A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #34-25 - When numbers speak volumes. Official crime data (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The Ministry of the Interior, which publishes official statistics 
regarding the number and type of crimes reported in the previous year, 
has released these data exclusively to a newspaper. As always in these 
cases, reading the numbers immediately becomes political, and the more 
detailed the tables, the more open it is to bias interpretations based 
on one's own ideas about the phenomenon of "crime." A term that 
encompasses behaviors ranging from a triple homicide to the defacement 
of a public building-different incidents lumped together to contribute 
to the overall total. While we wait for the official data to be made 
available, let's look at some of the data released in the previews.

A total of 2,380,653 crimes were reported by law enforcement to the 
Judicial Authority in 2024. Over the course of (almost) twenty years, 
the number rose from 2,771,490 in 2006, then increased to 2,892,155 
(2013), and then began to decline to 1,900,624 (2019).

Looking at its overall trend, it can be said that there has been a 
downward trend, even taking into account the anomaly of the two years of 
COVID. It must always be kept in mind that this number represents the 
total number of reports, not convictions, which, for obvious reasons, is 
lower. Therefore, even if there were 1.7% more reports in 2024 than in 
2023, this is not particularly significant.

Even without considering these numbers, it is all too easy to see that 
politicians, and all political parties, consider "crime" a central, if 
not the primary, problem. This is due, in some cases, to the historical 
propensity of certain political parties to propagate and pursue a "law 
and order" stance, which is an essential part of their ideological and 
identity heritage. In other cases, there are parties convinced that 
addressing petty crime rather than the problem of increasingly expensive 
rents pays off more in electoral terms.

Disaggregated statistics support both of these positions. That is, the 
numbers referring to the various types of reported crimes.

But, even in this case, the data can be interpreted through different 
lenses. For example: in 2024, reports of theft (all types) increased by 
3% compared to 2023 and accounted for 44% of total reports. However, 
looking at the same data through different lenses reveals that thefts 
(all types) decreased by 33% in 2024 compared to 2014. The same applies 
to other crimes; numbers that can be worrying if viewed too closely, and 
significantly less so if viewed from a distance.

Another clear example is the extensive coverage given by the media to 
certain news stories regarding intentional homicides, even revisiting 
events that occurred very recently. For years, data has confirmed that 
Italy is one of the countries with the lowest number of intentional 
homicides in Europe (second to last place), a figure that has been 
decreasing year after year: between 2015 and 2024, homicides rose from 
475 to 319. Even analyzing the data by distinguishing between male and 
female victims, the result remains unchanged: in the former case, the 
number rose from 330 to 206, and in the latter from 145 to 113.

Of course, there are also numbers that show clear upward trends. This is 
the case with the increase in reports against young people, including 
minors, and against foreigners, both for street or drug-related crimes. 
And there is much to discuss and write about this.

Collecting and processing this type of data is certainly useful for 
those who wish to study crime from a sociological perspective. It could 
also be useful, in a society that seeks to do away with prison, to 
understand the motivations of those who commit crimes and thus implement 
prevention policies. Instead, we live in a social system in which this 
data is used almost exclusively for propaganda, to advocate for 
increased police numbers, the construction of new prisons, and calls for 
harsher sentences. But worse can be done: the current government has 
already introduced, with the so-called "Security Decree" (Legislative 
Decree 20/2025), 14 new crimes, which will inevitably lead to an 
increase in reports in the coming years, ultimately fueling social alarm 
campaigns. Finally, there's a small risk of a "short circuit": on the 
one hand, the governing parties have always tended to talk nonsense 
about rising crime rates, while on the other, given that they've been in 
power for three years, they could attribute the overall numbers, which 
aren't all that tragic, to their own security policies. We're convinced 
they'll do both. We have no doubts.

Pepsy

https://umanitanova.org/quando-i-numeri-sono-unopinione-dati-ufficiali-sulla-criminalita/
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