This is hilarious: Don Surber writes about Norway's punishment-optional penal system (apparently, it's not illegal to fail to show up for jail time!), and links to this page (containing the 2003 Interpol crime rates) -- to point out that violent crime is far higher in northern Europe than it is in the USA.

And the authors of the pages freaked out:

But this site is also being missused by other media [1]

Information of Denmark published these comparisons in 2003... No such thing will ever be avaible again! [2]

Because, you know, we'd never want to help make the point that the USA could be, in any way, ever, superior to us. We'll never again reveal that information!

We are being used as source on large blog

.... What we intended to prove was that the crime rate in Sweden is the doubled of the rate in USA, and we also know why: The foreign immigrants have a crime rate of 3-5 times that of the Swedes, Norwegians and Danes depending on the acts of crime... Please, try seriously to find out and do dare to published the distribution of crimes in Oslo between Norwegians and foreign immigrants. [3]

Some immigrants are helpful, some are not -- the difference is culture and individual attitude. Yet different cultures, even within the same nation, have different characteristics, and some have higher crime rates than others. And troubled immigrant groups aren't always better in the second generation either -- sometimes the problems get worse.

(How nice for these Danish bloggers and authorities to have noticed such differences. It'd be nice if they'd apply the same analysis to the US crime rate, and then do a apples-and-apples comparison. But since we in the US have more minority culture members than they do, it's still not entirely clear why their crime rate is so much higher. Nice try, though.)

Probably because comparisons like these are so embarrassing, 2003 was the last time the public got useful information from Interpol -- something I've written about here. Failing systems simply don't like to report accurate data.

On a related note: as you know, there's a big push for socialized medicine here in the US. But anyone trying to make comparisons soon discovers its very hard to get honest data about what happens in government-run medical systems.

For example, in the UK:

Reporting by clinicians is selective, leading to underestimation of incidents and adverse events. A recent study in one NHS hospital found that the routine reporting system identified only 17% of the total number of incidents and only 5% of harmful incidents. In addition, it rarely gave adequate information about preventability, contributory factors, and ultimate outcomes. [4]

The National Patient Safety Agency estimates one in 10 patients admitted to [UK] NHS hospitals is harmed, to some degree, as a result of their care. But independent research group Dr Foster found some trusts reported no mistakes, which it says is an unlikely claim... Mr Taylor said: "Some hospitals report no errors and some report as many as 15%. [5]

(And notice the BBC apparently won't even print what percentage of hospitals aren't doing any error reporting at all! You can't even determine that rate.)

But hey: Wouldn't it be great to be part of a healthcare system where many institutions claim they've never made an error each year? Just cite those statistics, stick them in a documentary, and ta-da! -- you can prove you've go the greatest healthcare system on earth. And never mind all the MSRA superbug victims -- a disease which is moribund in UK NHS (nationalized) hospitals, yet somehow almost nonexistent in private hospitals.

When a monopoly fails, the last thing it wants to do is admit what's going wrong.