Did you know that being soft on crime has made Norway's crime rate double that of the USA? Or indeed, that this is so for all of Northern Europe? Hopefully you did not, for the above is most egregiously false. Yet it is being touted as fact by a widely read conservative US blog.




The blog in question is Power Line. Its source is a blog post by Don Surber, a columnist at the Charleston Daily Mail of West Virginia. In turn, Spurber's source is a fringe propaganda website from Denmark whose statistical figures turn out to be unfounded, incoherent, and maybe not even wrong. If you are still with me, you have already seen a fine example of how political pseudo-statistics -- those ill-sourced factoids dispensed at the water cooler, dinner table, or TV studio, despite being pristinely devoid of factual content -- crawl out of their pits of obscurity and into the bright light of day.

For starters, look at Surber's blog post. It was prompted by an English language article at the Norwegian Aftenposten.com, concerning the failure of many convicts to report to prison. Surber balks at the absurdity of such not having been a crime, but considering this, finds it to be "small wonder" that "Norway’s reported crime rate is double that of the United States." His lack of surprise at the latter claim is itself astounding. After all, how plausible is it really that a country the size of California with a population the size of Alabama should double the crime rate of metropolis-studded USA? And the more one knows about Norway, the more implausible it becomes: Studies rate the country in question as the most prosperous, stable, peaceful, and generally liveable in the world, as compared to the US at respectively #3; #19; #96; and #10.

We must therefore turn to Surber's source. Though the title of his link misleadingly suggests that this is Interpol, its destination is a page on an odd Danish website called Lilliput Information and devoted to warning about the alluring dangers of socialism, immigration, and freemasonry. On another page at the site, headed 'History and Ideas' (no byline), the last paragraph begins: "I then had to give a supplement on freemasonry and Illuminati, and point at the Experimental-Psycology which have had an enormous influence which the reader perhaps can judge by realizing reality (not TV), and other documented sources."

For sure, all that matters is the credibility of the original source of the statistics. But this, says Lilliput Information, is simply Interpol.com. No actual publication is specified; nor are we told whether the figures measure reported crime, investigated crime, convictions, or something else. All we get to know is that the newest table pertains to 2001 and the other to six years before. Below is an English version of the former, courtesy of the blog Danmark:



Crime per 100,000 inhabitants in 2001 by country and category, according to Lilliput Information. English version of table courtesy of Danmark blog.

Now here is an obvious problem with this table. Unlike with all the European countries for which an overall crime rate is indicated, the 2001 table is mum about both US fraud and drug crime ("narco-criminality"). This precludes any sensible comparison of "all offenses" between the US and other countries, unless one thinks that the incidence of fraud and drug crime is negligible in the land of Enron and methamphetamine.

Yet Don Surber at the Charleston Daily Mail does not shy away from such comparison, nor from ascribing the higher European totals to noodle-spined appeasement of the criminal element. This triumphalist pontification is curious considering that, according to the subtotals presented, the US is far more rife with serious crime than the ostensible basket case of Norway. As per the table, the US in 2001 had 5.61 murders per 100,000 citizens; Norway had 2.66. The US had 31.77 cases of rape per 100,000; Norway fewer than half at 15.12 per ditto. US counts of "serious assault" were a disturbing 318.55 per 100,000, compared to Norway's 77.43. Frankly, all else being equal, and assuming that you aren't Batman, where would you rather be?

But the worst is yet to come. If purporting to be summed over the subtotals, the overall totals per 100,000 are wildly off for every unit save the US! Thus, adding the figures in Norway's column yields 5.806,24, not 10.086,72. How the Lilliputians arrived at the latter figure is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But it is equally strange that Surber can pass it over in silence when it is all that supports the counterintuitive claim that Norway -- whose biggest city, Oslo, holds half a million souls -- is twice as crime-stricken as America.

The discrepancies with respect to the other Northern European nations are no better. For instance, overall Finnish mischief is given as at 14.525,74 per 100,000, even though adding up the preceding subtotals yields 3.869,99. This does not prevent Surber from confidently saying that "in fact, the U.S. crime rate is about half that of each of the Northern European countries, including England."

Might the Lilliputian bottom lines include crime that, for some reason, is left out of the table? An explanatory remark volunteers that: "There are other offenses of a sexual nature, but the categories apparently do not harmonize from country to country" (my translation). However, in order for the gaps to be artifacts of lame presentation, the crimes that dare not speak their names must be highly prevalent in Northern Europe yet unregistered in the USA, whose overall total (4.160,51) coheres with its subtotals. Either way, it is plain that these so-called data enables no comparison of overall crime prevalence between countries.

Furthermore, this has repeatedly but unsuccessfully been suggested to Surber. A notable update at the other Danish blog to which he linked for a translation of the Lilliput page, objects that said page fails to "show anything what so ever to support" his post. Comments from his readers have made the same point; his only reply is that the link to the front page of Interpol.com works (!) and that "stats show twice as many overall crimes in Norway" (sure, if you say so). As a collegial courtesy, I e-mailed to explain in detail how the Lilliput data are unsourced and flawed, mentioning that I was working on this article. In reply, he ignored my objections but cited three new links to support his claims. That support is sadly illusory, however.

The first link is to a world map with a table listing the top ten countries for reported crime as being Iceland; Sweden; New Zealand; Grenada; Norway; England and Wales; Denmark; Finland; Scotland; and Canada. The source provided is something called Compare Infobase Ltd., whose staff wisely disown "any responsibility for the correctness or authenticity" of the data. There follow travel ads for each country, starting with the alleged crime inferno of Iceland (pop: 310,000): "Large landscapes in white, covered completely with ice is what makes Iceland stand apart from many European nations. Travel to Iceland is a retreat into oneself and the starkness of nature. Travel to Iceland is easy as the country is one of the safest in the world."

The second link leads to a post at africanpress.wordpress.com, a mere copy of an Aftenposten article with no bearing whatsoever on Norwegian versus US crime rates, but which must have convinced some African that Norway is a half-anarchic hellhole.

The last link is to a private page hosted by one Tom Huppi. Startlingly, this is dedicated to refuting exactly what Surber would have his readership believe. It says: "Hiring more police officers and throwing more people into prison does not reduce crime -- in fact, those states which pursue this strategy tend to have the highest crime rates. And this is true internationally as well; the nations with the toughest approach to crime have the most of it.... The U.S. is the most violent society in the industrialized world, and probably the entire world as well." Notwithstanding this, says the article marshalled as evidence by Surber, the US is cutting edge in imprisoning its people, with 4.2 per 1,000 behind bars -- well ahead of the UK (1.0), and Germany/France (0.8).

While the document offers no comparative figures for total crimes, the data it does contain are most unkind to Surber's views. The US leads in murder at 8.40 per 100,000 (compare e.g. Norway 1.99; Finland 0.77). Among young males, the chasm widens to a staggering 24.4 (US) versus 2.3 (Norway, Finland). Armed robbery: US 221, Norway 22. Rape: US 37.20, Norway 7.87. Breaking in and entering: US 1,309, Norway 93. The only category where the US trails Norway is auto theft (US 583, Norway 665, with the UK in between and most of Western Europe at the rear).

However, this data set is sourced to a 1991 encyclopedia entry and comes with no information about the original source for the figures or indeed methodology for arriving at them. And let's face it: It is anything but trivial to compare international crime rates even with up-to-date, reliable data at hand. Not only is one country's heinous homicide another country's staunch self-defense; different jurisdictions vary in the rates at which inherently similar cases are reported, investigated, and resolved. Still, surely we can obtain a reasonable idea of total crime rates in the US versus Northern Europe in general and Norway in particular?

Well, maybe. The most promising material I can find is from the Seventh United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, covering 1998--2000. Whatever their merit, these figures, as reported at the statistics website Nationmaster, put Norway's total crime rate well below the USA's (71.8639 versus 80.0645 crimes per 1,000 people). Meanwhile, the US incarcerates 715 per 100,000 citizens, versus Norway's 64 (source: World Prison Brief 2003, published by the International Centre for Prison Studies, via Nationmaster). These statistics, contradicting the claim that Norway -- and indeed Western and Northern Europe -- double the USA's crime rate, were also brought to Surber's attention.

His mistakes are not confined to statistics. One further error, inherited from Aftenposten, is his failure to mention that noone sentenced to more than 74 days of prison could default with impunity in Norway even before the law was changed. For upon eventual capture, he stood to lose his right to parole 2/3 of the way into his sentence; a rule which now applies by law to all convicts. Another error is claiming that "Norway has one of the highest handgun ownership rates in the world" because faith in the police is low. No. Private firearms overwhelmingly are for hunting, and civilians must be active in a pistol club to purchase handguns, let alone carry or fire them in anger.

In the end, Don Surber comes across as an unprofessional, biased, and slightly unethical journalist, indifferent to the accuracy of his writing. Alas, his kind is rampant far beyond the Charleston Daily Mail or even Power Line. Yet this story nicely illustrates the evolution of obscure propaganda material into the questionable factoids traded at lunch tables and water coolers. Here, with just a little help from the imagination, is its evolutionary history so far:

1. A shoddy Danish website with an ideological agenda presents some statistical figures without either sourcing or coherence.

2. A hack at an American local newspaper finds an English translation of this page. He ignores its glaring flaws, perhaps in part because he shares the bias of the original website, and bookmarks it.

3. At some point said hack makes a connection to the English-language version of a foreign news item he stumbles upon. It occurs to him that tying the latter to the aforementioned stats equals a suitably patriotic and conservative post at his newspaper's blog. Voila: "Norwegian Woodenheads."

4. Meanwhile, a bit up the readership ladder, another blogger-columnist finds and links to his post.

5. This leads a right-wing blogger even farther up the food chain to notice the post and dash off a bit of high-strung rhetoric about how this yet again proves Europe's "ill-preparedness for the perils of modern life" upon having "succumbed to a liberal ideology that renders it more or less defenseless against civilization's enemies." (Our hack proudly heralds the trackback in an update.) By now, probably hundreds of thousands have already consumed the "information," most of them uncritically. And now, the sky's the limit: If other big bloggers, news sites, or talk radio stations pick it up, it could reach an audience of millions.

6."What's this thing I just read? About, eh, over in... eh, in Norway? Hey, you won't believe this! In Norway, they don't even make sure criminals do the time! If you're convicted of stuff and you don't wanna go, they're like, fine, see you! Nothing happens! And of course, crime there, just skyrockets? They have like twice as much crime as we do. I think in all Europe, they have about that now. Yeah, Europe's pretty much done for. All that socialism.... and those crazy Muslims. You know, Hillary wins, could happen here too. No really, it could!"

Coming soon to a water cooler; though hopefully not near you.

UPDATE:

Surber returned to the subject in a column published on Aug. 23. Not content to confuse his readers about crime in Norway, he offered them some bonus mythology about "how teenagers in the northern villages are trained to shoot polar bears":

"That Norway has a polar bear problem is proof that global warming is a myth. We are told global warming is killing off the polar bears.

Well, 40 years ago, there were 5,000 polar bears worldwide. Now Norway alone has 3,000 polar bears.

In remote regions of Norway, teenagers cannot leave the village without carrying a rifle."

The source is supposed to be Aftenposten, but no article is cited (sound familiar?). Moreover, there is unlikely to exist a valid source for the above "information."

You see, there are no polar bears on the Norwegian mainland. The only part of the country with such is the archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean, halfway to the North Pole. There the only Norwegian village is populated mostly by researchers, teenagers being scarce on the ground. As to the status of polar bears, even Surber's beloved Bush administration wants to list them as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act inasmuch as rising temperatures are shrinking the sea ice they need for hunting.

Apologies to all the hacks out there for calling Surber one of you. His condition must be considerably worse than that.