Even if you go back to the pre-twiddled numbers — 363 reported crimes of all kinds between 12/2007 and 10/2008 — and look at the crime rate normalized per passenger — the industry reports 13,005,000 passengers sailed in 2008, so if we take 10/12s of that — 10,837,500 passengers. In 2010 (I can only find numbers for that year), 10,290,000 out of 14,300,000 passengers originated in North America, a percentage of 71.96%. Applying that percentage to 10,837,500, a reasonable supposition, that gives you approximately 7,798,665 passengers originating in North America between 12/2007 and 10/2008.
So… 363 total crimes/7,798,665 passengers = 4.655 crimes per 100,000 passengers.
Let’s look at the FBI’s
Unform Crime Reporting system numbers for 2008. Violent crimes only (not property crimes) had a rate of 470.6 per 100,000 people. Property crimes had a rate of 3,274 per 100,000 people. Total crime rate? 3,744.5 crimes per 100,000 people.
Let’s look further at the cities under 10,000 people — since that’s the community size bracket that a cruise ship falls into. Violent crime rate is 320.5 per 100,000 people. Property crime rate is 3,334.1 per 100,000 people. Total crime rate is 3,654.6 crimes per 100,000 people.
Note here that I’ve twiddled the number of passengers in a way that should actually serve to *increase* the on-ship crime rate, and those 363 crimes include crime types not part of the FBI statistics, such as passengers caught trying to smuggle drugs onboard, crimes that happened on shore, and a travel agency employee in Michigan making a terrorist threat against all ships of Carnival Cruise Line.
This is not to say that the fudging of numbers by the FBI and/or industry is a good thing — far from it. But I hope I’ve shown that statistically, cruise ships generally have far less crime than the USA at large. I don’t have time to look up crime stats for the UK or other nations, alas.
