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David you obviously don't care for us poor souls over the border. I stated London because it is the capital of the country and as such surely must echo trends ------ more people, more incidents.
Do you honestly believe that violence and murder is down?
Kids are being searched in school for knives. I don't remember that happening when I was at school. Lot's of people in my town carried a knife because it was something that was vital for their work, I can't remember any time when one was used in an act of violence. In those days, you stepped outside the pub for a punch up, then shook hands and stood each other a drink.

"I am sure we can trade statistics all night long e.g. 871 AD, the golden age of a crime free countryside. Oh no, look at these figures for 23BC, crime was non-existent almost then."

Indeed, but that is a bit of a red herring, I was not going back to 23bc. As you will note from the story which you linked too, Alan Johnson had conveniently latched onto the glitch which was a temporary drop in murder stats for that year.

The stats which I linked to, covered not an unreasonable period of 1960's to date and show that murder rates have doubled over that period.

I would interpret that as being, Dick is right and you are wrong!

The deterrent factor of the death penalty is a myth and always was. It was something people used to justify the real intention of capital punishment, which was to make sure someone couldn't do it again and get revenge for society. Deterrent is window dressing.

I have to say that having seen the bloke who took the government to court for his voting rights chuckling away in an interview today, after Andrew Neil read out what he'd done (bludgeoned a woman with an axe then left her to die while he made coffee) I kind of wish we still had it.

I know that won't go down too well with some, but having also had family who were the victims of murder, I don't really care.

David, I'll have to trust you on this one, but does the word murder/unlawful killing /manslaughter amount to the same thing?. I believe they all mean that someone has lost a life. Has the law changed to make things look better?

Alex
"The stats which I linked to, covered not an unreasonable period of 1960's to date and show that murder rates have doubled over that period."

"Alan Johnson had conveniently latched onto the glitch which was a temporary drop in murder stats for that year."


You can interpret this any way you like and obviously are. L

For example look at the table on homicide rate per 100,000 of the population and you will see that over the last 10 years the trend in the UK appears downwards which tends to disprove your above remark re Alan Johnson. Like I said you cannot explain this drop in terms of whether we have the death sentence or not.
As I say you choose your statistics and pays your money.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... icide_rate

CHeers
D

No idea. I am not a statistician who can comment on the history of terminology with reference to government statistics nor I suspect are you. One moment you are talking specifically about murder, the next it is violence, then it is the number of people carrying knives etc. etc.

Have a good evening

Cheers
D

Fair enough, since you are not a statistician please don't bore me with further figures,telling me how good the labour party is and how much things had improved during their tenure. Figures are statistics so if you don't like them. don't use them.

!laugh!

Keep happy and be positive ----- one day Labour will rule again.

One also has to take into account murder detection rates going up too. The science that goes into detecting if a murder/rape has been committed at all has increased dramatically over the last 40 years and so any increase in crime detection must increase the number of crimes recorded.

It's like when people say "Why do kids have asthma? No one had asthma when I was at school!" Of course they did, they just weren't diagnosed.

And then the usual: "Kids can't play out these days, what with all the paedophiles we here about on the news!" They forget that more kids got fiddled with in the past. Kids are just more likely to come forward and actually tell a parent/teacher these days.