Lies, Dam Lies & Statistics - How you are being lied to about the crime rate

Crime is not going down, all the headlines are saying that today, but it is all twisting of numbers and statistics.  Toronto, like a lot of cities has a huge violent crime problem, but you will hear the Chief say that crime trends are down.  How can statistics Canada and the Chief be wrong, because they twist the numbers and use improper denominators in their math to make crime seem rare, distant, & not worth worrying about.

You'll notice media and the Chief "flub" the word crime and "crime rate"......which are two totally different numbers....they will say the crime rate is down 7% across Canada, and most will take this at face value....but crime is not down 7% the "rate" of crime is down 7%. 

For example you are driving towards a wall in you car at 100 miles and hour.....your speed slows to 90 miles per hour as you hit the wall........well, your "rate" of speed when you hit the wall was down 10%, but you still hit the wall, just not as fast.

The crime "rate" is not a percentage....although the Chief and the media talk as if it is....the crime rate is based on the number of crime divided by 100,000 of population......that is not a percentage, a percentage would be number of crimes divided by 100 people.  So the number appears one thousand times smaller than a percentage.  That is the first way it works to make the number appear small.

A second way that number is distorted is by saying the crime rate for sexual assault level 1 is 62 per 100,000 people in the population, as Stats Canada says....sounds pretty rare right?   Wrong....first off 50 per cent of those 100,000 are male and are not likely to be raped....so that dilutes the number right there, you can essentially double whatever rate the police are showing.

Same as our gang problem and the homicide rate.  Depends on the year, but off the top 90% of Toronto's homicide victims by shooting are black men between the ages of 14 to 29....roughly.  We tout our Homicide rate as being 1.4 per 100k people, but not if you are Black and live in a housing project between the ages of 14 to 29......that murder rate, by the time you take our white people, females, and people outside of that age range would jump to a rate of 26 per 100k.....New York is currently at 6.6 for the general population.

So you can lie with numbers....and right now everybody seems to be doing that.  By the way, you do have a better chance of being involved in a violent crime in Toronto, then you do of being struck by lightening.