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Notes -
Go directly to statistics jail for comparing violent crime in the US when large parts of the country were under COVID restrictions to Australia after COVID restrictions had ceased. If you use the 2019 US figures, it doesn't change the story - the US assault number was 1.7% instead of 1.4% - still well below the Australian level.
The equivalent victim-survey based crime numbers are the Crime Survey for England and Wales (I didn't bother looking for Scottish or Northern Irish numbers, but they won't materially affect the UK-wide average). The latest (almost entirely post-COVID restrictions) overall victimisation rate for violent crime is 1.35% - i.e. somewhat below the US numbers. The CSEW does not break down individual types of violent crime because the sample size isn't big enough to produce reliable numbers.
The other thing I looked at, more as a sanity check that the data was comparable than for information, was whether the contribution of domestic violence was the same. Both the US and Australia have about a 20:40:40 ratio of domestic violence/acquaintance violence/stranger violence. The UK talks about "domestic abuse" which is clearly something completely different because the rate is higher than the overall violent crime rate.
Incidentally, can any Aussies on this board let me know how you can have that level of violent crime and not end up with the kind of national freakout about it that the US and the UK go in for?
I was thinking about the national lockdown in Australia which ended in May 2020, but looking at this list of local lockdowns, it looks like Sydney and Canberra spent about 2 months of 2021 under lockdown and Melbourne about 3 months.
Looking at 2019 makes most sense until we have a full year of post-COVID data (which the UK just published, but the US and Australia don't seem to have yet)
The US numbers are lower in 2020 than in 2019. The most common motive for violent crime is drunken idiots fighting each other, and occasionally going after an innocent bystander accidentally while doing so. Much less of that in 2020.
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