Monday, February 05, 2007

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.

32 comments:

Anonymous said...

Poland has a murder rate of 0.0562789 per 1,000 people … America has a rate of 0.042802 per 1,000 people.

A typical Polish murder is this: a guy is drinking with his brother-in-law, then they have an argument and one of them draws a knife. Afterwards the killer he reports himself to the police.

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

These statistics really surprised me. Poland's rate of murder higher than the US and three times as high as any Western European country? Lithuania's and Estonia's murder rates again twice as high as in Poland? Fascinating and shocking.

BTW, beatroot, I very much agree with you position on freedom of posting any opinion or idiotism on your blog. BUT, the long off-topic posts as the one above are really just equivalent of spam. You do remove spam, don't you? Just a suggestion...

Anonymous said...

Why the truth is too embarassing for you gussie?

Anonymous said...

If'n the f'n idyit can't figure out what's on-topic, it's spam and I'm all for zappin' 'it.

Never let it be said I've never agreed with the finkster.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Geez.
I shall frame this :)

beatroot said...

Zapped...

Martin said...

Beatroot,

We've had this argument before, my friend - but one can't help but wonder how much of Poland's crime rate has moved out of Poland along wih the Poles.

Opamp - the scenario you describe is very similar to most murders everywhere; in Finland, one brother-in-law shoots the other.

Anonymous said...

martin said:

We've had this argument before, my friend - but one can't help but wonder how much of Poland's crime rate has moved out of Poland along wih the Poles.


Ah, the benefits of globalisation...

beatroot said...

Martin - if what you say is the case then there would be a rise in Britain in all the crimes that have gone down in Poland. The truth is, of course,they have not. Crime is reducing in UK too - for demographic reason, I think.

Just why crime has gone down in Poland is another matter. The government would claim that its 'get tough' policy is the reason...I have me doubts adn think that is a simplistic answer to beloved of politicians. They take the credit for everything that goes right and none for the things that go wrong.

Anonymous said...

BTW, I've been wondering about the picture: has that teddy bear been arrested, or is he a victim of (sex?) crime?

beatroot said...

Bearophillia?

Anonymous said...

Ha,

Things are trickier. I looked up "ursophilia" on the web (yup, I know I've got too much time), and in addition
to the straightforward meaning, it has another :

Bear: A gay man that generally has one or more of the following traits; a hairy chest and body, a beard, wide shoulders, husky build, beefy, more masculine. The exact definition of what a bear look like varies from person to person. A defining quality of a bear is that they do not fit into contemporary gay culture, or the stereotypical gay image.

Ursophile: A young smooth slender gay man that loves bears.

The ignorance about homosexuality in Poland has this blessing: only those to whom it is adressed will understand this policeman's plea...

beatroot said...

And by the look of the cop in the photo then he is a 'clone' (look it up) ursophile...

Blimey!

Anonymous said...

:)

Anonymous said...

Such a bears like this one held by policeman ale the gift given by the road-police to the little kids that are victims of hard traffic-collisions (where there are killed people) to make their shock a little lighter.

Regards,
Maciek
sp2qbn

Anonymous said...

Fascinating.

Are you now going to assert that Winnie The Pooh was gay?

beatroot said...

No, no, no...Winnie the Pooh, I believe, was a coprophile...(look it up)

Sorry, couldn't resist it...

Anonymous said...

Beatroot,

I wouldn’t advise using nationmaster as your source for the homicide rates. I remember viewing that site out of interest about 3 years ago and both the numbers and rankings were exactly identical. Indeed, the source cited was the “Seventh United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, covering the period 1998 - 2000 (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Centre for International Crime Prevention)”. This is especially problematic for Poland which, it seems, had a major upturn in crime around the turn of the century (Poland’s crime rate increased to a high of 5.61 in 2000, up from 2.09 in 1997). This was higher then the U.S. rate of 5.5 for that year. The following year; however, saw a decline in the homicide rate to 2.01, which has been falling ever since. A time-series of homicide rates per country was tabulated on wikipedia which got its info from the UN survey of crime trends, the same source for which nationmaster based its results. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_murder_rate

beatroot said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
beatroot said...

Cheers…good one. Shows you the difficulty of using crime status. I chose murder stats because they are the one crime that gets almost 100 percent report…therefore are the most accurate. But as you show, the collation of those stats is another matter.

Anonymous said...

I've always found Winnie the Pooh quite sexy. If there was a chance..., but that's neither here nor there.

beatroot said...

What you are suggesting is illegal in south virginia...and should be in warsaw!

Anonymous said...

In other news, Winnie the Pooh announced today that he is sick of his squeaky clean image and will give blow-jobs to 10 men, on the first come first serve basis.

-------------------------
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I had sex with winnie the pooh

beatroot said...

That's enough!!!' I'm calling the cops...

Anonymous said...

Is the Winnie the Pooh banter part of the Gay Agenda?

Anonymous said...

What is the "Gay Agenda"? Another conspiracy theory?

beatroot said...

Yup! They are gonna take over the government and put teddy bears in the defense minsitry...and then tickle the middle east to death...or something...

Anonymous said...

Poland has a murder rate of 0.0562789 per 1,000 people … America has a rate of 0.042802 per 1,000 people

WRONG STATS

poland has murder rate of 1,2 per 100 000 people
the record was in 2000 and there was 2,2 per 100 000 people
last year (2010) in poland was "only" 460 murders thats good number for a country with 38 mln people

safe (to american standards) new york has more murders than whole poland

sorry for my english

Keith Otis Edwards said...

Al Franken once said "Rush Limbaugh pulls his figures out of his butt," and it seems that the same phenomenon is evident here. It's amazing that this blog still comes up #3 in any search for "Murder rate in Poland," and I wonder how many people have been missled by its misinformation.

Here are the genuine stats. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Index, there were over 14,000 murders in the USA in 2010. The population is now nearing 309 million. In Poland, population 39 million, there were 702 murders in 2010.

Since the USA has almost 10x the population of Poland, an easy way to estimate the crime rates is to multiply the 702 murders in Poland by 10. It is then obvious that the crime rate of the USA is more than double that of Poland.

Anonymous said...

homicide rate in poland never been 5 per 100 000 people,
in 2001 was the highest rate in history: 2.5 per 100000 people,
in 2010 1,2 per 100 000

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