The Ghost of Paley
Posts: 1703
Joined: Oct. 2005
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[Graffiti moved to Bathroom Wall. - Wesley R. Elsberry]
| Quote | | Hmm - if you read the current literature instead of the out of date literature, maybe you would be more aware of what was going on. |
Go back to your Playstation, sonny. The big people are talking.
| Quote | And why do these numbers disagree as well? Can you explain the discrepency? I didn't read all of that, as I don't have the time, nor do I really care all that much. But if you want more, seemingly different data, check out figure 2b on this.
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Hey, I'm not the one who mistook a newsblurb for a scientific survey, and then switched to a different set of figures when pressed for more detail. But if you could ever trouble your bad self to click on the blue line, you'll see that the charts are derived from data compiled by the International Crime Victim Survey, which is...oh, who am I kidding. As if you'll ever look. Here:
| Quote | The International Crime Victim Survey (ICVS) is the most farreaching programme of standardised sample surveys to look a householders’ experience with crime, policing, crime prevention and feelings of unsafety in a large number of countries. This page summarises the development of the ICVS.
There were two main reasons for setting up this project. The first was the inadequacy of offences recorded by the police for comparing crime in different countries. The second was the absence of any alternative standardised measure.
Police figures are problematic for comparative purposes because the vast majority of incidents the police know about are notified by victims, and any differences in propensity to report in different countries will undermine the comparability of the amount of crime counted by the police. Moreover, official police figures vary because of differences in legal definitions, recording practices, and precise rules for classifying and counting incidents. These limitations are well-established. A number of countries have independently mounted crime or ‘victimisation’ surveys to asses national crime problems- and the ICVS mirrors their approach. Such surveys ask representative samples of the population about selected offences they have experienced over a given time. They are interested in incidents are whether or not reported to the police, and indeed, the reasons why people do and do not choose to notify the police. They thus provide both a more realistic count of how many people are affected by crime and - if the surveys are repeated- a measure of trends in crime, unaffected by changes in victims’ reporting behaviour or administrative changes in recording crime.
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As for the methodology:
| Quote | CATI method
The technical management of all (but Finland and Malta) of the surveys in the industrialised countries has been carried out by Interview, a Dutch surveying company. Interview subcontracted fieldwork to survey companies in the participating countries, while maintaining responsibility for the questionnaire, sample selection and inteview procedures. The survey on Malta was done according to the Face to Face method, supervised by UNICRI.
sampling: a sample of between 1000 and 2000 households was drawn by random dialing of telephone numbers. Non relavant contacts (like companies) were ignored. Within a household, there was a random selection of a household member aged over 16. In case of a refusal, this household member was not replaced. The process continues until the agreed amount of completed interviews were reached. An exeption to this procedure is Finland, a random selection of individual were drawn from the population register. Also an exeption was Northern Ireland and some rural parts of Spain, since telephone penatration was low the interviews were taken face to face, but also computer assisted.
response rates: in the eleven industrialised countries in the 1996 sweep taken as a whole, 67% of the respondents selected for interview agreed to take part. this was an improvement on the overall response rate of 60% for the twelve countries of the 1992 sweep and on the 43% response rate in 1989. In 1996, response varied from 40% in the USA to 80% or more in Austria, Finland and Northern Ireland. For the seven countries which took part both in 1992 and 1996, the response rate was about the same or better in five, but fell slightly in two (the Netherlands and USA). For the three countries which had surveys in 1996 and 1989, responses were lower in Switzerland but higher in the other two.
CATI: the interviews were done by telephone. The interviewer reads the questions (and instructions) from a computer screen. The answers are directly entered into the computer system and used to select the next question. (For instance, the items on car crimes were skipped if the household has no cars.)
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There's much more, of course, but this will get you started. Of course, I can't read it out loud to you.
| Quote | Clearly math is not your strong point at all. Crime rates fell in 94. Roe Vs. Wade was decided in 73. That makes 21 years.
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Why, it certainly does. But the time from Roe v. Wade to the Reagan presidency was only 8 years, just as I wrote, apparently to no avail. And that's when crime started falling. I must admit, however, that it did start rising again in the mid-eighties, so there wasn't as much net change during the Big R's tenure as I thought. And I am aware that crime continued to jump until the Republican Revolution in 1994. When, of course, crime immediately began to plummet despite dire liberal forecasts of the crime wave sure to follow in the wake of welfare reform. By the way, whatever your reader charges, it's way too much.
| Quote | | But crime plummeted in cities that DIDN'T apply Giuliani's theory. All across our nation. There is no consistent correlation between crime fighting methods and less crime. |
Sorry, but there was something special about the crime drop in the Big Apple, no matter how badly you may want to wish it away.* I bet you wept in frustration as Giuliani exposed the city's gangsta-hugging tactics for the crap they were, and are. So typical: conservatives have to change the tire in the thunderstorm while the libs watch from the safety of the local Starbuck's. And bitch about how warm their frappuccino's getting.
| Quote | I don't have a source handy, but much of the decline was attributable to a handful of big cities such as New York and Boston.
Simply false. |
Really?
| Quote | Another facet of the recent decline is that until lately it has been driven primarily by the largest U.S. cities. In 1995, 40 percent of the national drop in homicide could be accounted for by just six cities. Given its large share of the national population, and its relatively high homicide rate in 1993, New York City’s 67 percent reduction in homicide from 1993 to 1998 itself accounts for 17 percent of the national decline during this period. But New York’s experience has not been unique; over the same period, the number of homicides has dropped in San Diego by 68 percent, in Boston by 65 percent, in Los Angeles by 60 percent, in San Antonio by 60 percent, in Houston by 43 percent, in New Orleans by 42 percent, in Detroit by 26 percent, in Philadelphia by 23 percent, in Dallas by 21 percent, and in Chicago by 18 percent. Together with New York, these cities account for 8 percent of the national population, but 59 percent of the decline in homicides. For 1999, statistics from the FBI’s preliminary Uniform Crime Report indicate that the largest drops are now occurring in smaller cities, such as Nashville, Tennessee, at 50 percent, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, at 41 percent, as the largest urban areas have now bottomed out.
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While you're at it, fire your fact-checker as well. 
*Here's a homework exercise for Constant Lurker: name the sources the author uses to validate the official numbers, and compare with Paley's sources. Discuss any similarities you see.
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Dey can't 'andle my riddim.
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) But how is this inconsistent with my contention? Self-hatred and "enlightenment" values go hand-in-hand, after all. Well, that's all for now. Later, I'll hand out a fun homework assignment and answer any follow-up questions.......... 
9 AM (e)
