Friday, April 30, 2010

Very Good Piece

Malcolm Beith has a great article about the difficulty tallying up drug-related murders, and the general unreliability of statistical info related to organized crime. This is I believe the first piece that I have ever seen pulling apart those numbers (excluding blog posts), despite the fact that drug-related murder is an extremely vague label that can very easily be manipulated one way or another. Really good stuff, and something that somehow virtually no one on either side of the border pays much attention to.

2 comments:

Noel Maurer said...

The overall point is a good one, but the use of numbers in the piece seems incredibly sloppy, I think. That might be the point, but the country has pretty good crime statistics, even if there's no way to figure out how many were related to organized crime.

pc said...

As far as the sloppiness of the numbers, yeah I took that to be the point. Do you mean as far as crime rates and what not Mexico's numbers are pretty good? I think that's probably true (though I dont have any basis of comparison outside of the US), but there are definitely lots of contradictions in what different areas of government say about narco arrest numbers and drug related murders. Insofar as the government and independent analysts use those to demonstrate progress or lack thereof, I think it's a problem in how we look at Mexican organized crime.