Questions tagged [criminology]
The study of criminal behavior in both the individual and within a given society.
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Is gun control effective?
I have seen numerous arguments about gun control, in the sense of laws restricting gun ownership or possession, and whether widespread gun possession affects crime rates, and each side is happy to ...
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Are white people more likely to commit mass murder in the United States?
There have been several claims in the media that white men are more likely to commit mass murders. I've seen rather strong evidence that the vast majority of these crimes are committed by men, so I ...
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Have one in ten women suffered rape in the UK?
A recent survey in the UK claims that about 10% of women have been raped but that most do not report the incident even to friends. In the words of one news report:
One in 10 women has been raped, ...
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Are 1 in 5 college women raped?
In this article, it is claimed that 1 in 5 college women are raped (at least around the 2013-2014 time period). I have heard the claim repeated from other sources (such as the BBC, which was ...
user19074
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Are African Americans victims of a disproportionate number of police killings?
Many people are currently arguing that African Americans are being killed by police disproportionately to their percentage of the US population.
An example of the claim is given at Mapping Police ...
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Are more crimes committed during a full moon?
It is a common belief that more crime is committed during a full moon.
I rationalised this by assuming
criminals used the increased moon
light to aid them in their criminal
activities with out really ...
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Is this "whites killed by whites" diagram wrong?
I found the following diagram on twitter:
(Sorry for not giving the source: I don't know how to link there.)
The diagram gives the impression that if you're a white person (in USA), then you're ...
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In the US, are illegal immigrants more likely to commit crimes?
Trump has claimed numerous times that part of the reason we need to close the border is that the illegal immigrants are prone to crimes. I want to check these claims. Are illegal immigrants more ...
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On average in the US, is there a mass shooting 9 out of every 10 days?
Reading the New York Times today, I came across this very amusing "tourism video" touting the benefit of visiting/moving to Australia, namely, "You Won't Get Shot".
Don’t Get Shot in America. Live in ...
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Is the increasing availability of high speed internet pornography reducing sex crime rates?
Some early studies show that the availability of pornography does not increase the rate of sex crimes.
Research on pornography has generally been of various types (Tovar, Elias, & Chang, 1999)....
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Were US crime rates significantly lower in 2011 than in 1992?
While watching this video, it makes the claim at about the 12 minute mark that US crime rates are lower across the board.
It then shows a graph that lists various violent crimes with numbers in ...
user11643
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Is the immigrant/crime correlation simply explained by lower wealth?
I am often confronted with statistics that show immigrants are much more involved in crime than the native citizens. This seems to be common in Western countries. Here are some examples, however, ...
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Can music incite murder?
From a deleted 700 Club interview archived on the internet archive at
http://web.archive.org/web/20000122101421/http://www.cbn.org/the700club/johannamichaelsen.asp
Johanna says you can trace ...
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Is there a correlation between mass-murder and use of psychoactive prescription drugs such as SSRIs?
It seems to be a commonly-held belief that there is a strong correlation between the use of prescription drugs such as SSRIs and mass-shooters. For instance, this claim:
Every mass shooting over last ...
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Are crime rates up by 10% in Germany?
On June 18th and 19th, 2018, the President of the United States, Donald Trump tweeted that the crime rate in Germany has increased:
(1) Tweet from June 18th, 2018
(2) Tweet from June 19th, 2018 ...
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Is the death penalty an effective deterrent?
There is a lot of clutter from anti-death penalty sites, which makes it hard to find all the research. They often cite statistics like those explained in this website, including the chart below that ...
Dogmafrog
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Has Trump's administration been making more human trafficking arrests than the Obama administration?
I come across this image below circulation on the internet.
The image is comparing the human trafficking arrests during Trump's and Obama's administrations. Are these figures true?
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Do atheists commit far fewer crimes?
According to a post by latimes.com, "How secular family values stack up":
Atheists were almost absent from our prison population as of the late 1990s, comprising less than half of 1% of those ...
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Is there a high chance of being raped in US prisons?
If there is anything one takes away about US prisons from television and movies, it is that there is a really high chance of you getting raped in the shower or in some other dark place.
Now, I don't ...
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Can acts of IP piracy be more beneficial than harmful?
There are several claims that piracy of Intellectual Property (IP) can help sales more than it hurts them.
For example, Edmund McMillan of Team Meat states in an interview at IGN:
McMillen ...
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Do rapists think rape is normal?
I have found the following statement on an article of feminism:
Do you know who think all men are rapists? Rapists do. They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes ...
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Do car alarms provide a significant reduction in automobile theft?
Noise
That movie got me thinking, because it makes a number of claims about car alarms that jive with my personal feelings about them. They're noisy, obnoxious, tend to go off at night, and are ...
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Did violent gun crime rates rise in Australia after the 1996 gun control laws?
In 1996 Australia passed the National Firearms Agreement (NFA) which greatly restricted the option to legally own some types of guns by private citizens.
The activist site, World Public Union claims ...
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Do men with no prior exposure to child pornography go on to harm children once exposed?
UK government advisor John Carr, of the Council on Child Internet Safety, claims in a radio interview:
Mr Carr said there was "no question" that some men who look at child sex abuse images ...
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Are "burglar codes" used to target homes for crime?
There is a common trope which has been going round for years that there are a series of chalk-marks used by burglars to indicate possible targets.
There have been multiple news stories about this ...
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Is this graph of "mass shootings" backed up by reliable data?
There's this graph on the internets:
But I was unable to find any sources of the data. Most of the sites that present the graph seem to be politically oriented. Is this backed by any hard data?
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Do "scare kids straight" programmes reduce criminal activity?
It seems obvious to many people that if the consequences of an activity are sufficiently scary people will naturally avoid the activity. If the consequences of criminal activity are frequent death, ...
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Did a Michigan jewellery store keeper successfully scare off his attackers with a shotgun in 1995?
In an answer to another question, there is a reference to this 2012 Natural News article, which in turn cites this NRA-ILA article, which cites "The Chronicle, Muskegon, MI, 8/23/95":
Plans to slay ...
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Are 1 million people a year date raped?
This article claims:
Every year, an estimated 1 million people are date raped, and many of
them are victims of date-rape drugs, potent mixtures that disrupt the
central nervous system.
I ...
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Did Russian hackers beat slot machines with an app?
Russian hackers made up to $250,000 per weekend by using an app to tell them when to pull a trigger.
[...] custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate roughly 0.25 ...
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Do immigrants to the US commit less crimes that native born Americans? [closed]
In 2015, Donald Trump suggested in a speech that Mexican immigrants to the US were bringing crime.
In response, several reporters denied it, such as the Washington Post
data show that new immigrants —...
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