Rising crime in the UK

[Belacqua]

It says the video is unavailable. 

Oops, sorry. It should have occurred to me that a lot of these British productions remain under copyright in Britain, but are free to watch here in Japan. 

The point made in the documentary is just that there are a lot of repeat offenders in the UK who truly don't care about breaking the law, yet their punishments are very light. Granted, the filmmakers may have had an ax to grind. If so, they certainly chose the most effectively disgusting people to make their point. God those people are terrible. 

Never mind, anyway the whole ASBO thing is from quite a long time ago, I'm well aware of it. Yes most of them were white back then.

I suppose what we need here are reliable statistics, not influenced by political goals. So for example if we assume that the percentage of white people with ASBOs are more or less the same, and that recent immigration has increased the percentage of non-white people in the UK, then it would make sense that the rise in crime would be attributable to non-whites. The higher the percentage, the higher the percentage of nasty people. 

But we'd also have to know what percentage of non-whites do crime, and a number of other variables. 

It's best to remain skeptical of official numbers, I think, so it's hard to know for sure. 

For example the Crime Survey for England and Wales is the most accurate report on crime statistic -- according to the people who make the survey. And it's a self-reported survey, where they send out questionnaires and get back maybe 40 to 60 percent. 

The danger is that it's easy to be skeptical of numbers we don't like, and easy to switch off that skepticism when we find a number that suits us. 

I guess you still aren't allowed to do links on this forum, but if you can name some sources for me to Google I'd be happy to look at those. Unfortunately this has gone from a simple data collection issue to a very ideological one on both sides, so just about anything they say should be taken with giant-sized pinches of salt.