Wire Britain
September 3, 2009 7 Comments
Just a few hours after finishing my post exulting the virtues of The Wire, Man on The Wire, I coincidentally stumbled across the following news item on the BBC web-site: Is Britain really like The Wire?
Apparently, the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, has compared parts of Manchester, Liverpool and London to the version of Baltimore that were are presented with in The Wire. My first reaction to hearing this was that while there are areas with gangs, high crime rates and drugs culture in Britain’s inner cities, you’re just trying to sound cool because you’ve mentioned The Wire. All large conurbations have deprived areas that are a natural hotspots for crime, but a comparison to the acclaimed HBO TV series seems glib, even if it is accurate.
The BBC article quotes some crime statistics to compare the cities, and they may be surprising:
Population:
1. Baltimore – 624,237
2. Manchester – 458,100
3. Liverpool – 435,000
Violent Crime (incidents per every 1000 of the population):
1. Manchester – 27.11
2. Liverpool – 20.75
3. Baltimore – 15.97
Robbery (incidents per every 1000 of the population):
1. Baltimore – 6.10
2. Manchester – 5.91
3. Liverpool – 2.48
Burglary (incidents per every 1000 of the population):
1. Manchester – 15.64
2. Baltimore – 11.57
3. Liverpool – 9.53
As I’m not a professional criminologist, I’m not going to try and analyse these figures too much, or attempt to explain what they say about our society. I might point out that Manchester fares worst out of the statistics, and it certainly seems to put pay to the stereotype of scousers being a criminal race. Overall, you could argue that all the figures are of the same order of magnitude, and perhaps Mr Grayling had a valid point. Yes, you could argue that, but then I’ve not yet mentioned the murder statistics.
Incidents of Murder:
1. Baltimore – 282
2. Greater Manchester – 34
3. Merseyside – 23
Please note that the UK statistics are for the greater metropolitan areas, which have much higher populations. The BBC don’t give a figure for the number of murders for every 1000 of the population, but my estimates are:
1. Baltimore – 0.452
2. Merseyside (Pop: 1,365,901 – source Wikipedia) – 0.017
3. Greater Manchester (Pop: 2,562,200 – source Wikipedia) – 0.013
It surely only takes a cursory glance at the murder statistics to see that the problems in Baltimore have a very different component to those in the UK. I won’t try and suggest reasons for it because I haven’t done enough research on the subject. Maybe others should also learn to do the proper research before they speak.
Note – Due to the way I blog, I am writing this on the afternoon of August 27th, but it may not be published for another week or so. If you read an article similar to mine in that period, please don’t think I copied.
About sherby57
Interesting stats. Thanks for sharing it.
I lived in Manchester for 2.5 years before moving South this year, fell in love with it. For all the bad publicity it receives, I wish people would focus on reporting the good about Manchester.
Interesting statistics. After reading Homicide and the Corner by David Simon (the creator of the Wire) I can only imagine that our statistics appear higher because a) the government is keen to have stats on everything no matter how irrelevant and b) that incidents of violent crime, robbery & burglary go unreported in Baltimore, whereas here they are.
There is a lot of good about Manchester and the city has been transformed over the last twenty years. The most evil thing about the place is the one of their football clubs that is appropriately linked to the devil lol.
It’s a very interesting point about what proportion of crime goes unreported. As you say, you’d think that Britain reports a far higher percentage, give our obsession with statistics. The comparison between the murder rates is staggering though, and that’s a crime that’s difficult not to report.
The original comment was really just a Tory trying to be hip and with-it by mentioning ‘The Wire’ – I’d be very surprised if he’d actually watched any of it. But is that just me being a cynical bugger?
Sadly, I think that’s you being accurate rather than cynical!
It’ll be the same bandwagon jumping that had Gordon naming Arctic Monkeys as one of his favourite bands.
Quite possibly…although Big Gordon has always struck me as a bit of a secret indy kid. Then again, maybe not.