Comment on London stabbing rates vs X posts about London crime
jacksilver@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I always find it interesting when you’re only provided a portion of the data in a chart, as this shows “hospital Admissions” and not total incidents involving a knife.
If you look at other reports on the issue it seems like incidents involving a knife are still high (and don’t follow the trend from the graph) even though hospital Admissions and deaths are down - Source.
That could mean that reporting is up while crime is down, or could mean that less incidents are ending violently, but it’s not as clear a picture as the initial graph indicates.
Note: the source is for the UK in general, but other London based reports show similar. I chose that article because they seem fairly trustworthy.
Riverside@reddthat.com 1 week ago
Isn’t the outcome the important thing? Like, clearly fewer people are dying/being hospitalized by knife attacks, isn’t that ultimately the relevant metric?
Gathorall@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Well, that means knife crime is more successful. Rarely are you supposed to even use the knife. And the victim needing a hospital after is also a failure. Therefore if knife crime remains high and hospitalizations are lowered that means the criminals have more success with it and it becomes are attractive formof crime.
jacksilver@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The point of my post is that it is “a metric”. The original post was showing that knife “crimes” were going down over a period of time while rhetoric about knife crimes were up.
However, knife crimes may not be down based on other metrics. So yes, while it’s good that less people are being hospitalized, that doesn’t mean the argument being made in the OP is valid.
I’m also not trying to take sides, just noticing that the graph on knife attacks wasn’t telling the whole story. It’s very possible that the increased rhetoric on knife attacks leads to more people reporting even though crime is down. Generally there has been a trend in the world to over report crime, typically done to help push legislation or political parties.