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Incidence of illegal behavior is generally determined through polling. Basically, you ask people anonymously and they're more honest. For example "Have you smok
by jkyle 11y ago
Incidence of illegal behavior is generally determined through polling. Basically, you ask people anonymously and they're more honest. For example "Have you smoked marijuana in the last year?"
There are various biases that impact the validity and reliability and there are methods for accounting for those biases. Rates of criminal behavior in the population is a very active and mature area of research.
Another method is extrapolation from statistical trends in crime. For example, most violent crime occurs within race. So you can take victims of violent crime that were not solved and extrapolate fairly good estimates of the perpetrator's traits from the victim. Of course, you still have to account repeat offenders and other confounding factors.
Short answer is, there's not just one way.
- tomjen3 11y agoThat is very interesting, but you would need to know the level of trust the groups have compared to how strong their norms for not breaking the law would be in order to normalize the results (e.g are people of one minority group less likely to trust strangers compared to the majority?) which are factors that you can't know.
- sukilot 11y agoYes, but by the same token, the fairness of he judicial system is also subject to factors you can't know. It is unreasonable to assume hat the crim justice system Is an island of unbiased rationality, considering the steady stream of corruption revelations.