This post contains extracts from Chapter 23 Private Defence of Textbook of Criminal Law by Glanville L Williams (2nd Ed 1983). (more…)
January 2000
Monthly Archive
Sat 1 Jan 2000
Sat 1 Jan 2000
Otis Dudley Duncan, University of California, Santa Barbara
(from The Criminologist Vol 25, No 1 Jan/Feb 2000 pp 1-7)We who work hard to produce statistics for public consumption would do well to acquire a little historical perspective. Theodore Porter’s wide-ranging Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (1995) takes note of 19th-century developments illustrating the “creative power of statistics…. Every category has the potential to become a new thing.” Crime did not originate in that century, but “it may be doubted whether there were crime rates” before then (p. 37). To the examples given by Porter we might add the relatively new “thing” in the domain of what used to be called “moral statistics”—the production of counts and rates of DGU (defensive gun uses, or users, according to context). Porter concludes that democratic politics gives rise to distrust of personal judgments and statistical methods are brought into play to nurture confidence where personal knowledge is an insufficient basis for political decisions. A somewhat paradoxical outcome is that “There is a strong incentive to prefer precise and standardizable measures to highly accurate ones” (p. 29). But it is arguable that the study of DGU is not yet at a stage where such a choice is necessary, or even possible. I shall point out some problems of communication that stand in the way of achieving either desidratum soon.