Hi,
I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this, but its the only statistics related forum that I could find.
I am in the process of putting together a report on crime and sustainability, and one of the indicators used is the murder rate. However, I am quite suspicious of the official statistics put out by the police services.
Please see the attached Excel File for the graph showing the trend from 1994 to 2006. You can see that there is a very sudden and sustained drop in the murder rate in 03/04. Superficially that is great news, but I can't help wondering whether or not the data has been falsified.
These numbers are for a large city. There has been no obvious external factor, such as redrawing of municipal boundaries, that could have caused this.
So, I just wanted to ask people's opinion on the matter: Do you think that this could be a real decrease? What kind of mechanism could be responsible for such a sudden decrease in a particular crime statistic? There have not been similar sudden decreases or increases in other violent crimes. All the other data (for other crime categories) that I have shows a gradual increase, gradual decrease or no change, as I would have expected.
Thanks for any advice.
I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this, but its the only statistics related forum that I could find.
I am in the process of putting together a report on crime and sustainability, and one of the indicators used is the murder rate. However, I am quite suspicious of the official statistics put out by the police services.
Please see the attached Excel File for the graph showing the trend from 1994 to 2006. You can see that there is a very sudden and sustained drop in the murder rate in 03/04. Superficially that is great news, but I can't help wondering whether or not the data has been falsified.
These numbers are for a large city. There has been no obvious external factor, such as redrawing of municipal boundaries, that could have caused this.
So, I just wanted to ask people's opinion on the matter: Do you think that this could be a real decrease? What kind of mechanism could be responsible for such a sudden decrease in a particular crime statistic? There have not been similar sudden decreases or increases in other violent crimes. All the other data (for other crime categories) that I have shows a gradual increase, gradual decrease or no change, as I would have expected.
Thanks for any advice.