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A comment on Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experience of being cheated. Parent comment

Re:Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experien... by llm_trw on Sunday June 09, 2024 @10:40AM (#40624751)
>Crime stats and polling of people’s perception of crime show this as clearly the wrong approach for instance.

The only crime stat you can trust is murder and that's because bodies can't be hidden (easily).

Everything else gets swept under the rug.

When I wanted to report my car broken into I was hung up on three times because of a poor quality line, which was fine before I told them what I was calling for. When I went there in person I had to wait 40 minutes for someone to take my report and give me a reference number for my insurance.

Crime is absolutely massively under reported.

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Re:Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experien... by varjag on Sunday June 09, 2024 @11:13AM (#40624969)
But this hasn't changed over decades. Policing never was 100% effective and crime was always underreported. Yet if you ask people it's crime getting worse YoY.
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Re:Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experien... by llm_trw on Sunday June 09, 2024 @11:45AM (#40625215)
It's getting worse.
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Re:Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experien... by BolexNOLA on Sunday June 09, 2024 @12:06PM (#40625386)
Based on?
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Re:Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experien... by fallingknife on Sunday June 09, 2024 @12:47PM (#40625711)
Policing was effective enough that I never had to find someone to unlock a case for me at the store unless I was purchasing something particularly valuable. It was effective enough that you didn't see videos of people looting stores or driving around breaking into cars with impunity.
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Re:Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experien... by varjag on Sunday June 09, 2024 @05:12PM (#40627663)
I don't know, these things were cliche plot devices in 1970s-1980s films and it appears everyone was convinced America headed into Escape From New York future. Naturally, few people had cine/video cameras on them at any time.
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Re:Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experien... by BolexNOLA on Sunday June 09, 2024 @08:00PM (#40628650)
That’s because companies have successfully PR’d their way into “shoplifting is the greatest threat to the US economy.”
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Re:Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experien... by shakow on Sunday June 09, 2024 @01:19PM (#40625951)
But as long as the stats are not reliable, that's unknown territory. Maybe the police is getting more lazier, maybe less, maybe there are less people reporting because it is seen as useless, maybe there are more because they get tired of it, one can simply not get a picture independently of where the trend is going.
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Re:Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experien... by marcosdumay on Sunday June 09, 2024 @05:09PM (#40627643)
And yet, if more people you know report being victims of crime, and the official statistics point to a decrease, the people upthread are happy to declare a decrease.
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Re:Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experien... by enavari on Sunday June 09, 2024 @11:01AM (#40624892)
One need only download a community based self reporting app like "citizen" to see how much crime really exist.. It's more than you'd like know. Like the previous poster said, not everything is reported.
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Re:Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experien... by ryandrake on Sunday June 09, 2024 @01:06PM (#40625863)
I'm sure apps like this are targeted towards an already paranoid and crime-obsessed demographic, and they're going to be full of false positives. Not sure you can take that sample as representative.
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Re:Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experien... by Spooky23 on Sunday June 09, 2024 @10:59AM (#40624879)
100% correct. They even teach this in graduate criminology programs. Stats are only consistently reliable for a narrow range of events.
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Re:Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experien... by mr_toad on Monday June 10, 2024 @01:36AM (#40630521)
> The only crime stat you can trust is murder and that's because bodies can't be hidden (easily).

Seems to be a significant decline since the 90’s, followed by an increase since 2016, and a Covid dip followed by a resumption of the increase. It’s still a lot lower than it was in the 90’s.

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Re:Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experien... by llm_trw on Monday June 10, 2024 @07:40AM (#40632487)
Medical technology has also improved dramatically since the 90s.
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