Why is crime so high in England?

[VictorCharlie]

You are wanker with no empathy for those killed with those guns of horrid intent. Semantics are stupid when dealing with fatheaded clouts like you. And you are talking about crime?

America is a joke country. There is no comparison. South Africa maybe, but England....No.

No comparison? I'd say being twice as likely to be assaulted or raped hardly something to hang your hat on.

According to who ? The statistics do not support such an easy supposition. The willingness to report crime, the prosecuting authorities definition of crime, The populations definition of crime, are all extremely different in both countries. In some cases almost diametrically opposed. If I am 668 times more likely to be murdered in the US with a firearm than the UK then the comparison is pretty clear and obvious but what an American citizen would class as an assault and would a British citizen would think constitutes assault, are much more fuzzy. So many assaults are not recorded. On top of that you have to factor what the law in each country classes as an assault. You then have to factor in the fact that all though many people report crimes not all cases are prosecutable and the factors that decide this are again very different in each country. Then you have to factor in the simple truth that America imprisons far more criminals percentage wise than the UK. Crime is not so high in England as the OP has suggested nor has it risen dramatically.

I'm basing that statement on the link I posted previously. 2.8% of UK citizens are victims of assault versus 1.2% of US citizens; 0.9% of UK citizens are victims of rape compared to 0.4% of US citizens per the United Nations Inter-regional Crime and Justice Research Institute. I'm not claiming those stats to be infallible nor that there are not other perspectives on them but even if they are off by a percentage point then really the likelihood of being assaulted or raped is about the same and hence comparable.