8 ms·

Why is violent crime so rare in Iceland?

45 points by bsg75 13y ago

ellyagg 13y ago
Last year, New Hampshire's murder rate was 1.3. Since 1996, like Iceland, its murder rate has never gone above 1.8. New Hampshire is four times as big as Iceland. Why is violent crime so rare in New Hampshire? [http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-...] Not that New Hampshire is unique. There are other states larger than Iceland that have similarly low murder rates.
- sp332 13y ago
  A couple of the major reasons the article puts forward also apply to New Hampshire. First, we have lots of guns here. In fact our state's constitution requires the state to give a concealed carry permit to anyone who passes a background check and sends in the form with $10. Since gun ownership has a controversial effect on crime, perhaps a more compelling reason is that we only have 2 major cities in NH. And neither of them are really big enough to have an "inner city". We have one of the lowest GINI coefficients (a measure of income inequality) in the nation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_co...
  - danbruc 13y ago
    In comparison with other countries this is still a relatively high value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
    - sp332 13y ago
      Yeah, maybe I shouldn't have thrown in income equality. I meant to emphasize that most of the people live in similarly sparse environments. It's not like we have remote farmers and people who live their whole lives in a city who never meet the likes of each other.
- 13b9f227ecf0 13y ago
  It's proximity to Canadian latitudes. The nearer you get to Canada in the USA, consistently you get better educational outcomes and crime rates. The obvious solution to our social problems in America is to move all the low achievers to be near the Canadian border.
  - bmm6o 13y ago
    Detroit is about as close as you can get (geographically) to Canada.
    - kyllo 13y ago
      I hear Buffalo, NY has a pretty high violent crime rate as well.
    - gwern 13y ago
      Congratulations, you won today's "reply to a statistical generalization with a single outlying datapoint/anecdote" no-prize! Write in for your fabulous reward.
      - bmm6o 13y ago
        And 100 HN points to you for spotting the fallacy! Well done, but you don't really believe the suggestion that after controlling for all else, closeness to Canada ends up being correlated with educational outcomes and crime rates, do you? It's obviously a joke.
        gwern 13y ago
        I think that if you really control for all else like ethnicity, it would go away, but to condition on that much would miss the point.
    - jfb 13y ago
      Perhaps better to say, "Windsor is as close as you can get (geographically) to Detroit".
- dm2 13y ago
  Could the weather have anything to do with it? Could also be partly the lack of tourists or type of tourists, compared to warmer areas.
  - Swisscoder 13y ago
    I agree the Cold weather has to do a lot with the behaviour of the people. Also Iceland is one of the Ten Least Crowded Places in the World.
    - subsystem 13y ago
      Yes, but... "With a population of 200,852, Greater Reykjavík comprises over 60% of the population of Iceland in an area that is only just over 1% of the total size of the country." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Reykjav%C3%ADk_Area http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Reykjav%C3%ADk_Area
  - kyllo 13y ago
    Boston is less than 2 hours' drive from New Hampshire and has plenty of violence. I think New Hampshire's cities are small and just don't really have ghettos the way most large American cities do. The violence happens in bigger cities that are pretty nearby, but happen to be outside NH's borders. Southern NH is kind of like an extended suburb of Boston.
    - zequel 13y ago
      Mass has very little gun violence, in fact, ~ 3.1 per 100k. "Plenty of violence" isn't a helpful statement.
      - kyllo 13y ago
        OK, so now we get to play "compared to what?" OP is about murder rate, not gun violence rate. (2011): National rate: 4.7 Northeast rate: 3.9 MA rate: 2.8 NH rate: 1.3 MA's rate is lower than the national average and lower than the Northeast regional average, but more than double than NH's average. My argument is that NH has a particularly low murder rate because it doesn't really have any big cities--the populated areas are mostly suburban. High murder rates correlate with high population density (and poverty). If the nearby metropolis of Boston were inside NH's borders, then I think NH would have the higher murder rate. Do you disagree with that assessment?
- mistermann 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hampshire#Race_and_ancestry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hampshire#Race_and_ancestry
schoper 13y ago
Biology. Icelanders in the U.S. don't murder people very often either. Nordics make good neighbors. Then again, if you've read the Icelandic Sagas, you'll find that they used to be bloodthirsty enough in pre-modernity. Culture matters too. Just not as much (in the range of societies that exist in the first world today).
- tinco 13y ago
  I do not believe that there exists any evidence that there is a biologic difference between Icelandic or Nordic people in general and other groups of humans that correlates strong enough to explain the crime rate statistics of Iceland. Also, the fact that you mention 'nordics make good neighbors' in the same comment as acknowledging that nordics raped and pillaged my people for hundreds of years.. (edit: sorry I'm a bit tired I had some insulting line here I hope no one read) culture matters too..
visarga 13y ago
My insight: it's the degree of integration of society. No disenfranchised sections. Besides Iceland, two other countries stand up: Japan an Switzerland. In the former, not even police or yakuza bear fire arms, things are solved mainly on reputation. In the latter, every citizen has to know how to operate a firearm, on account of not having an army. So it's not the availability or lack of thereof of guns. It's the "social tension" (what exists between people) that binds people together. A society of strangers and cvasi-anonymous people leads to higher violence. When people are separated, they don't prevent each other from falling into a life of crime. A society where whole swaths of people are in poverty believing they have no chance to succeed leads to the worst cases of violence. Even the slight idea that there is a path from poverty to success, even if it is an illusion, keeps the violence down. But when people are convinced that the system is stacked against them no matter what they do, then they dissociate from the large society, form a new attitude - that they don't need to play by the rules, they don't need to have compassion, because the rich have all the power and resources anyway and they actively block the poor from raising up. That's basically whet the shit hits the fan. Remember the French arab revolt from a few years back, in Paris? Same thing. Arabs emigrated in France after WWII for work. They remained in France and had children. Now french people don't need them any more, but the kids are born in France, they have no idea of the countries their parents came from. They don't want to leave, but they are not welcome in France either. They are without a place of their own. Thus, feeling of racial discrimination and violent protest.
- snogglethorpe 13y ago
  Regular Japanese police do carry firearms.
  - visarga 13y ago
    Even the guys who stay at the local booth in the corner of the street?
    - snogglethorpe 13y ago
      Yes.
wtbob 13y ago
My suspicion is that it's due to a number of factors. Economic equality (real or perceived) is probably one thing; cultural homogeneity is probably another; if I infer correctly from the article that Icelanders see dealing with crime as a matter for all citizens, not just agents of the state, then that probably is as well.
Muzza 13y ago
This is not the answer HN is looking for, but Iceland is safe because it's full of Icelanders. England was safe when it was full of Englishmen. Not anymore. Sweden was safe when it was full of Swedes. Not anymore. Etc.
- saraid216 13y ago
  This is actually my intuition, too: most of the Scandinavian countries' successes are better attributed to racial homogeneity than to actually being institutionally sounder. I can't prove that, though; there have been discussions before about immigration similarities, but nothing that I found convincing enough to remember.
  - onemorepassword 13y ago
    Seriously, I fucking hate this uninformed American crap, like Europe is some mythical white people planet? "Racial homogeneity" my ass, Scandinavia or the rest of Europa isn't living in the middle ages anymore. It's insulting and borderline racist nonsense.
    - mercurial 13y ago
      Immigration is pretty low in Scandinavia. Coming from Paris, it's quite bizarre to visit Copenhagen or Árhus and wonder what happened to the non-white people.
      - rdl 13y ago
        There are actually a lot of refugees/immigrants in the Norway/Sweden/Denmark/Netherlands from Islamic countries, now. And, those communities tend to commit a disproportionate number of crimes, although this could be for a variety of reasons -- poverty before moving, poverty after moving, culture, age, ... (Biology seems like the least likely, especially given how bloodthirsty the vikings were only 50 generations ago)
    - saraid216 13y ago
anuraj 13y ago
The homicide rate is not too low. For example, my state Kerala which has the highest recorded crime rate (read mostly petty) in India, has a homicide rate of 1.09 - Much less than Iceland even with 100x population.
- jsnk 13y ago
  Iceland's homicide rate is one of the world's lowest, and it has lower homicide rate than India by 35 times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
  - anuraj 13y ago
    I told you about the Homicide rate of Kerala, an Indian state which has 100x population of Iceland. 365 (470 including culpable homicides not amounting to murder) homicides in 2011 with 33.4 million population.So Iceland is nothing exceptional here. http://www.keralapolice.org/newsite/crimein_kerala.html http://www.keralapolice.org/newsite/crimein_kerala.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala
    - mercurial 13y ago
      You seem to be claiming Kerala as the norm rather than an outlier. You're certainly welcome to compare crime rates between the two and/or suggest explanations/compare living conditions, but saying that very low crime rate is the norm is simply false [1] 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_rate
      - anuraj 13y ago
        No - I said Kerala has a high crime rate - but a relatively low homicide rate. Kerala is definitely an outlier in many respects in India. What I am trying to hint is it is not exceptional to have low homicide rates - there are several parts of the world where it is the norm. It may be better to consider high homicide rates in some developed, high HDI regions as an anomaly and analyze the reasons.
coldarchon 13y ago
Once I have read a very esoteric but interesting text about the correlation between the day/night ratio and the good/evil ratio of religions where they originated. Maybe this has an effect on understanding of criminality or morality too?
tzs 13y ago
I recall several news stories around a month ago about the Icelandic government creating a smartphone app that lets Icelanders check to see if the person they are dating is a relative. Apparently the small population and low immigration rate means that a given random pair of Icelanders are likely to be more closely related than a given random pair of people from most other countries. I wonder if the increased risk that your victim might be a relative might have some deterrent effect?
mwctahoe 13y ago
I feel the fact that they named the armed cops the Viking Squad is being overlooked here. Viking Squad aint nuthing ta fuck wit.

45 points by bsg75 13y ago

Last year, New Hampshire's murder rate was 1.3. Since 1996, like Iceland, its murder rate has never gone above 1.8. New Hampshire is four times as big as Iceland. Why is violent crime so rare in New Hampshire? [http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-...] Not that New Hampshire is unique. There are other states larger than Iceland that have similarly low murder rates.

sp332 13y ago
A couple of the major reasons the article puts forward also apply to New Hampshire. First, we have lots of guns here. In fact our state's constitution requires the state to give a concealed carry permit to anyone who passes a background check and sends in the form with $10. Since gun ownership has a controversial effect on crime, perhaps a more compelling reason is that we only have 2 major cities in NH. And neither of them are really big enough to have an "inner city". We have one of the lowest GINI coefficients (a measure of income inequality) in the nation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_co...
- danbruc 13y ago
  In comparison with other countries this is still a relatively high value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
  - sp332 13y ago
    Yeah, maybe I shouldn't have thrown in income equality. I meant to emphasize that most of the people live in similarly sparse environments. It's not like we have remote farmers and people who live their whole lives in a city who never meet the likes of each other.
13b9f227ecf0 13y ago
It's proximity to Canadian latitudes. The nearer you get to Canada in the USA, consistently you get better educational outcomes and crime rates. The obvious solution to our social problems in America is to move all the low achievers to be near the Canadian border.
- bmm6o 13y ago
  Detroit is about as close as you can get (geographically) to Canada.
  - kyllo 13y ago
    I hear Buffalo, NY has a pretty high violent crime rate as well.
  - gwern 13y ago
    Congratulations, you won today's "reply to a statistical generalization with a single outlying datapoint/anecdote" no-prize! Write in for your fabulous reward.
    - bmm6o 13y ago
      And 100 HN points to you for spotting the fallacy! Well done, but you don't really believe the suggestion that after controlling for all else, closeness to Canada ends up being correlated with educational outcomes and crime rates, do you? It's obviously a joke.
      - gwern 13y ago
        I think that if you really control for all else like ethnicity, it would go away, but to condition on that much would miss the point.
  - jfb 13y ago
    Perhaps better to say, "Windsor is as close as you can get (geographically) to Detroit".
dm2 13y ago
Could the weather have anything to do with it? Could also be partly the lack of tourists or type of tourists, compared to warmer areas.
- Swisscoder 13y ago
  I agree the Cold weather has to do a lot with the behaviour of the people. Also Iceland is one of the Ten Least Crowded Places in the World.
  - subsystem 13y ago
    Yes, but... "With a population of 200,852, Greater Reykjavík comprises over 60% of the population of Iceland in an area that is only just over 1% of the total size of the country." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Reykjav%C3%ADk_Area http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Reykjav%C3%ADk_Area
- kyllo 13y ago
  Boston is less than 2 hours' drive from New Hampshire and has plenty of violence. I think New Hampshire's cities are small and just don't really have ghettos the way most large American cities do. The violence happens in bigger cities that are pretty nearby, but happen to be outside NH's borders. Southern NH is kind of like an extended suburb of Boston.
  - zequel 13y ago
    Mass has very little gun violence, in fact, ~ 3.1 per 100k. "Plenty of violence" isn't a helpful statement.
    - kyllo 13y ago
      OK, so now we get to play "compared to what?" OP is about murder rate, not gun violence rate. (2011): National rate: 4.7 Northeast rate: 3.9 MA rate: 2.8 NH rate: 1.3 MA's rate is lower than the national average and lower than the Northeast regional average, but more than double than NH's average. My argument is that NH has a particularly low murder rate because it doesn't really have any big cities--the populated areas are mostly suburban. High murder rates correlate with high population density (and poverty). If the nearby metropolis of Boston were inside NH's borders, then I think NH would have the higher murder rate. Do you disagree with that assessment?
mistermann 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hampshire#Race_and_ancestry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hampshire#Race_and_ancestry

schoper 13y ago

Biology. Icelanders in the U.S. don't murder people very often either. Nordics make good neighbors. Then again, if you've read the Icelandic Sagas, you'll find that they used to be bloodthirsty enough in pre-modernity. Culture matters too. Just not as much (in the range of societies that exist in the first world today).

tinco 13y ago
I do not believe that there exists any evidence that there is a biologic difference between Icelandic or Nordic people in general and other groups of humans that correlates strong enough to explain the crime rate statistics of Iceland. Also, the fact that you mention 'nordics make good neighbors' in the same comment as acknowledging that nordics raped and pillaged my people for hundreds of years.. (edit: sorry I'm a bit tired I had some insulting line here I hope no one read) culture matters too..

visarga 13y ago

My insight: it's the degree of integration of society. No disenfranchised sections. Besides Iceland, two other countries stand up: Japan an Switzerland. In the former, not even police or yakuza bear fire arms, things are solved mainly on reputation. In the latter, every citizen has to know how to operate a firearm, on account of not having an army. So it's not the availability or lack of thereof of guns. It's the "social tension" (what exists between people) that binds people together. A society of strangers and cvasi-anonymous people leads to higher violence. When people are separated, they don't prevent each other from falling into a life of crime. A society where whole swaths of people are in poverty believing they have no chance to succeed leads to the worst cases of violence. Even the slight idea that there is a path from poverty to success, even if it is an illusion, keeps the violence down. But when people are convinced that the system is stacked against them no matter what they do, then they dissociate from the large society, form a new attitude - that they don't need to play by the rules, they don't need to have compassion, because the rich have all the power and resources anyway and they actively block the poor from raising up. That's basically whet the shit hits the fan. Remember the French arab revolt from a few years back, in Paris? Same thing. Arabs emigrated in France after WWII for work. They remained in France and had children. Now french people don't need them any more, but the kids are born in France, they have no idea of the countries their parents came from. They don't want to leave, but they are not welcome in France either. They are without a place of their own. Thus, feeling of racial discrimination and violent protest.

snogglethorpe 13y ago
Regular Japanese police do carry firearms.
- visarga 13y ago
  Even the guys who stay at the local booth in the corner of the street?
  - snogglethorpe 13y ago
    Yes.

wtbob 13y ago

My suspicion is that it's due to a number of factors. Economic equality (real or perceived) is probably one thing; cultural homogeneity is probably another; if I infer correctly from the article that Icelanders see dealing with crime as a matter for all citizens, not just agents of the state, then that probably is as well.

Muzza 13y ago

This is not the answer HN is looking for, but Iceland is safe because it's full of Icelanders. England was safe when it was full of Englishmen. Not anymore. Sweden was safe when it was full of Swedes. Not anymore. Etc.

saraid216 13y ago
This is actually my intuition, too: most of the Scandinavian countries' successes are better attributed to racial homogeneity than to actually being institutionally sounder. I can't prove that, though; there have been discussions before about immigration similarities, but nothing that I found convincing enough to remember.
- onemorepassword 13y ago
  Seriously, I fucking hate this uninformed American crap, like Europe is some mythical white people planet? "Racial homogeneity" my ass, Scandinavia or the rest of Europa isn't living in the middle ages anymore. It's insulting and borderline racist nonsense.
  - mercurial 13y ago
    Immigration is pretty low in Scandinavia. Coming from Paris, it's quite bizarre to visit Copenhagen or Árhus and wonder what happened to the non-white people.
    - rdl 13y ago
      There are actually a lot of refugees/immigrants in the Norway/Sweden/Denmark/Netherlands from Islamic countries, now. And, those communities tend to commit a disproportionate number of crimes, although this could be for a variety of reasons -- poverty before moving, poverty after moving, culture, age, ... (Biology seems like the least likely, especially given how bloodthirsty the vikings were only 50 generations ago)
  - saraid216 13y ago

anuraj 13y ago

The homicide rate is not too low. For example, my state Kerala which has the highest recorded crime rate (read mostly petty) in India, has a homicide rate of 1.09 - Much less than Iceland even with 100x population.

jsnk 13y ago
Iceland's homicide rate is one of the world's lowest, and it has lower homicide rate than India by 35 times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
- anuraj 13y ago
  I told you about the Homicide rate of Kerala, an Indian state which has 100x population of Iceland. 365 (470 including culpable homicides not amounting to murder) homicides in 2011 with 33.4 million population.So Iceland is nothing exceptional here. http://www.keralapolice.org/newsite/crimein_kerala.html http://www.keralapolice.org/newsite/crimein_kerala.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala
  - mercurial 13y ago
    You seem to be claiming Kerala as the norm rather than an outlier. You're certainly welcome to compare crime rates between the two and/or suggest explanations/compare living conditions, but saying that very low crime rate is the norm is simply false [1] 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_rate
    - anuraj 13y ago
      No - I said Kerala has a high crime rate - but a relatively low homicide rate. Kerala is definitely an outlier in many respects in India. What I am trying to hint is it is not exceptional to have low homicide rates - there are several parts of the world where it is the norm. It may be better to consider high homicide rates in some developed, high HDI regions as an anomaly and analyze the reasons.

coldarchon 13y ago

Once I have read a very esoteric but interesting text about the correlation between the day/night ratio and the good/evil ratio of religions where they originated. Maybe this has an effect on understanding of criminality or morality too?

tzs 13y ago

I recall several news stories around a month ago about the Icelandic government creating a smartphone app that lets Icelanders check to see if the person they are dating is a relative. Apparently the small population and low immigration rate means that a given random pair of Icelanders are likely to be more closely related than a given random pair of people from most other countries. I wonder if the increased risk that your victim might be a relative might have some deterrent effect?

mwctahoe 13y ago

I feel the fact that they named the armed cops the Viking Squad is being overlooked here. Viking Squad aint nuthing ta fuck wit.