[extropy-chat] If the nonUS citizens voted in Nov 2 elections...

[Alfio Puglisi]

On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, Mike Lorrey wrote:

>Property crime ranges from 3-5 times higher than the US in european
>nations. Theft of identification is a common occurence, which is the
>whole reason why a company like American Express came into being.

3-5 times higher seems a really high number. It's easy to skew number 5
times up or down in different statistics. In a 5-minutes Google search
(pulling up what seemed official pages, but no guarantee of scientific
precision) I found the following:

Auto theft:
US     1 every 186 cars per year
Italy  1 every 156 cars per year

Burglary:
US    1200 cases / 100.000 people
Italy  406 cases / 100.000 people

so auto theft seems slightly higher in Italy, while burglary seems so
much higher in the US that I doubt the numbers.


references:
US burglary: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/burg.htm
US person per household: http://www.google.it/search?q=cache:8XhNFyRTFKQJ:www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-8.pdf+average+household+size+US&hl=it
US car theft: http://www.iii.org/media/hottopics/insurance/test4/
Italy burglary: http://www.google.it/search?q=cache:q3JIf_50llEJ:images.vb.camcom.it/f/Varie/So/Sociale.pdf+crimini+statistiche&hl=it
Italy car theft: http://www.targhe.org/articolo_cesc2002.html

Alfio