I got quite a shock after reading this… so don’t get murdered unless you know who it is…

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2962597/Police-survey-reveals-the-UK-has-1143-unsolved-murders.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_murders_in_the_United_Kingdom

I had no idea the crime solving success rates were so low.

It's hard to know how to measure rates, Norman, but that doesn't sound unduly high to me for a country of 65 million or whatever the UK is. That's about 15 times the size of NZ which would equate to an unsolved rate here of about 75. I'm sure we'd have more than that and less time to have them in too. As far as I know NZ has quite a reasonable rate of success in murder cases.

The only percentage I could see in those sites were 92% but it included those convicted and those acquitted, which isn't the same as cases cleared.

The unsolved ones are always interesting, partly because they are unsolved, but partly perhaps because the ones that are not easy to solve are likely to have unusual elements to them. I am a little surprised by that list from 1959 - 65 of Jack the Stripper; I don't seem to know them at all. I'm old enough to remember this time, so I wonder why I don't. Young enough to be protected from such news? And most of those women mentioned under Jack the Ripper's crimes are not considered his victims at all. That doesn't stop them being unsolved, of course.

The main ones here people remember are those of young women hitchhikers from the 1970s and 80s - there seemed to be a spate of them. And some odd ones, like a caretaker at the Wellington Trades Hall lifting a case which exploded; there's never been any idea at all what that was about.

While I was checking that, I saw that yesterday (18th Feb) was the last hanging in NZ in 1957. History site says "controversially convicted of killing his wife". She died of arsenic poisoning.

Maybe it seems high to me on account of me leading a sheltered life… I suppose what you say is quite right caro, but when you first look at the figures I don’t automatically think of percentages and what a fair rate of detection is. Maybe I might after the initial shock, but it’s still one heck of a lot of undetected murders… and I do believe the detection rate is actually very good. Nevertheless with the detected and the undetected… there’s a whole lot of people getting murdered.


I’m not fond of US, TV of any sort and least of all the overabundance of cop shows that are screened over here… I can’t stand ‘Morse’, ‘The Sweeny’ only portrays the cops as a bunch of heavy whiskey drinking thugs… but most of the TV cop shows have a cast of so few that they all seem capable of solving the crimes singlehanded… so I don’t think I’m being suckered into that thought process. And as for the ‘Midsummer’ series… anyone living in a village with such a name… get out, leave, emigrate… you’re a crime statistic waiting to happen.

I do enjoy watching the latest cop shows with real as it happens filming… an I love to see the helicopter in action… once that things onto them… there’s no hiding place.

Caro, I'm sure I read somewhere that NZ has the highest per capita murder rate in the 'developed' world? Is that the case, do you know, and if so can you speculate as to why?

The info officer rang this morning to see if I could work for the day, so I haven't time to check this at the moment, ferval. NZ has a very high rate of imprisonment, but that is more to do with a high-profile group calling for longer sentences than with actual crime rates.

If we do have a high murder I put it down (as I do everything bad) with right-wing changes in the 80s leading to an unequal society. In my town of 350 people, three families have murdered daughters, which seems excessively high to me. (I think just one of the girls was killed here. Her father was the plumber I mentioned on the bar thread who died; he never really got over this dreadful crime.)

But I don't recall any murders in the 8000-population town I lived in earlier for over 20 years. Must have been some, but perhaps domestic or family and not so high profile.

Caro.

Historically, the unsolved crime rate must have been considerably higher than it is today though. Crime came into being at the same time as the first law was introduced so it is not a modern phenonema.

Would imagine that the rate of those wrongly accused or convicted of a crime must have been considerably higher than today also.

Ferval, it has proved rather difficult to find consistent figures for murder rates. I have seen sites which claim NZ's is the highest in the OECD, one that put it fifth, but the official OECD figures says it is slightly below the average. Some 'independent' figures seem to have agendas behind them. And somewhere it said our rate was 5.8 per million, but that seems to only mean about 24 a year - last year we had 35, which was down a lot from previous years.

http://oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/safety/

That site goes through all the countries with their safety records, but I have brought it up on NZ's. I read that our rate, along with Britain's, Australia's and others has gone down in the last twenty years (despite media hoopla and people's fears), and that is put down to more people (till recently) in employment and fewer young men around who apparently are the most likely to run around murdering people (down from 12.2% of the population to 10%).

And murder is a good choice to check figures because generally murder is reported whereas other violent crimes might not be.

You would like to think that with modern detection methods there would be fewer people wrongly convicted of a crime, but there do seem a lot that still depend on a jury's opinions of circumstantial evidence. Maybe not murders so much.

Thanks for looking into that Caro, it was one of those vague recollections that it's so hard to pin down.

Quote:

and fewer young men around who apparently are the most likely to run around murdering people

That's something else I heard on some radio programme, that the fall in crime rates in America, Britain and the west in general has less to do with policies and policing than with the availability of abortion, now that's quite a thought isn't it?

I’m really surprised by what you say ref the crime rate in NZ. When some of my wife’s family were emigrating there in 1970… we were under the impression that it was a major incident if Mrs Browns cat got stuck up a tree and required rescuing, or that the paperboy had a puncture on his bike and was late delivering the mornings paper… crime rates were not talked about. There wasn’t any, so what’s happened in the last forty years… unless it’s the wife’s family going back to their old ways.