Hunting The Muse

Crime Rates

Bowling For Columbine did get me thinking about a couple of things. Rather, it reminded me of things I've thought before, including how press coverage distorts the frequency and presence level of crime. Like how kidnappings go down and coverage goes up, that sort of thing.

So how do you control coverage? Well, you don't. But you can encourage.

When I was in elementary school, I did a science fair project that involved comparing local crime rates with the phase of the moon. I think I got second prize (there were multiple first prize winners). But the key to that project was that I found a person working in the police station that had access to all the statistics and was able to give them all to me by date.

These days, I would think those statistics would be available in real-time on a regional basis. I'd like to see a live indicator that actually showed the violent crime index compared to previous dates. A little graphic shown each day so people can see the crime rate go down when they actually think it is going up. Actually, I'm sure that quite a few newscasts have got to be already doing this. But I'd also like to see it as a web service.

By the way, the upshot of my 7th grade science fair experiment was that the crime rate was noticeably more active when there was a full moon. My conclusion was that the moon has an impact on many people's moods, making them more aggressive. A couple years later, thanks to an old Shoe cartoon, I thought of an alternate explanation: That the full moon makes it easier to see. Posted by Curt at February 8, 2003 04:04 PM