Counting domestic violence
Stuff is reporting on the police decision not to release domestic violence statistics this year, because they are in the middle of a change to a new system.
The police point of view seems sensible here: the only urgent use for the statistics would be to look at short-term trends, and this is meaningless if the definitions are changing. The real question is whether the change in definitions is an improvement or not.
Domestic violence statistics are more complicated than many crime statistics because the legal system tends to organize statistics by which crime was committed. Domestic violence isn’t a single crime — it’s a subset of a range of crimes — so it can’t be worked out retrospectively from other crime statistics, and it doesn’t have a unique legal definition. The police say that they current change is to adopt a more similar definition to Australia.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
[…] Stuff thinks so, but actually it’s hard to say. The statistics have recently been revised (as the paper complained about in April). […]
11 years ago