By The popular website Slate has an article out on US military crime in the wake of the shooting rampage at Fort Hood. The Slate author was able to determine that US military crime in Korea is actually lower than the surrounding population using data from the ROK Drop:
An Army psychiatrist who was about to deploy to Iraq went on a two-gun shooting spree at Fort Hood in Texas on Thursday afternoon. Twelve people died in the attack, and 31 were wounded. How often do soldiers commit crimes on their bases?
Not very. Careful study of crime rates at military installations have been made overseas, where local communities may feel threatened by the presence of U.S. military forces. In Okinawa, Japan, for example, American soldiers have been involved in several high-profile rapes and have been accused of more widespread violence. While it’s reasonable to expect that a population of young men trained in warfare would commit crimes at higher rates, a recent study found that the troops in Okinawa were less than half as likely to break the law as those in the general population. In Korea, too, U.S. servicemen seem to be arrested for serious crimes far less often than the locals. [Slate]
It is always good to get linked to by big sites, which the ROK Drop does every once in a while, but if you are wondering these sites usually do not bring much traffic. For example the day of the Slate article brought me 31 page views from Slate. That is nothing for web traffic. One of Bill’s golf postings brought over 550 page views that same day from a golf forum.
I think this is because sites like Slate people go to in order to read stories and not look for links to stories. Make sure to read the article and it also has a link to a US military crime study that was done by Fort Carson that I am currently reading through that is 126 pages long. So far it is interesting reading.
11:40 pm on November 8th, 2009 1
I don’t know about everyone else but I have not been reading Slate much lately since their RSS feed seems to be down.
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11:46 pm on November 8th, 2009 2
For years I would confront reporters with these statistics (by means of email) whenever they’d write sensationalistic articles about the increasing incidence of crime amongst the foreign population. Only a few replied, none admitted they did a piss poor job at fact checking.
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November 9th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Teabagger, were they korean reporters? They don’t care about the truth.
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7:49 pm on November 9th, 2009 3
The NY Times did an article a few years back when Iraq was going hot and heavy. They claimed over 22 murders had been committed by US troops over the previous year in the US and that it was “to be expected from young people who were trained to fight and kill”.
The NY Post did a follow up ‘to the NY Times article’ and found many of the murders unrelated to Iraq (Many, had never even been to Iraq) and that the total was “80%” less than that of the same age group and numbers of peers in the US.
In other words, young trained military people were significantly less likely to kill others than their peers.
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November 9th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Gerry, I never saw the NY Post article but I did my own analysis of the NY Times article that showed it was nothing but more anti-military BS:
http://rokdrop.com/2008/01/13/the-new-narrative-troops-are-murderers/
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November 10th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
FYI Updated: Wed., Jan. 16, 2008, 2:12 AM
THE TIMES IS ‘MURDER’ ON OUR GIS
By ANDY SOLTIS
Last Updated: 2:12 AM, January 16, 2008
Posted: 2:12 AM, January 16, 2008
Conservative columnists and bloggers are blasting The New York Times for what they call fuzzy math and shoddy research designation to trash the reputation of GIs by saying Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are returning home as murderers.
The Times said in a front-page story on Sunday that it had found 121 cases of Iraq and Afghan war vets committing a homicide in the United States.
But veterans and right-wing critics crunched the numbers and discovered that the murder rate for returning vets is only one-fifth of that of young Americans who did not serve in the war zones.
Post columnist Ralph Peters called the lengthy Times article “part of the disgraceful left-wing campaign” to portray “our troops as clichéd maniacs.”
Several hundred blogs have appeared since Sunday that are critical of the article. “I’m a veteran and I haven’t killed anybody in years,” wrote William Briggs. “But if you read The New York Times, you’d be right to worry that I might.”
Efforts to obtain a response from the Times yesterday were unsuccessful.
The pro-troop group Move America Forward called the article “slander.”
“It’s obvious that The New York Times has an agenda of undermining the missions of our troops in the war on terror, so much so that they are willing to resort to demonstrably false statistics to support their anti-troop bias,” said the group’s chairman, Melanie Morgan.
The critics said the 121 killings have to be judged in context, by comparing the vets with those Americans who didn’t serve in the war zones.
Justice Department statistics show that Americans in the veterans’ age group, 18 to 34 years old, commit about 150 murders a year – or 700 to 750 over the period studied by the Times. That’s more than five times the number of murders committed by veterans.
“In other words, the Times unwittingly makes the case that military service reduces the likelihood of a young man or woman committing a murder by 80 percent,” Peters wrote.
andy.soltis@nypost.com
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8:38 pm on November 9th, 2009 4
There is a small subgroup in academia that specializes in the argument that maleness coupled with militarism causes rape and violent crime. A Korean (Korean-American?) prof in the US has written a book about it that you hear mentioned in the Korean media and K-blogs from time to time. They like to focus on US military base culture — or more correctly the culture around US bases – in places like Korea, Japan, the Philippines and look at issues like human trafficing — as it relates (as they see it) to militarism…
I’m sure it is the kind of thing that makes liberal elitists feel superior while at Manhattan cocktail parties…
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November 10th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Please read atrticle above I just posted, especially the last two paragraphs. It will make for even better conversation at the VFW while drinking a beer. (the drink of the intellectual ‘Hemmingway’)
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10:42 am on November 11th, 2009 5
And this is news?
People who join are ‘double filtered’.
Background checks to weed out habitual criminality, and the general mind-set of those inclined to volunteer for military service [selflessness vs selfishness].
Does this mean the services are free of dirtbags and slackers? Hardly.
But their representation [percentage-wise] is inherently smaller than the general population. And the system is geared towards more ‘aggressive’ corrective action, either by peers or leadership; ‘general society’, not so much.
Sometimes ‘discrimination’ is a good thing.
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