Category: Studies and Statistics

The University of Portsmouth, England, has this press release announcing this unsurprising result. “New research has revealed that alcohol can impair the ability of eyewitnesses to accurately recall a suspect’s facial features, particularly key details such as the eyes, nose, and mouth.”

It’s easy to laugh and say “of course” (and I did), but there is some value in research that confirms the obvious. Every once in a while such efforts actually contradict the obvious, and those incidents are important in the progress of science. The research also fills in some details that are not quite so obvious. Continue reading . . .

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has released the 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey. After increases in 2022, the rates were nearly the same as the past year, with violent crimes down 1/1000* and property crimes up the same amount.

The rates at which victims reported crimes to the police rose from 41.5% to 44.7% for violent crimes and fell from 31.8% to 29.9% for property crimes. For thefts other than cars, less than a quarter of crimes committed are now reported to the police. Continue reading . . .

In the past two years, there have been dueling studies flying back and forth about whether jurisdictions in the political control of one party or the other have higher crime rates. They have been used by advocates to make “studies show” arguments in favor of or against particular policies. But this is all smoke and mirrors, as this Issue Brief from the Manhattan Institute shows. It is titled The “Red” vs. “Blue” Crime Debate and the Limits of Empirical Social Science, by George J. Borjas and Robert VerBruggen.

This is really a case study in how researcher-advocates can produce any bottom line they want in many cases through design decisions that fly beneath the radar of public awareness. Do you compare states or counties? What variables do you control for? The authors note, “Casual consumers of empirical social science research often fail to appreciate all the ways in which researchers can manipulate the data to say whatever they want.” An alternate expression is the pithy old saying, “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” Continue reading . . .

A couple of updates on prior reports of shoplifting statistics:

The National Retail Federation has revised its earlier report on retail losses due to crime, which we reported here. The statistic of $95 billion, noted in our post, stands. However, the NRF withdrew its claim that half of that total was from organized retail crime. The fraction from organized, rather than individual, theft is unknown at present. See this article by Anne D’Innocenzio for AP, in the WaPo. From the article: Continue reading . . .

The Council on Criminal Justice has this report on shoplifting statistics. As we have noted on this blog many times and the report acknowledges, these stats have to be taken with caution because they only measure crimes reported to the police. When no-consequences policies lead people to believe (often correctly) that the police will not do anything anyway, reporting likely drops, thereby concealing an increase that may result from the same policies. Further, the report notes, we do not have the backup of the National Crime Victimization Survey that we have for crimes against individuals. The NCVS does not survey businesses.

With that big caveat, the report does have some interesting data. Among the “key takeaways”:

• Shoplifting incidents reported to police have rebounded since falling dramatically in 24 large American cities during 2020. But whether the overall tally is up or down compared with pre-pandemic levels depends on the inclusion of New York City. With New York’s numbers included, reported incidents were 16% higher (8,453 more incidents) in the study cities during the first half of 2023 compared to the first half of 2019; without New York, the number was 7% lower (-2,552 incidents).

The big drop during the pandemic was, obviously, because of the big drop in people going to stores and stores being open. What about the 2023 v. 2019 numbers? I’m skeptical that even without New York overall shoplifting is actually down. A drop is reporting is almost certainly a big factor there. Continue reading . . .