Crime rate down in Poland

...but some crimes in Poland are still higher than many realize.

Interior Minister Ludwik Dorn announced on Friday that the overall crime rate fell by 10.7% in 2006. Theft fell by 13.5%. More importantly, theft related killings were down by 8 percent.

Corruption detection – a central plank of the government’s domestic policy – was up 6.4%.

Crime in much of the western world – UK and the US for instance – is also on the way down, but, crucially, the number of people in the main age category most associated with crime – the 16 – 25 year olds – is falling in those countries. So the sub-population where the criminals originate is falling.

Poland, however, has seen a bulge in 16 – 25 year olds, following the Polish ‘baby boom’ of the 1980s. So crime is falling at a time when the criminal sub-population is growing.

So these figures are a major success. How much of this is due to the government, however, is less clear.

But how criminal is Poland?
Crime in general has risen since the introduction of capitalism. Capitalism in a sense is crimogenic.

But what worries Poles the most is that Poland has become a more dangerous place to live. But is it any more or less dangerous than the average western society?

Well, the bad news is that Poland has a higher murder rate, per capita, than does the United States!

Poland has a murder rate of 0.0562789 per 1,000 people … America has a rate of 0.042802 per 1,000 people. Those stats will come as a bit of a surprise to both Americans and Poles, no doubt.

The country where you are most likely to get murdered in the world, by the way, is – no surprise – Columbia. The safest country in the world is Qatar (see the whole fascinating list here)

Luckily for Poles, however, most murders appear to be gang related – one criminal killing another.

(Perhaps there is a kind of Darwinian thing going on, and in a few years time all the weaker thugs will have become extinct, and we will be left with a handful of Superthings… )

But the news that the murder rate is falling in Poland is going to go down very well here, and not just with the government’s supporters.

I don’t suppose gang related criminals are too disappointed about it, either.