Donate SIGN UP

Yet Another London Killing.

Avatar Image
anotheoldgit | 11:51 Fri 19th Apr 2013 | News
68 Answers
Many have pointed out to me when I have stated that crime was not as widespread 'in my day' as it is today, that it was it is just because we get to hear about it more these days..

Well I wonder how many of you know that yet another killing took place only yesterday in North London?

I only heard a snippet about it on a London radio station news report, and it took me a while to find this link, can't find a report of it in any newspaper, and yes not even in the Daily Mail.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-22211339

How many times do we hear "no arrests have been made" I wonder how many just fade away without anyone being charged and convicted, and even if some are, I wonder if their names will ever be remembered in the future?

No such stabbings and shootings were never on the scale of which they are today, "in my day".
Gravatar

Answers

41 to 60 of 68rss feed

First Previous 1 2 3 4 Next Last

Best Answer

No best answer has yet been selected by anotheoldgit. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.

For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.
Question Author
Zacs-Master

/// 2012 has seen a large reduction in murder in London and across England and Wales. ///

For all your research Zac that is not issue, what the issue is about is the fact that a killing as took place in London and not many have even been made aware of it.

Doesn't that convey the message that life is so cheap these days so much so that it does not even reach some news outlets, never mind the front page as in Jack the Rippers days.
@em10, 22 apparently - extrapolating to the whole year we can expect to see maybe 70, but I might be missing seasonal variations.

@Sqad the problem with stats is usually not the numbers themselves, but the sweeping conclusions some people draw from them. It's rare to find someone who looks at a table of numbers and doesn't find at least partly what they were hoping to see in the first place.

I, for example, will look at the data ZM provided and note that the last ten years have seen a fall in crime. AOG will probably point out that even with that fall the murder count has almost doubled between 1949 and 2012. Both of us are right, though we need to compare too with population changes and so on, and methods.

Now you're moving the goalposts from 'No such stabbings and shootings were never on the scale of which they are today, "in my day"' to whether people have been made aware. I was aware just before 7 this morning as I went on the BBC website.
Question Author
/// I live oop north and unless these things are reported Nationally and I see them I wouldn't know that they had happened. ///

Most ironic when some have often told me, that such things did happen in 'my day', but we didn't get to hear about it, but these days it is more widely reported.
jim, seasonal variations, sounds like a song for Christmas. Appalling waste of life no matter how many. and of course it worries me, because many of these cases are on our doorstep so to speak. Our local paper does report on those in the borough, and many seem to be drug, gang related.
jim...LOL....that really was my point, that you have made more clearly.
Yes, sometimes we can lose sight of the real issue in statistics.

I took ZM's and sharingan's data together and cobbled out a rough but probably meaningless list of numbers hopefully representing murder rates every ten years from 1951 to 2011 inclusive. Numbers are 8, 6, 10, 11, 13, 21, 11. These represent, I hope, approximate murder rates per million people. The general trend up to 2001 was a rise, but things have got better over the last ten years.

It might be worth, however, taking these numbers with a pinch of salt.
Jim...your point is well taken and if i have understood your reasoning......the figure was 6 in 1961 and 21 in 2001............that is a threefold rise in half a century.so it is clear that people born post WW2 will experience the feeling of " a more violent society.

It's more than likely that there will be an arrest and conviction following this killing. One outstanding characteristic of these killers is their stupidity.
True, it does look that way. It's possible that over types of crime fell in the same period. And even if not, the last ten years have seen year-on-year falls so things are getting better again. Goodness knows what caused the massive upsurge, and the table I was using has an odd spike in 2001, but one possibility it that it's to do with another change in the way data were taken - I'm fairly sure something like that happened in 2001 hence the spike.
I believe the spike was caused by the attribution of the Shipman murders
That might make some sense in which case there's a typo in the data. The change is then from 21 down to 18, so the "times 3" still apples.
on relatively small numbers, adding in 174 killings makes a huge difference

and changes to the Counting Rules make like for like comparisons difficult

from wiki:

//A detailed breakdown of the way crimes are counted are available from the Home Office website. Recorded crime increased in England and Wales during most of the 1980s, reaching a peak in 1992, and then fell each year until 1998/99 when the changes in the Counting Rules resulted in an increase in recorded offences. This was followed by the introduction of the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) in April 2002 which led to a rise in recording in 2002/03 and 2003/04, as the rules bedded-in within forces. Crime figures were originally collected to cover a calendar year, however this changed from 1998 when crime statistics began to be collated and grouped by financial year.//
stats don't matter if it's your son, daughter that has been murdered.
"The plural of anecdote is not data". Anecdote is a personal, subjective observation - it might form the basis for an investigation, but it is meaningless without its significance being assessed.

And jim reported some figures earlier. Sqad then mentioned that was a threefold increase - which sounds huge - but that is only really true if you are starting with a big number in the first place. Homicide in the UK is thankfully a rare occurence, and so we were starting from a very low base. Here. the absolute numbers become more important really.

What is very true though is the difference between the publics perception of crime, personal safety and the safety of their own neighbourhoods. Despite the trend lines suggesting a fall in most types of crime, the public still appear to think crime is much more widespread than it is. This difference, between the publics perception and the official recorded crime figures is worth exploring.
if you live in some sleepy backwater then it is unlikely you would come under the radar of serious crime. Big cities attract undesirables, and that isn't a new thing. The area around seven dials in London was infamous, and it wasn't until we had some form of early police force that things began to change.
/never mind the front page as in Jack the Rippers days. /

aog - If you think about it for more than a nano second or indeed read any history about crime in victorian england

you would realise that there were thousands of crimes that went unrecorded, unsolved and unreported; Jack the Ripper was a newsworthy exception and doesn't represent a statistically valid indicator of crime levels

I don't understand why you think your anecdotal recall of your own experiences and observations should hold sway over official statistics
My point exactly Zeuhl but you put in much more erru...erriu....erro.... better.
Of course there was crime in the old days. I was born in 1953 and I am sure we were not all angels back then.

But I can tell you with certainty that are lots of things happening now that was seldom seen then. People were much more polite and well mannered, even uneducated people. Graffiti was unknown. Vandalism was something that you seldom saw, if at all. Noise wasn't the problem that it is now, especially in residential areas. Our urban areas were much, much safer than they are now. Public drunkenness was seldom seen as well. Even taking into account that there were less cars on the road back then, you seldom encountered people driving too fast in built-up areas. I can never remember hearing pop music blaring out of car windows.

By the way, have you noticed that when you are stopped at the lights and the car next to you has the stereo on far too loud, its never Mozart ?
Oh you've noticed that musical point too mikey?

I think a lot has changed in the last 50 years, some of it bad to be sure, but plenty of good as well. There is a negativity about many of AOG's posts that goes too far. Crime fluctuates but has always been a problem worth moaning about. Drunkenness fluctuates too, but has often been complained about through history. Youth crime, ditto. If there has been a short term rise in some types of crime, others have fallen in the same period. Apparently the number of road deaths per car on the road was far greater in the 30s - 50s than today, presumably because people took less care.

Converse to crime, things have improved. Far fewer people in absolute poverty. Far better literacy rates. Better acceptance of differences in race, creed, colour, gender, sexuality. The overall picture is one that for me is positive. But I wouldn't mind some things from the 50s having not changed. Hopefully in the future we can have the best of all times.

41 to 60 of 68rss feed

First Previous 1 2 3 4 Next Last

Do you know the answer?

Yet Another London Killing.

Answer Question >>