The incompleteness of crime stats

Two views of Crime:

I am more inclined to agree with Wilfred Reilly and less with Sailer in regard to crime. Crime stats, imho, are not as infallible or definitive as often assumed by the ‘online right’. They tell an incomplete picture. The stats fail to take into account or overlook unreported/unclosed crime, and also crime which has many victims yet is recorded as a single incident of crime. Sailer is correct that murder stats are the most reliable due to the seriousness and the presence of a body, yet as Reilly notes, murders are only a small fraction of overall crime. Just focusing on murders overlooks other types of crime in which blacks are less represented. An obvious example is fraud, which is almost always perpetrated by non-blacks and has many victims over a long time period. Computer fraud or credit card fraud not uncommonly has thousands of victims committed by a sole perpetrator or a small organization, yet may be charged as a single count of ‘wire fraud’.

It’s similar to how it’s assumed that Asian kids are less disruptive and more obedient in school, but this is not true in their native homelands. Rather, Asian-Americans are just a biased sample, due to selection effects, and not representative of Asians everywhere. Same for scholastic achievement: It’s easy to have superior national ‘PISA’ scores when the low-scorers are excluded from taking the test or not recorded.

SBF, whose fraud affected millions of FTX customers, technically (as far as the legal system and the stats are concerned) committed the same ‘quantity of crime’ as a black ‘youth’ who holds up a 7-11. Yet way more victims over a much longer duration and a way greater dollar amount. Again, the stats do not take into account the number of victims by a perpetrator, the duration, or the dollar amount (except for certain crude thresholds; e.g. grand vs. petty theft/larceny). The threshold for grand larceny is typically, depending on the jurisdiction, just $5,000, yet SBF’s fraud is estimated at $8 billion, or 1,600,000 times that amount.

It also stands to reason that smarter criminals in higher-IQ regions, like in South Asia, engage in the type of crimes which are less likely to be reported or go on longer, such as crypto-currency fraud. By comparison less intelligent, impulsive criminals with high time preference are more likely to get caught and thus have their crimes closed and recorded in the stats.

Here’s one example from Hong Kong: A crypto influencer was arrested in Hong Kong for a potential $128 million fraud involving 1,400 people. Here again we see a large dollar amount and many victims.

Hong Kong police arrested six individuals, including crypto influencer and YouTuber Joseph Lam, on Monday in connection to the halted trading platform JPEX, the South China Morning Post reported.

Police said the group is suspected of a “conspiracy to defraud” investors, and the case could involve HK$1 billion, or about $128 million, according to complaints lawmakers received from more than 1,400 people.

I think also people conflate safety with low-crime. They are related but not interchangeable. America has overall low crime and low civil unrest, yet its streets, especially in major cities, are overrun by the homeless, drug addicts, and other vagrants. In contrast, the streets of Seoul are much safer and you’re less likely to be held up at knifepoint after dark, but maybe also more likely to be scammed.