Talk:Crime in Greater Manchester

This article seems to be about policing Greater Manchester
According to Sir Robert Peel, one function of the Police is to prevent crime, not be responsible for it, as implied by the lead paragraph! Somehow, I don't think that is correct, in any case. The rest of the article goes down the slippery slope of citing raw statistics about crimes recorded by the Police, without even adjusting the numbers for population density or weighting the crime by seriousness, let alone trying to adjust for the under-reporting of crime by victims, or the seriousness of the crimes that are reported. The incidence of crime in the community is a function of population density and a propensity for that community to commit and report crime. Comparisons with other areas and regions are not meaningful unless one controls for various factors, such as population density and reporting propensity, so that one can appreciate the dark figure of crime that is not reported to or detected by the police. Citing the raw statistics on their own, doesn't answer the question of how much crime occurs in Greater Manchester if most of it is not reported. Police only see or detect a small amount of crime, so their view of the criminal underworld is not neutral, either. To improve this article, one needs ti also look at what the victims and criminals are saying and doing, but are not talking about it to the police. Some research about victims of crime would be informative to identify the sorts of crime issues that are prevalent in the community but not reported to police might be enlightening. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 03:17, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

History section, and statistics throughout
At present this is a list of crime statistics for different parts of the country in 2018, presented as absolute numbers. Some comments:


 * Apart from the tenuous connection that 2018 is in the past, this isn't about the history of anything.
 * Most of these places aren't Greater Manchester.
 * Neither can they be compared with Greater Manchester, unless the figures are at least given per head of population.
 * Comparing two numbers and impartially saying one is bigger than the other wouldn't be original research, just statement of an arithmetical fact, but interpreting the comparison would be.
 * Presentation of statistics throughout the article seems to me quite often to veer away from an encyclopaedic style in the direction of "newspaper style".

By encycloaedic style I mean objectively stating the statistics and their significance. By newspaper style I mean either focusing on making a list of numbers that aren't meaningfully interpreted sound interesting by varying the vocabulary, treating everything as a league table, or using language and juxtapositions that subjectively imply unsupported interpretations. Musiconeologist (talk) 00:12, 29 March 2024 (UTC)