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Charles Ellson · March 1st 05, 08:40 PM posted to uk.transport.london,uk.railway

In article
"James Christie" writes:

In message , Charles Ellson
may have written...
In article net.com
"Roger T." writes:

snip
Funny, when we used to beat the crap outta kids who did this sort of thing,
kids didn't do this sort of thing.

Oh yes they did, as you'll find by studying old newspaper reports. The
difference nowadays is that the population is higher so that factor
by itself tends to increase the amount of offenders even if the rate
stays stationary. Claims by parts of the press that "this sort of thing
never used to happen in the past [when our lot was in power]" are
nearly always contradicted by the the same newspaper's archives.

That's a rather sweeping and misleading generalisation. The population
of my area has actually gone down over the past few decades, and is
still going down, yet there is a massive rate of vandalism. How can you
explain that?

Too small a sample to base a reliable stistic upon ? Had the neds moved
out instead then you might be living in a comparative oasis of
peace and tranquility. There always have, and maybe always will be
areas where crime is concentrated or absent but most forms of anti-social
behaviour which "never used to happen" turn out to be age-old problems
when older information sources are examined. The trick used by the
sections of the media who wish to colour things their way is to quote
raw figures of X% increase in the number of commissions of an offence
rather than the more representative figure of commissions per 1000
of population. Typically, the headlines might scream "5 times as many
insert offence are committed compared to 50 years ago" while totally
forgetting that the town is now ten times the size it was then.
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