[geeks] What desk toy or "tchotchke" says "geek" to you?

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 @ 21:41 +0000, Mike Meredith said:

> The serious UK crime statistics are based on the collation of recorded
> crimes. I'm not familiar with the behind the scenes processes involved
> but I do know that to become a recorded crime you have to 'report' it
> twice ... the initial call, followed by a signed statement. 

What should happen is that reports, arrests, and convictions should be
taken into account, though the latter is invalid if judges on the bench do
not follow jurisprudence, fail to uphold the law, or otherwise bias their
judgements.

For example, I'd never count stats from those awful television courts in the
US, and I don't think they should be allowed to exist.

> Indeed which is why the people designing the process to collate them are
> very careful about how the process works. They're also very pedantic
> about what exactly is being measured ... 'recorded crimes' != 'total
> crimes'. And any decent statistician should be able to estimate a
> 'squishyness' value.

The people doing the low level work can be very good.

The problem to me is what happens to the numbers after they are done.

As I said elsewhere, I've seen the government locally state things which their
own numbers can't support, and not just about crime, but economics, traffic,
etc.

> Recorded crime stats are probably relatively accurate.

If they are generated by an observation of dispatch and arrests at a minimum,
yes.

Otherwise, where exactly are they getting the information?

I once asked a gun control nut where she got her arrest information, and
she never could tell me.

So, I handed her a report from the local police. She wasn't too happy though,
since the real numbers didn't match her speech.

She never did thank me.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["We are all of us in the gutter, some of us
looking at the stars." -- Oscar Wilde]