Inquisitive Bird's Danish Age-Crime Plots

First, the multiple-year bins.

These were binned for greater reliability, because Danish crime rates are not extremely high, so they can be pretty unstable on a year-to-year basis.

Second, the plots by year.

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Verbally?

First, it’s worth noting that ages before 15 are not recorded. There’s not an absence of violent criminality prior to that age, the data just isn’t available in Denmark. Onto the results.

The years 2000 and 2002-2019 and the aggregates for 2000-2018 showed a later male than female peak age for violent criminality and every year showed a sharp drop-off with age for boys. In 2001, the peak for girls was later, but the data for girls is always noticeably noisier than it is for boys, so I’m surprised this didn’t happen more often just by chance. In the COVID years of 2020 and 2021, the peak age for violent criminality was the same for males and females.

But before calling this a total replication failure for the trend in America, take a look at this .gif:

Criminal offending by age indeed became less sharp for boys as the years went by. For girls, this was less certain, but it looks like they became sharper, and thus perhaps less differentiated by sex in a different way.

Denmark may be following the U.S.’ lead, but it’s at least doing it very slowly if it is, and the flattening in Denmark may be explained by a general decline in violent crime, separate from whatever caused the changes to peak age violent criminality in America. Only time will tell.