They found that 1% of people were accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions

Over the past two or three months there have been a number of research papers released, all dealing in some respect with the issue of the power law nature of crime.  I have posted on a couple of them.  Somehow, I missed this good round-up piece by Ed West back in July which pulls together a lot of the current evidence that in many categories of crime, most of the crimes are committed by a very small percentage of the criminals.  If you want to reduce crime, you most easily target those who are committing most of it.

Sounds easy and straight-forward but being humans, it is of course not easy and simple.  Or at least, we choose not to make it easy and simple.

From The power law of crime by Ed West.  The subheading is The majority of offences are committed by a small number of people.  

In July 2021, three young friends from the Tallaght area of Dublin were driving along the city’s N7 road when their car went headlong into a lorry. Graham Taylor, Karl Freeman and Dean Maguire, aged between 26 and 31, were all killed in the horror smash, which was followed by a fire of such intensity that the men had to be identified using DNA from relatives.

What was so unusual about the tragedy was that after the accident the number of burglaries across Leinster plummeted, with huge declines in some counties; in Laois and Offaly non-aggravated burglaries fell by more than half between June and August.

Freeman had ‘previous convictions for offences including dangerous driving, endangerment, burglary, assault and unlawful taking of a car’, one judge calling him ‘a menace to society’. Maguire had 30 previous criminal convictions, while the Gardaí considered Taylor to be the ‘most significant criminal’ of the three. He had 120 previous convictions, including a number of driving offences for speeding and endangerment.

Before their untimely and tragic deaths, these three men had between them made a huge contribution to crime in that part of Ireland, and with considerable effect on trust and wellbeing for literally tens of thousands of residents.

This story comes via an Inquisitive Bird substack covering the subject of power laws in crime. Power laws, whereby a small number of people tend to be responsible for a huge proportion of any phenomenon, can be found in all human activity, whether it be income, book sales by authors, or number of sexual partners; the most well-known, the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule, originally comes from Italian land ownership.

Lawbreaking, too, observes a power law, so that a huge proportion of crime is committed by a very small number of offenders who have an outsized impact on society.

Inquisitive Bird wrote that power laws are ‘observed for arrests, convictions and even self-reported delinquent behavior’. He cited British data which shows that ‘70% of custodial sentences are imposed on those with at least seven previous convictions or cautions, and 50% are imposed on those with at least 15 previous convictions or cautions (Cuthbertson, 2017).

‘But perhaps the most illustrative study is by Falk et al. (2014), who used Swedish nationwide data of all 2.4 million individuals born in 1958–1980 and looked at the distribution of violent crime convictions. In short, they found that 1% of people were accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions, and 0.12% of people accounted for 20% of violent crime convictions.’

As with most West pieces, it is massively well sourced and worth reading at the original site for all the links to underlying articles, research and data.  West is a gem.