Being assaulted and robbed isn't very much fun at all

[HoreTore]

Nonsense.

Murder is the sole definite crime statistic. We know about all of them. Every other statistic have huge dark figures, and so its usefulness is limited. We know that we only know about a fraction of them.

You can use it for arguing tendencies and such, but you must always be aware that there will be a ton of other explanations for your numbers than the one you choose to go with.

Murder is different. Murder is final.

The only assumption you need to make when it comes to murder, is the assumption that the number of murders in a society is a decent reflection of the level of crime in a country. Since we do not have a tradition of honour killings and such here, this is a reasonable assumption.

For other crimes, you need to make a ton of other assumption for your conclusion, which makes it a lot more uncertain.