Less Crime = Lying Cops?

At his Bayou Renaissance Man blog, Peter writes:

There's a very interesting article over at PoliceOne discussing how, in many jurisdictions, crimes are under-reported, wrongly recorded, and generally 'fudged' for political reasons...

I highly recommend clicking over to PoliceOne and reading the entire report. It provides very important insight into a problem that directly and immediately affects your own security. If you don't know the true dimensions and nature of the crime problem in your area, how will you know whether or not to take additional precautions, or be prepared to deal with specific types of crime?

As I said in his comments, one of the more seeming open-and-shut arguments advanced by many gun bloggers recently is the idea that "more guns = less crime". If the reporting from PoliceOne.com is as widespread as it appears, just how trustworthy are the statistics this line of reasoning relies on? Do the actual numbers really support the conclusion we gun owners think we're making?

This is more than a quibble over semantics. If the "... less crime" half of the argument isn't actually true (indeed, if the apparent crime reduction synonymous with the rise in gun ownership is actually false and no correlation exists), what evidence is there to disprove the notion that this official statistical fraud is instead hiding a rise in gun-involved crime?

Food for thought, indeed.

 It is usually a better strategy to control the context of a dispute, to get ahead of your oppositions arguments as it were, so my initial thought is to make a point of the unreliable nature of the official statistical record and to dismiss efforts to debate any point that relies upon them. Stick to the historical record of political/constitutional arguments about US citizen gun ownership and concentrate on the positive individual growth and development achievable through responsible gun usage. Defensive gun usage shouldn't be minimized, but it might be more effective to relegate such arguments to a supportive role rather than boldly flaunt assertions that appear more than a little questionable at the moment.

The whole "tide of history" thing is still running strong; concentrating on legal gun ownership, while making the point often about how unreliable "official" records seemingly are,  just makes better sense to me.

http://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2012/06/crime-statistics-less-than-trustworthy.html