John Walker Crime Trends Analysis Contents
The analysis of trends in crime is a pre-requisite for finding solutions.
This website aims to provide some assistance to those looking for solutions to
crime, from the local level to, quite literally, the global level. Data
about crime are often very poor. Inevitably, they relate only to crimes
that the police find out about, or that victims report to police or special
crime victimisation surveys. Academic criminologists have created quite a
mystique about the so-called "dark figure of crime", to the extent that
administrators and politicians are often convinced that analysis of the
available data is simply a waste of time.
This website takes quite the opposite point of view, noting that crime is no
different to economics in having poor and incomplete data. Economists,
however, take this in their stride, and develop forecasting models that
incorporate both the statistical evidence and the best available expert
knowledge. The data issues are amplified many times over when you try to
solve economic or crime problems at the international or global level, but we
have shown, in these web pages, that it is not impossible to monitor trends in
crime - even at the global level - and that international co-operation against
crime can be based on a deeper analysis of the available facts, instead of
simply following the dictates of those very annoying people who insist - without
any evidence - that they have the answers.
