Talk:Crime statistics

Proposed merger from Crime index and Crime rate

There's not enough here to justify three separate start-class articles that overlap almost 100%. Let's merge and look in future at whether any specific aspect needs a sub-article. --VSerrata 12:35, 5 April 2007 (UTC) See also Dark figure of crime which I'm thinking is probably worth keeping as a sub-article on perceptions of crime statistics. --VSerrata 12:41, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Agreed, just make sure that the Dark figure of crime article is linked to in the new merged peice. SGGH 13:53, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Also see the couple of points I raised on the WP:LE talk page :) SGGH 13:54, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

I disagree with merging the three (or four) articles mentioned above. While I agree that Crime statistics should be the prime article, I think there should be separate articles for both Crime index and Crime rate. These are two fairly common terms that each need explaining in some detail, rather than simply being buried in the middle of a large article that discusses many other aspects of gathering, recording and analysing crime statistics. -- Cameron Dewe 00:06, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I think that if you put crime rate and crime index as sections you could clean up a couple of useless items. It would be easier for readers because a rate IS a statistic and items are "rated" in an index.Sutjo-18005 (talk) 02:43, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

The article needs to be a bit more systematical in discussing crime and criminal justice statistics with links to the several sources, it is not just a matter of merging but of restructuring. It is now too much focussed on USA, here some European input. (may, 2008)

• crime and criminal justice statistics / properties and limitations
  • official data
    • international data compiled by UN and INTERPOL (and a few other governmental/international organisations such a OECD)
  • victimisations survey amongst population of several types
    • international comparative victimisation surveys (there are several)
  • other sources (not neccesarily on crime but on related issues) There is so much more to say on crime than just the things we put people in jail for
    • WHO on violence and murder (from the medical world)
    • Transparancy International on corruption
    • marketing data on reliability of business partners (strenght of the criminal justice system)
    • trafficing in and smuggling of human beings
    • terrorism
    • genocide
    • violation of human rights (amnesty international)
    • cross border organised crime
    • cross border environmental crime (Greenpeace)
    • crimes against animals (species dying out because they are hunted for their fur)

All these field make attempts to produce statistics, ans some are very successfull.

---

The UN crime stat link (http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/crime_monitoring_surveys.html) has stopped working. I am not sure exactly what content it originally pointed to so I can't fix it myself, sorry. Ttk11 (talk) 20:15, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

• The particular UN page did not have much content,
  • it linked one own source; the UN survey among nations on the operation of the criminal justice system. That one is worth while to include http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/United-Nations-Surveys-on-Crime-Trends-and-the-Operations-of-Criminal-Justice-Systems.html
  • It linked to the international crime victims survey (ICVS) pages from another UN organisation (UNICRI). That particular project has a more complete website of its own recently added to the crimestats page http://rechten.uvt.nl/icvs
  • It linked to the UN Statistics devision that has a manual of countries on how to obtain crime statistics http://unstats.un.org/unsd/pubs/gesgrid.asp?id=293

Crime Inxex

The "crime indices" link just redirects back to the same page. It would be nice if crime index would be defined better, too.--76.203.216.147 (talk) 15:49, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Footnote 2 (van Dijk) appears to have been "graffitied". The link is to a paper called "Criminal Victimisation in International Perspective". Do you have a way of knowing who made the alteration? 78.86.166.221 (talk) 14:39, 15 August 2011 (UTC) Nigel.

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Crime rate by population or time?

I struggle to figure out the definition of "crime rate". Normally crime rate seems to be "crimes per population", but some dictionaries define it as "crimes per time" in an area. Trump mentioned Sweden in a speech - and in Sweden "crimes pr 1000 population" is going down while "crimes pr time" is going up. (See: Immigration_and_crime#Sweden). The article List of United States cities by crime rate even lists "Crime rates per 100,000 people" - which I understand as "crimes pr 100000 people" . (?) Is there a difference here between definitions in UK and US, or do people working with crime and people working with language use different definitions? Markuswestermoen (talk) 12:29, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

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Crime nationwide by race

Would like to the facts about all of races that committed crimes like white on black, black on white, and black on black this is nothing to do with race it’s about the facts what race commits the most crime I know it’s touchy but the facts should be brought the attention of all races fact 2601:8D:8680:8E80:58AA:E1DA:E6BD:3289 (talk) 22:25, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

Declining values, declining rates

Might 'property' crime rates not simply correlate with the falling real value of property? Less costly, less valuable household goods make burglary, theft, shoplifting etc less profitable, and less attractive. 49.186.96.182 (talk) 22:49, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Unsourced statements throughout

I see that many statements throughout the article are unsourced, so I'll be adding citation-needed tags. If you happen to have sources for any, please add them. I'll take a shot myself over the next few days, but I'm hoping some of the people who originally wrote these statements are watching this talk page. Thanks! ClaimTracer (talk) 04:36, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

Proposed approach to "Crime statistics" as an encyclopedic topic

There seem to be two approaches in play in the article at the moment.

First, there are passages that approach Crime statistics as a conceptual topic to be explained. In those passages, the article discusses how crime statistics are defined, collected, interpreted, and critiqued.

Second, there are passages that seem to approach Crime statistics as a data repository. While I believe the original authors of the following passages were making good-faith efforts to improve the article and Wikipedia, I include these passages as examples:

• "In 2019, the Global Organized Crime Index found that DRC had the highest rate of criminality."
• "Annual estimates of crimes committed in the United States range from eleven to thirty million because many acts go unreported."
• "An estimated hundred million Americans have a criminal record."

If we follow this approach, we would need to explicitly decide which statistics to include without giving undue weight and continually maintain up-to-date figures.

I propose that we prioritize the first approach. Specific statistics could still be included, but only as explicit, illustrative examples of something being discussed or explained. Otherwise, I think we exceed the scope of the article.

Thoughts? ClaimTracer (talk) 14:47, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

It's been a week without replies. I'm going to proceed with editing Crime statistics', prioritizing the conceptual approach. ClaimTracer (talk) 17:37, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

Incident-based crime statistics are missing from this article

Crime statistics does not discuss incident-based crime statistics, such as the National Incident-Based Reporting System in the U.S. or the UCR2 in Canada. ClaimTracer (talk) 01:34, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Moved possible OR with a broken reference here for discussion

I'm moving the following statement from the Classification section for discussion:

According to the UNODC, there have been more than three million homicides in Africa since the year 2000.

When I follow the link in the reference, I'm redirected to https://data.unodc.org. When I go to the link for Intentional Homicide, I can request data for total homicides in Africa from 2000 to 2024, but what it currently provides are totals for each country in Africa for each year during time period. There's no total for Africa.

Let's assume good faith and provide benefit of the doubt on the original source. Let's assume a total was provided at the original link.

However, to verify the statement today would require downloading the data into R or a spreadsheet program and calculating the total for Africa. That in itself probably doesn't violate WP:NOR because WP:CALC, but homicide data for Africa is incomplete because it's unavailable for many African countries. Does simply adding up subtotals and reporting the result constitute WP:SYNTH when we don't mention the contextual information?

Even if we decide the statement is acceptable on its own with regard to WP:NOR, it doesn't fit in Classification as it stands. There are other problems too, such as whether it's a notable fact by itself. ClaimTracer (talk) 16:26, 4 March 2026 (UTC)