In the October 7^th edition of that oh so British magazine, the Spectator, Rod Liddle takes aim once again at his favorite hate objects – America and Americans. Liddle attacks Americans because they don’t react the way he wants them to when crazies commit crimes like the murder of Amish school children in Lancaster.

According to Liddle, we didn’t react “properly” by passing (“possibly useless”, he says) legislation, keeping the event in our “public consciousness”, writing enough newspaper stories, and talking. It seems the British idea of what is “proper” is no longer the stiff-upper-lip of their recent past – and I guess the Amish children’s parents themselves, with their simple, assured stoicism and belief in God, were among our worst offenders.

Liddle then goes into a rant against the death penalty, writing that “the sentence has not acted as a deterrent.” The total number of murders in the United States doubled during the period that the death penalty was abolished. Since its restoration, the number of murders has dropped from 20,510 to 16,148. The drop in the murder rate is even more impressive – from 9.8 to 5.5 murders per 100,000 people.

Comparing crime rates between nations is notoriously difficult. In the United States, we use the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report, which actually counts each crime committed and reported to individual police agencies. In Britain, the Home Office uses a polling method called the British Crime Survey.

According to Home Office estimates there were 2.4 million “violent incidents” in Britain last year as opposed to America’s 1.4 million “violent crimes” reported to the FBI.

As a for instance, let’s look at robbery in Britain, which has gone from 15,800 incidents in 1980 to 88,710 for 2004 – while in the United States it dropped from 565, 840 in 1980 to 401,470 in 2004. Remember that Britain had 60 million people in 2004, against the United States’ 295 million.

If you want to do something about crime, here’s a figure for you to think about. 15 murders a day. 15 murders are committed each day in the United States by convicted criminals under government supervision – on probation or some other scheme that gets them out of jail and back into the community. This figure is from a National Center for Policy study.

Another study, followed in the Boston Globe and conducted by the U.S. Justice Department, found that during a 17-month period criminals released “under supervision” murdered 13,200 people in the United States and committed more than 200,000 other violent crimes. Here’s the nexus and the starting place for reform.

Liddle ends his column with an outright falsehood when he claims that “murder levels are increasing in the US… it is expected that they will have doubled between 1990 and 2010.” The murder rate has fallen in the United States from 9.4 in 1990 to 5.6 in 2005, and there is nothing to suggest that it will be at approaching a rate of 20 per 100,000 in five years’ time. Wishful thinking on Liddle’s part perhaps. He does hate us so.