The Justice Ministry report you reference is by a Labour Govt appointed bureaucrat – hardly a non partisan source and one wedded to the spin you buy into and the Corrections orthodoxy that saw Graeme Burton released to murder again.

Red Rag’s stats at least com from a credible source, even if they’re 6 years old they show clearly that the US had 4 times New Zealand’s rate of violent crime offences.

http://www.justice.govt.nz/pubs/reports/2002/intl-comparisons-crime/section-5.html

Now I really doubt that is has changed to the extent that you believe as a result of reading thi “disaster centre”. So if you can show us a credible source then please do.

NZ from http://www.stats.govt.nz/NR/rdonlyres/7D5A6256-3D51-4F8E-ADF3-C0FC0B55D66B/0/CrimeinNewZealand19962005.pdf plus clarification from the Police website previously posted.

US from http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm which are lifted straight from the FBIs figures

All figures per 10,000 population

1. Vehicle Theft (US)/Car Conversion (NZ term)
US ’95: 56 US ’05: 41.6 Change:-26%
NZ ’96: 139.2 NZ ’06: 90.6 Change: -35%
Current differential: NZ 85% higher car theft rate

2. Burglary
US ’95: 98.7 US ’05: 72 Change: -27%
NZ ’96: 139.2 NZ ’06: 90.6 Change: -35%
Current differential: NZ 26% higher burglary rate

3. Aggravated Assault
US ’95: 41.8 US ’05: 29.1 Change:-30%
NZ ’96: 44.7 NZ ’06: 52.7 Change: +18%
Current differential: NZ 79% higher aggravated assault rate

4. Rape (US)/Sexual attacks (NZ)
US ’95: 3.71 US ’05: 3.2 Change:-14%
NZ ’96: 5.9 NZ ’06: 6.0 Change: 2%
Current differential: NZ 87% higher rape rate

5. Murder (US)/Homicide (NZ)
US ’95: 0.82 US ’05: 0.56 Change:-32%
NZ ’96: 0.23 NZ ’06: 0.2 Change: -13%
Current differential: US 64% higher murder rate

Please note that p 47 of the NZ Stats Dept survey has complete definitions of each crime type and the FBI website in various locations has the US definitions. In all categories detailed the definitions are very similar.

So PJ there have been declines in some NZ crime stats but wth the property related crimes, NZ rates are still higher than the US. Aggravated assault has been hashed over in previous posts. Rapes see divergent stats with NZ much higher than the US. Only in the area of murders does the US outstrip NZ but heading in the right direction. You can also see the ratio of murders to agg assaults in 06 in NZ is 263:1 (my previous stat of 4000:1 was wrong) and the US equivalent ratio in 05 is 289:1.

Another cowardly smear from another intellectual yellow back. ..and ignorant too. How can anyone who wants small unnoticeable government agree with the big government ideals of the National Front FFS??? They’re leftists, and like you PJ, they see government and regulation and force as the answer to very perceived problem. You PJ are in fact much closer to the National Front than anyone who advocates for small government and individual liberty will ever be.

“My point in all this is the trend – in NZ violent crime is trending upwards and in the US it is trending downwards, very strongly so in many cities and towns.”

Is this the best you’ve got?

If economic growth was trending up in Malawi and down in New Zealand would you say that the economic situation is better there than here?

You should acknowledge that you have been OWNED, and bow out with some dignity while you still can.

come on sonic – I think it’s very unfair to be accusing Baiter of such a horrible mind-set, what would his friends at the National Front Say?!

You sad fuckwit, the pattern is the socialist’s sacrifice of black people to the left’s obsession with power. You are disgusting racists prepared to trap black people in welfare ghettos and crime regions just so you can hold on to the power you crave so insanely. You do it here in NZ too, to Maori and Pacific Islanders. Lead them into your welfare lairs and deprive them of their Independence and self respect at every opportunity. Just so they’ll vote for you. You people are power drunk narcissistic scum who have abused democracy to such an extent it is now almost worthless as a means to arriving at effective governance.

I have never tried to claim that the US had a lower murder rate than NZ – it clearly doesn’t only that murder even in the US is rare and in both NZ and the US aggrevated/serious/grevious assaults (however defined) outnumber murders by an average of 4000 to 1. It is a quality of life statistic.

In pointing to Minnesota I was trying to bring some population equivalence. I’m comparing NZ with a State of over 5 million with the urban area of Minneapolis-St Paul being over 2 million with all the same big city issues you would find in Auckland. Rochester is Hamilton sized and MN has 4 cities between 50,000 and 100,000 outside the Minneapolis urban area. To compare the crime rate in MN with Golden Bay as you suggest is laughable. When you compare the murder rate in NZ it has risen to a level 0.2 p/10,000 in 2005 where the homicide rate in MN fell from .39 p/10,000 in 1995 to 0.22 in 2005 – only a fraction above NZ. Murder stats in the US are distorted by the very high rates of several key cities. My point in all this is the trend – in NZ violent crime is trending upwards and in the US it is trending downwards, very strongly so in many cities and towns.

“black drug dealing areas.”

“black on black crime in the welfare ghettos”

Anyone else starting to see a pattern there?

the risk of sexual violence in New Zealand was nearly 3 times the risk for an average United States citizen;

Nowhere on the page does he attempt to justify this assertion. (Note the rather weaselly wording he employs.) So I’ve bounced around and checked on a few sources and they all agree with these numbers in 2000:

Forcible Rape category:

US Rate: 32.0 per 100,000

NZ Rate: 13.7 per 100,000

http://www.justice.govt.nz/pubs/reports/2002/intl-comparisons-crime/section-5.html

ie about 2.5 time lower. Maybe Mr Franks should attend a remedial arithmetic class.

Mr Franks also makes the disingenuous claim that:

Only for murder are US citizens supposedly more at risk than New Zealanders. However over 80% of murders occur in 7 police districts confined to black drug dealing areas.

Which is of course pretty much the case for all nations, that there are some areas and social groups that disproportionately contribute to the numbers. The same applies to NZ, drop for instance Counties-Manakau, and suddenly our figures look better too.

Finally as I sit here I chuckle inwardly at Mr Baiter’s response if perchance I had had the temerity to quote a Labour party website in support of my argument.

http://www.act.org.nz/node/27242

Well I do appreciate a decently linked reply, and it has taken me a little while to spot where you have gone wrong.

The main problem is that the US and NZ definitions you are using are not equivalent.

The US definition of “aggravated assault” normally includes the us of a weapon and injuries very likely to cause death. The closest equivalent in NZ is “grievous assault”. ( I could include “attempted murder” but that is a relatively rare charge.)

The US “aggravated assault” rate over the period concerned (1996-2005) is in the range 414 to 291 per 100,000.

The NZ “grievous assault” rate in the same period moved from 57 to 94 per 100,000. Still 3-4 times lower than the US.

Not a great result, but then as the data I presented above clearly and unmistakably demonstrates, NZ had a very low violent crime rate for decades until 1984. Just for convenience I’ll link to it again:

http://www.safe-nz.org.nz/statsgraph.htm

What the hell caused the blue “violent crime” line to suddenly rocket upwards from 1984 onwards? And then curiously enough start to trend downwards after 1998?

And for a concrete reference, let’s just compare the US “homicide” and NZ “murder” rates over the same period:

US: 8.2 to 5.6 per 100,000

NZ: Around 2.5 per 100,000

Again the same 3-4 time higher in the US. (The “murder” rate for NZ is not explicitly mentioned in the document you referenced. It is wrapped up in another much larger category rather oddly named “other”, which includes a whole bunch of other things such as “kidnapping” and “abductions”.) But at about 110 murders per year in NZ, that works out at aprox 2.6 per hundred.

Now I am pretty confident that “homicide” and “murder” are very comparable crimes both here and in the US. Therefore I am justified in using the relative ratio between the countries of 3-4 times higher in the US as a baseline. I would also expect that if “aggravated assault” and “grievous assault” were comparable charges, that they would demonstrate a similar ratio…ie in the range 3-4 times higher in the US. Which is the result I have.

BTW if you want to selectively use places like Minnesota, can I select …umm…Golden Bay for comparison?

And just to round this off:

The figures confirm New Zealand crime rates have been trending down since peaking in 1996, Mr Hawkins said. Taking into account that New Zealand’s population grew by approximately 277,000 people between 1996 and 2003, total recorded crime figures in 2003 were 7.3 percent lower than 1996, and the resolution rate 6.7 percent better.

Rates of recorded offences per 10,000 population have fallen 13.7 percent since 1996. That year crimes per 10,000 population numbered 1279.7, compared with 1103.7 in 2003.

Opposition politicians had misrepresented crime rates as rising, when the facts were total reported offences had fallen since peaking seven years ago, Mr Hawkins said.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0403/S00178.htm

True, because of starins associated with globalisation their political centre of gravity it shifting slightly rightwards, but nowhere near as far as we have in New Zealand. The fact is that you can have healthy economic growth, very powerful unions (they don’t necessarily cause increased unemployment), a comprehensive welfare state, low levels of poverty, and low crime and imprisonment rates, all at the same time.

People will often site America as an amazing economy, but the truth is that America’s economic strength has been based, in large part, upon their domination of the international monetary system rather than anything intrisic linked to their productive power of their economy.

In the early 1970s the OPEC countries agreed to only trade oil in US dollars. So, Since the oil shocks of the 1970′s, the need to have dollars to import oil became national security policy for most countries. In this way, the value of the US dollar is held artifically high. Furthermore, the US is running a multi-trillion dollar trade deficit, and the public debt is also in the many trillions of dollars. But that’s OK, the United States has followed a deliberate policy of trade deficits and budget deficits for most of the past two decades, so-called benign neglect, in effect, to lock the rest of the world into dependence on a US money system. America lives off the borrowed money of the rest of the world in the Dollar System. In effect, the German workers at BMW build the cars and give them away to Americans for free, when the german central bank uses the dollars to buy US bonds. What is perverse about this system is the fact that Washington has succeeded in getting foreign surplus countries (countries it has a trade deficit to) to invest their own savings, to be a creditor to the US, buying Treasury bonds.

The US Treasury is certain that its trade partners will be forced to always buy more US debt to prevent the global monetary system from collapsing, as nearly happened in 1998 with the Russia default and the LTCM hedge fund crisis.

So treasury continues to rely on foreign money to prop the consumer debt bubble, at low interest rates. Were foreign money to stop propping the US economy, now at some $2.5 billion daily, the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise its interest rates to make dollar investments more attractive (interest rates were just 1% 3 years ago). Higher rates would trigger a crisis in consumer debt, mortgage defaults, credit card and car loan failures. Higher rates would plunge the US economy into a depression.

Interesting times lie ahead.

great, so now you, like so many other upwardly mobile labourites can’t see anything but your own narrowly defined self-interest. Yes markets are great, they provide a powerful engine for growth and development, however, they should be seen as a servant of humanity, not a divine law in themselves. The are a means to an end, not an end in themselves, so where they produce negative outcomes, they should be regulated. Unfortunately there is a tendency amongst “upwardly mobile” people, once they are no longer feeling the negative aspects of the market, to forget this. You seem to be one such person.

well, may we please hear your alternative explanations?

You measure failure by incarceration rates – you’re entitled to do that. It wont change the fact that Americans feel safer and are safer because more crims are behind bars for longer. It is better to compare NZ with the countries culturally similar such as the UK, Australia, US and Canada as our cultural histories and development are quite different from Scandanavia.

PJ I used to be a left leaning, socialism loving Labour activist. I used to write letters to the editor defending the very interventionist policies you shill for. I did my time at any number of Labour meetings, conferences and campaigns. Once I broke free from the collective liberal think of the universities I started to see the real world and self employment helped me see how the market truly works. Embracing more free market thinking caused me to look at socialist social policy interventions and I saw the same wooly headed thinking and poor results.