"azotic" wrote in message
...

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
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On Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:04:15 -0400, Ed Huntress wrote:

They need lots of practice in Nevada, the most dangerous state in the
country, with a crime rate 24% higher than the national average.



Show us the citation that backs up that hysterical remark.

Thanks,
Rich

Hysterical? Rich, the slightest effort on your part would show you where
that came from.

sigh Sometimes I feel like I should run a basic self-education class
for righties. That's based on the CQ Press methodology, which ranks
states on five violent crimes plus auto theft. You can check them out
against the UCR. I've done so, and it would take about 15 minutes if you
want to go to the original source.

But the summary is in the links from he

http://www.cqpress.com/product/Crime...ings-2008.html

--

Ed Huntress

Ed you might want to find a new source:

Article: Some Call Dangerous-City Ratings a Crime
Article from:
The Washington Post
Article date:
November 21, 2007
Author:
Elizabeth Williamson - Washington Post Staff Writer CopyrightThis
material is published under license from the Washington Post. All
inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post.
(Hide copyright information)

If the FBI has said it once, it has said it a thousand times: Do not use
its crime statistics to rank the nation's most dangerous cities.
That didn't stop CQ Press from releasing a book this week that does just
that. And it didn't stop officials from cities on the list -- not the ones
ranked safest, of course -- from furiously protesting that the rankings
were not only meaningless but unfair.

Several criminologists say a new report by a private publishing company
that ranks cities is flawed.

"Morgan Quitno computed the rankings by using rates for six of the seven
offenses -- murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and motor
vehicle theft -- excluding larceny theft. James Alan Fox, a sociologist
and professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston,
said the report is 'a rehash of readily available crime statistics.' He
said that cities' wide variations in size, demographics, geography and
economic conditions make comparisons of their relative safety
questionable."

I Question CQ press, state ratings. Just simply compile your own stats
from daily newspapers on the web, only took a hour
of reasearch using google to determine that the CQ ratings are a crock of
****. One wonders if the authors got some payola
to make some cities look better and others look worse or they were
incredibley incompetent, lazy and sloppy ?

Best Regards
Tom.

I had read that WP article in '07, Tom. Notice that I didn't use the city
rankings, only the states.

Back in '91 through '93 I wrote several editorials about UCR statistics, and
I was one of those complaining to the FBI about the non-comparability of
figures. If you followed the whole situation you'd know that the FBI clamped
down hard on the state reporting -- even ran classes for the UCR reporters
in each state -- and that the state-by-state figures are much improved, and
quite good, by the late '90s.

But the city figures are still unreliable for reasons that aren't worth
going into here. The one category of crime that is, and always has been,
extremely accurate is the murder rate. You can't easily hide murders. So if
you want to be fussy about it, start with that.

But the criticism of M-Q really should be directed at the FBI and at the
local reporting agencies for UCR. M-Q just reports what those agencies
report -- of course it's a "rehash of readily available statistics." That's
what CQ Press does -- report summaries of official statistics.

Overall, their reports are generally accurate. When you have a murder rate
of 9.0/100k, like Nevada, and compare it with some state that has a rate of
8.9, the comparisons are speculative. But when it's 9.0 (Nevada) versus 4.9
(New Jersey), or 1.2 or whatever (Hawaii), those UCR errors are not a
factor.

The criticism about relative city sizes and demographics is something for
the social scientists to worry about. This is just a state ranking. If you
live in Nevada, you're roughly twice as likely to be murdered than you are
if you live in NJ -- and the city issues and demographics actually work
against Nevada in the comparison. Those are just the facts, not sociological
theorizing.

--
Ed Huntress