Postscript 16th May 2011.
What we need is a scientific theory (incorporating cultural criminological data) to better explain and forecast crime: http://dysology.org/page7.html
The Failure of Criminology to Explain the Crime Drop and the Irrationality of Criminologists who are Attempting Now to Predict the Past in order to try to know the future can be read here:
Mike Sutton's paper - published on the peer-to-peer BestThinking.com website was inspired by The Labour Party in Nottingham (England) irrationally and ludicrously claiming credit for the International 15 year crime drop.
6 comments:
To use a Cockneyism "Round my manor nobody bothers reporting petty crime. What is the point?" The drop may be due to folks just not bothering to contact a police force that is
1/ "Ovestretched" or
2/ "Bloody useless" depending on one's view.
Ciaran
Indeed a lack of petty crime reporting may be an issue - as may poor recording of some reported crimes. However, even crime surveys of the public have picked up the same trend. The paper by Farrell et al - link provided in blog post above points this out.
I am still looking for a Ph.D supervisor, cough, cough. Also doing work on the "Smiley Culture" and other recent deaths in custody.
Very good article, but I think that this isn't a failure of criminology, it just needs to evolve a bit. In my studies to get my criminology degree, we've learned that criminology is a reactionary practice. We need to study what has happened in order to predict what can happen. So I don't think that it's a failure of criminology, we just need to get a bit better at predicting crime.
Kevin
What Sutton's paper implies but does not spell out is that using past observations in order to predict the future (rather than to attempt to explain the past)falls foul of what Hume and Later Karl Popper explained as the problem of induction, and the associated principle of induction.
It is irrational - along with such ideas that all swans are white because you have only ever seen white ones.
One day a black swan might just turn up (as happened when Australia was discovered). In that sense expecting the past to resemble the future, and vice versa, is irrational for prediction.
What we will one day achieve (with enough of the right data - and the right theoretical explanation) is the ability to forecast crime as we can with the weather.
The fact that we are nowhere near there yet is proof of the faiure of criminology. And the fact that top criminologists have been funded to predict the future on the basis of the fallacy of induction is well... quite incredible really. Where did it all go so wrong?
Only a good theory of crime is hard to vary and can be tested by observation and experiment.
Kevin
Check this out:
http://dysology.org/page7.html
It explains why using past social data to predict social futures is irrational
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