CRIME RATES1981 1996
U.S. England U.S. England
Homicide 9.83 1.13 7.41 1.31
Rape 70.59 4.19 70.79 21.77
Robbery 258.75 40.86 202.44 142.35
Assault 289.73 197.49 388.19 439.60
Burglary 1649.47 1447.36 942.95 2239.15
Motor Vehicle 474.72 670.09 525.93 948.83
TheftPolice Recorded Crime Rates
per 100,000 in the United States
and England: 1981 and 1996Table 4
SOURCE: Langan and Farrington 1998.
The legal justifications for killing a spouse or even
a person committing a crime may vary from coun-
try to country, as may the reporting and recording
of homicides. Still, the data for this crime rate
almost certainly are more accurate for internation-
al comparisons than those for rape, robbery, bur-
glary, assault, theft, or arson.
Table 5 presents data for 1990 from the Unit-
ed Nations (United Nations Crime and Justice
Network 1998) on intentional homicide rates per
100,000 for a selected set of countries. The rate for
the United States was taken from the UCR (FBI
1991). Note the wide range of homicide rates, with
Barbados and the United States with relatively
high rates and Austria, Botswana, Denmark, Ja-
pan, Norway, and Spain with relatively low rates.
There probably are real differences between these
two sets of countries in terms of homicide rates. It
is less clear that smaller differences across coun-
tries with rather different legal systems, levels of
development, and cultural histories, represent dif-
ferences in the unjustifiable intentional taking of
another person’s life. To reiterate the difficulty in
making cross-national comparisons, we note that
INTERPOL’s international crime statistics come
with the warning: ‘‘the information given is in no
way intended for use as a basis for comparisons
between different countries.’’
CONCLUSIONSAt the beginning of this article we noted that the
computation of a crime rate might seem straight-
forward, but designating the most appropriate
term for each component in equation (1) often is
Austria .52 Italy 3.11
Barbados 11.76 Japan .50
Botswana .46 Madagascar 1.31
Bulgaria 2.52 Norway .99
Canada 2.22 Spain .71
Denmark .80 Sri Lanka 2.17
Egypt 1.07 Sweden 1.41
Fed. Rep. of Germany 2.13 Switzerland 1.64
India 4.24 Turkey 1.64
Israel 2.30 United States 9.4Intentional Homicide Rates per 100,000
in Selected Nations in 1990Table 5
SOURCE: United Nations Crime and Justice Information Network- http://www.ifs.unvie.ac.at/ uncjin/mosaic/at.inthom/
txt.
difficult. Designating the base represents the easi-
est decision. This choice does not greatly change
the interpretation of the rate, although it may
make the interpretation more or less intuitive for
the reader. Choice of the appropriate relevant
population size is more difficult; for example,
basing rape rates on the number of females rather
than the number of people or the motor vehicle
theft rate on the number of registered motor
vehicles rather than the number of people. Deter-
mining the number of incidents constitutes the
most problematic component of calculating crime
rates. Here, the differing definitions of crimes,
varying counting rules, response rates, rates of
reporting incidents to the police or interviewers,
response categories, bounding of interviews, memo-
ry decay, police discretion in recording crimes,
and so on, can greatly affect the estimated crime
rate. These factors differentially affect estimates of
the number of incidents based on self-reports,
UCR, and NCVS data. Even so, within the United
States for certain crimes and comparisons, data
from these different sources lead to similar con-
clusions. Comparisons of crime rates across na-
tions, with the possible exception of homicide, is
extremely risky.REFERENCES
Beattie, Ronald H. 1960 ‘‘Criminal Statistics in the
United States—1960.’’ Journal of Criminal Law, Crimi-
nology, and Police Science 51:49–65.
Bell, Daniel 1960 ‘‘The Myth of Crime Waves.’’ In
Daniel Bell, ed., The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion
of Political Ideas in the Fifties. New York: Free Press.