 – Other
Thus if you remove homicides committed by blacks (total: 21862, Blacks:9316), and assume a proportionality between number of offenders and number of offenses, you can extrapolate US homicide offender rate of only 2.6/100,000, lower than Germany (3.27) and France (3.91).
One might ask why blacks are singled out. The reason is that inner city blacks are not representative of our culture. The black population is only about 13% of the total, and many blacks do not live in the inner city welfare cultures. Also, dividing the raw numbers into “white”, “black” and “other,” as was done by the Justice Department, shows that there are more black murderers (9316) than there are white and “other” combined (8346). I do not have statistics breaking out homicide by race AND location, but since most homicides committed by blacks are done in the inner city, the overall black statistic should be a good proxy.
Many, including myself, blame the high inner city crime rate on several factors:
- Misguided welfare policies, which have helped to create a culture of irresponsibility.
- The ideology of racial separatism (black power, etc.) and its relative, multiculturalism and the cult of victimology.
- Centuries of slavery and oppression, which really only came to an end in the 1960-current time period.
That the dramatic increase in the black crime rate came after the rise of the welfare state and the creation of black racial separatism and victimology suggests the causative nature of those factors.
NOTE: Statistics used here are not “cooked” in the sense of using the years that best support my argument. They are simply the oldest and newest years available from the sources, with the exception of the US homicide rate in 1980, which was a maximum over a long time, but not atypical of the period.
NOTE: I found one relatively obvious error in the data above, and have replaced that with accurate data. Also I have slightly changed the wording to better reflect the methods of calculation, and adjusted the non-black rate slightly with the new data. 7/31/2002.
NOTE: The following article by Theodore Dalrymple, a prominent British social critic, would tend to indicate that indeed, as suggested by some commenters, the high violence rate in France may be also due to ethnic minorities (although I was unable to find actual numbers). 10/25/2003.
SOURCES:
International data come from these Interpol documents.
U.S. Data by Ethnicity comes from this Deparment of Justice document. Note that it has separate linked pages, and you need to go into it aways. Also you can get raw numbers by clicking on the graphs.
I can see that you are blinded by your countery. You believe your countery is perfect. I can see the problems in my country, and dont pretend that my country is a perfect place. you have taught me somthing I before merely suspected, which is that your gouvernment has you on a leash. You can not possibly know how intelegent I am from what I have written here, and you cannot assume my knowlage of other areas because there are some indescrepencies in my knowlagemaybe there is somthing wrong with the British educational system, I havent lived long enough to know if there is a deterioration, but I am more knowladgeable than most people my age in my country, and a lot of the knowladge I have learnt, I have recieved seccond hand, so any descrepencies are from overinformation, rather than under.
Dominic
Once again, you produce absurd assertions with no proof at all.
I am not going to waste my time in detailed refutations of your stuff any more.
I have better things to do than educate a rude, semi-literate 14 year old.
Well, Dom, regarding your math. My daughter had finished teaching herself Calculus when she was your age.
Now please, go away – you are wasting my time and your silly assertions just make you look like an idiot.
Good point Dominic. Strange how Americans are completely obsessed (and blinded) with statistics. Even in their Sport.
As far as your assessment that it’s safer to walk the streets of New York than the streets of Paris, John Moore, I wonder which parts of New York you’re conveniently leaving out… I wouldn’t even compare. Show me the violent crime (you know, like Death ) statistics between the two cities.
I suspect that New York still leads in death rates, but Paris leads in overall crime. London is having a rapidly increasing rates of firearm crime, now that they have banned all firearms.
Statistics can blind you if you use them incorrectly, but they are the only way to learn certain information. Science without statistics is pretty lame, for example.
Put another way, if you don’t use statistics in some areas, you will be fail to learn facts.
That’s a pretty vague assertion, John Moore, unless you provide me with specific data. I really don’t get how arming everyone makes a safer society, unless of course you find it tolerable, I don’t. But I’m just a Euro living under a “tyranny”, as an NRA nutcase once accused me of. You lead the industrialized world combined in gun-related murder per capita, can you explain or are you just more trigger-happy than we are?
I don’t have the time to go digging into details right now. This is a very old thread (look at the dates) and I’m tired of it. I did a bunch of digging into stats, triggered by a few articles I read, and wrote the post above.
The violent crime rate is up in Europe, down in the US. Beyond that, I’m not going to go dig stuff up.
Causes? Mostly cultural change and changes in ethnic mixes. A lot of the cultural change in Europe is a result of the welfare state, just as it is in the United States.
We have lots more guns, so it would hardly be surprising that we have more gun related murder. But when you realize that over half of our murders are not committed with firearms, it becomes clear that the availability of guns isn’t the major factor in the murder rate.
When you see that half of our murders are committed by blacks, who represent 12% or so of our population, it becomes clear that this phenomenon is not going to have a single, simple answer, but rather be a combination of several different causes.
In the United States, murder rates do not correlate will with firearm availaility. They correlate strongly with race, age and sex.
I realize you don’t understand how firearms affect societies. I don’t think anyone can make strongly provable assertions. But we do have firearms here, it is traditional (we are still somewhat of a frontier society – if I drive to the next town to the NE of hear, I have to drive through 150 of uninhabited wilderness). I have a gun for self defense because I sometimes have to go into areas where crime rate is high. I also have several firearms just for fun – one being an AK-47. I have fired a gun in self defense, and like almost all such uses, it was successful and nobody was hurt.
I’m not interested in debating who has the best society. There are too many variables. I like ours. I used to like the British society (but it’s been a long time since I was there and I know there have been significant changes). I lived in France and enjoyed the people there, even as today I detest their government and their bigoted Le Monde.
If you really want to know about street crime rates in cities, I suggest you dig out the information. There have been plenty of articles in a few American magazines with the stats. Some of the articles were written by Brits.
From what I have seen of French and British press today, Europe is rapidly becoming information deprived, with an almost monolithic world view being presented, so you may not find articles there on subjects like these.
Not my problem.
I am an NRA member and supporter, but some people have pretty extreme views on firearms, believing that they are essential to liberty. I think they are important for self defense but anyone who thinks they are going to fend off a tyranny with their weapons hasn’t through it through very carefully. After all, fully automatic weapons were readily available in Iraq under Saddam (they are not readily available in the US), and they didn’t stop the tyranny.
New York City didn’t become safer by arming everybody. In fact, it is one of the cities that prohibits most firearm ownership (although other cities have also seen dramatic drops in violent crime, and those cities do allow firearms). New York City became safer because of better police policies, and the willingness to lock in jail people who prey on their fellow citizens.
In America, many have come to realize that a significant percentage of criminals cannot be rehabilitated, and thus they tend to have long jail terms. This is a psychological reality – these people tend to have personality disorders that there is no known way to alter. This change from a rehabilitative approach has significantly altered crime both by keeping criminals away from the populace and increasing the negative incentive to commit crime.
Demographic changes are also significant, with variatians in the number of young males – and young males are responsible for most violent crime in any society.
As far as Europe goes, it depends a lot on what country you are in. Although European anti-Americanism seems almost universal, there are still dramatic differences in societies and culture in Europe. So what I might say about Britain may be completely wrong about Norway.
Anyway, after a little bit longer I am going to close the comments on this article. I’m tired of Europeans coming in here and nagging me. If you don’t believe my statistics, that’s fine. If you are truly interested, go dig up the statistics like I did.