Questions tagged [criminology]
The study of criminal behavior in both the individual and within a given society.
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Can a body be dissolved by a few liters or gallons of Hydrofluoric acid?
In the "Cat's in the Bag..." episode of Season 1 of "Breaking Bad," characters are shown with 4 gallon-jugs of Hydrofluoric Acid that they use to dissolve 2 adult corpses. Chemistry is a major plot ...
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Do removable faceplates on car stereos deter theft?
Everyone has probably seen a car stereo head unit with a removable face plate; the idea being you can take the faceplate with you to deter theft. The claim is specifically made in this product ...
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Is the Bible the most shoplifted book?
Looking at several 'fun facts' pages, the claim of the Bible being the most shoplifted book appears on several of them. Example 1, Example 2, Example 3 Example 4
The Bible, the world's best-selling ...
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Does prison work reduce recidivism?
I'm having difficulty finding statistics comparing the recidivism rates of regular prisoners and the ones that worked while serving the sentence. I can't remember where but I've read that "specialists ...
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Does the 'Mafia' still exist in Italy?
Here is a claim that says the mafia still exist in Italy:
Yes, sadly it does, and will ever does. I'm Italian.
and it's not called mob.. or whatever.
there are many clans, in several Italian ...
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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 a Bitcoin Exchange manipulate the exchange rate in a way that defrauds its users without consequence? [closed]
Bitcoin is an Internet currency with no centralized bank or agency underpinning it. I only recently heard about it and I've been trying to understand how it works and if it is safe, however this is a ...
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Did Hugo Chávez have a net worth of 2 billion dollars at the time of his death?
I've seen this now numerious times,
Analysts say Leftist leader had 'amassed private fortune of $2 billion' - Dailymail.co.uk
And, that's a pretty sly way to say that "someone said". But, is it ...
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Has a mass murder ever been prevented by a good guy with a firearm? [duplicate]
While the statistical relationship between gun ownership and mass homicides has been discussed on Skeptics.SE, I have not seen any questions or answers on the following claim.
The policy of the ...
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Is kidney theft happening in real life?
From time to time, we heard about spine-chilling stories of kidney theft in various forms. There's some competing views out there, but I don't know which one to believe.
One negative point of view is ...
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Has a programmer ever embezzled money by shaving fractions of a cent from many bank transactions?
There's a popular story that describes a programmer having altered a program at a bank so it diverted fractions of a cent from every transaction to another account (or some variation like multiple ...
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Was there a recent spate of violence against Indians in Australia?
I recently came across a journal entry, written in December 2012, about racial violence in Australia.
The entry mentioned an incident against a woman targeted for singing in French. I assume this ...
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Do murderers tend to return to the scene of the crime?
It is commonly heard that murderers (or other criminals) "always return to the scene of the crime".
Well, that's certainly false for all murderers. However, it is suggested that murderers do have a ...
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Are there 10 time more home invasions in the UK than the USA?
In this interview (0:35 mark) Ann Coulter argues that:
... home invasions are 10 times higher in Britain than they are in this country [US]
Are there any evidence to support this claim?
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During the decade of the Clinton ban on semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines, did crime not go down?
Source: USA Today, Opposing view: Eliminate 'gun-free zone' regulations
Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, made a claim:
During the decade of the Clinton ban on ...
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Does increased gun ownership in the US correlate with a reduction in violent crime rates?
This is somewhat of the converse of the question Is Gun Control Effective:
A quote of famous musician and gun advocate Ted Nugent has been making the rounds on the Internet again lately:
Where you ...
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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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Can handcuffs be picked with a single hand while handcuffed?
Many movies and series show people wearing handcuffs picking them using a small hidden piece of metal, like a bobby pin, paperclip, broken glasses, tweezers and more.
Can this be done in real life, ...
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Can a trained human eye catch microexpressions?
Microexpressions were validated in this question: Do involuntary "microexpressions" betray liars?
But can a human eye (as opposed to a frame by frame analysis of a high-speed video) detect ...
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Does a dog provide a reasonable deterrent against house theft?
Is there any evidence to suggest that owning a dog or that evidence of a dog (barking alarm, beware of dog sign) reduce the likelihood of your home being broken into?
Example 1:
Most burglars do ...
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Have more people been killed in Chicago than U.S. troops in Afghanistan?
A tweet from @LeftSentThis stated that
2,000 US troops have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001, more than 5,000 people have been killed by gun fire in Chicago during that time.
There are at ...
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Does locking your car doors reduce theft?
Almost everyone I know locks their car doors when they leave their vehicle for an extended time. However, I come from a country town and most people in that country town don't lock their car doors and ...
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Correlation between MAO-A gene and murderers / sex offenders
The MAO-A gene, also known as the "Warrior gene", is thought to cause increased antisocial and violent behavior patterns in people who have experienced an abusive childhood. [ref] Caspi et. al. found ...
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Does a suspect's psychological state after arrest correlate to guilt or innocence? e.g. do only the guilty sleep in jail?
A common cop procedural trope suggests only the guilty sleep in jail. It shows up in Law and Order: SVU (S6E04), award winning movies, and even articles about poker tells. The guilty, or so the ...
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Do fast jury verdicts favor either the prosecution or the defendant?
Trial watchers occasionally assert fast verdicts are more likely to be guilty ones. The idea has been expressed by small town newspapers and even sports reporters. At the same time, other news ...
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Are there between 100,000-300,000 child sex slaves in the United States today?
Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore state this as part of the "Real Men Don't Buy Girls" campaign.
CNN -
There's between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States today," Ashton Kutcher ...
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Were members of the yakuza amongst the Fukushima 50?
Tomohiko Suzuki, author of the book The Yakuza and the Nuclear Industry, claims that several members of the Fukushima 50, workers who stayed behind to work on the Fukushima dai-ichi nuclear reactor ...
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Is it safer to NOT light your house at night?
At some point, I read a news report that investigators found out it is actually safer not to light your house when you are not there or when asleep. It mentioned that thieves found very dark places '...
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Are heavy metal music listeners more likely to commit crimes?
It has been suggested (particularly in the 1980s) that individuals that listen to heavy metal are more likely to be commit a crime, as shown here and here. Have any studies statistically shown so?
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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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Do home alarm systems reduce burglaries?
Does installing an alarm system in your home have an effect on the number or results of burglaries?
I am about to buy a house with an alarm system installed, with a siren/flash light on the front ...
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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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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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Has anyone innocent ever been arrested because of contraband that was planted in their luggage?
There is a question on travel.SE asking what to do if some culprit planted contraband in your luggage. There are some links provided to cases where this is suspected to have happened.
Being able to ...
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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 professional assassins exist?
It's a common trope in movies that certain people, either spies or mercenaries, specialize in assassination. (An apparently well-paying but wearing specialty, since generally the assassins are freshly ...
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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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Do cyber crimes cost $US114b annually?
A study Symantec claims that the global damages from cyber crime were
A study by Symantec Corp, the maker of Norton computer security
software, estimates the cost of global cybercrimes at $114 ...
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Are electric chairs powered by generators connected to the mains in the same building?
There's an episode in The Green Mile movie where the death row servicemen rehearse the upcoming execution that is done using an electric chair. One of them says (quoted from here):
Roll on one.
[...
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Psychological pricing: reducing theft? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
The origin of “99 cents”
On Wikipedia, the article for psychological pricing (ending prices in -99 or similar) gives the following suggestion for why it is done, ...
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Can you put a gag in someone's mouth to prevent them from talking?
I don't get this, I see it on crime TV programs a lot, they stuff a cloth in the mouth of someone so they can't scream/shout for help.
I put a sock in my mouth once, it was pretty easy to push it out ...
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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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Does addressing the issues focused on by the Broken Windows theory have a measurable impact on crime?
These are excerpts from what could be considered the source for the Broken Windows theory (emphasis added):
[A]t the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind ...
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Can anything remove fingerprints from your fingers?
Here's where it gets interesting; I don't mean erase them from an object, I mean from your fingers directly. Some people claim there is a way to do it, some people claim it's impossible.
I have a ...
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Do murderers have "the eyes of a killer"?
Has there been any research in criminology, psychology, or some other related field? Something that shows a correlation between the everyday facial expression someone wears on their face, and whether ...
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Did the legalisation of abortion result in lower crime rates?
In the book Freakanomics, the author speculated that due to the legalization of abortion in the US, crime rates fell because the people that would normally go out and commit these crimes, well they ...
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Are atheists strongly underrepresented in US prison communities?
This popularly referenced survey gives statistics about the number of atheists in US prisons.
It suggests just 0.21% of the prison population is atheist. There are more scientologists! This is ...
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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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How reliable is identification via DNA matching?
For example, how did they identify Osama bin Ladin? How can they identify with such confidence a DNA match?
How can you compare DNA against a sister and determine that it is indeed Osama bin Ladin?
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Did any satanic cult ever commit organised ritual murders or sacrifices?
In Manhattan Beach, CA in 1983 members of the McMartin family were accused of a variety of abuse charges against the children in their care.
It was reported that the children:
"were victimized ...
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