[vkou]

Police in Japan deliberately ignore many crimes, to make the numbers look good.

Also, torturing people into confessions is a great idea, until you nab the wrong person. But it sure drives the conviction statistics up!

This isn't a question of culture, this is simply a case of the police fudging the numbers to make themselves look good. The Soviet Union also had "zero crime", and a 99% conviction rate, but unlike Japan, nobody took those bullshit claims seriously.

[iguy]

The 99% obviously means that (at best!) that they don't bring cases they may lose to trial, and isn't really an achievement.

But GGP realusername's claim was that brutal policing drives crime. Places which have brutal policing and genuinely low crime are some evidence against this, even if you don't wish to emulate the brutality.

(Whether the USSR had low levels of street crime I actually don't know -- is this known? But few deny that Japan and Singapore are pretty damn safe.)

[TangoTrotFox]

I was not stating it was a good thing. It means that Japan is treating people they suspect of crimes absolutely awfully. The hypothesis I was responding to is that harsh treatment of suspects is reciprocated with harsh treatment towards police from future suspects. I'm not sure this is substantiated.

[arcticbull]

So does China! 99.93% conviction rate last year. That's 3 nines! Stellar, those police get it right basically all the time! [1] Hong Kong OTOH is between 53.9% and 79% [2]. Sad.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/1...

[2] http://www.hk-lawyer.org/content/conviction-rates