Crime Monthly Oct 2025: Overkill, Cheating, Subways, and Dead Children
Sharing Some Insightful Articles
Dear Readers,
The time has come to share some excellent articles and posts about crime. Today’s newsletter features articles from Substack and the Atlantic.
We enjoyed these articles and felt that you would too. First, we jump into current practices regarding the investigation of murder and overkill. Secondly, we explore how Malaysia tried to cheat its way to the World Cup. Thirdly, we explore the effect of crime on the use of pubic transportation. The fourth article is about crime reduction and the importance of considering how impactful certain interventions can be. Our fifth article this month raises questions about personhood and how it affects criminal investigations and the commission of crimes by analysing a case where a father killed their son in Victorian England.
We hope you enjoy them!
Overkill: When Murderous Violence Exceeds What is Necessary
In this post,
discusses overkill. This term seeks to distinguish murders where the victim was killed from instances in which the violence far exceeds what would be needed to end a life.This is an insightful post on how overkill gets studied, interpreted, and how it should drive investigations. The post also documents how assumptions about the kinds of people who overkill have driven investigators astray.
At CuringCrime, we find the effort to study, define, and quantify these acts is interesting and shows an underlying belief that this approach is beneficial and fruitful1.
Forged Ancestry and Cheating in Sport
Crime is a term that covers a diverse range of activities, and we find that
is doing a wonderful job raising awareness about crime in sport. We urge you to check it out.In this instance, the Malaysian Football Association forged documents to claim foreign players had Malaysian heritage and thus could play for their national team. After some investigations, the players were banned for twelve months, and the football association was fined. I admittedly enjoy football, and I am troubled by these acts and deeply concerned about how betting is affecting sport.
Why Will No One Ride The Metro?
Ok, this headline is a bit misleading, but hey… I need to get your attention somehow.
We are also making an effort to include articles from other publications that we think may be relevant to those who subscribe to CuringCrime.
Before moving to Europe, I spent ten years living in the United States. One striking difference between these diverse and heterogeneous places is the use of public transportation. The article cites data on whether people use public transport.
“In a 2024 study of data from nearly 800 cities, Asian urban residents used public transit for 43 per cent of trips; 24 per cent of Western Europeans in cities did the same. In American cities, the figure was less than 5 per cent.”
In general, European countries have better infrastructure to support people’s travel.2 Presumably, you would expect Americans to use public transportation if the infrastructure were there.
If only the world were so simple. After investing millions in developing such infrastructure, an American city saw little uptake in the number of people using public transport. Lehman cogently argues that there is more to such disparity. He argued that a reason why Americans avoid public transport is the perception that these spaces aren’t safe. There is, Lehman contends, some evidence that many crimes do take place in such spaces.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/subway-safety/684566/
The actual amount of crime and the perception of crime both affect whether people use public transport. Thus, any strategy aimed at increasing people's use of public transport needs to assess the actual level of crimes taking place there and work to dispel any unfounded fears people may have.
How to Reduce Crime?
The fantastic,
, has written a most informative post on how we should think about crime and efforts to cut crime. Roman urges that kind of approach that CuringCrime wholeheartedly endorses. In short, Roman asks policymakers to consider the impact of initiatives and assess whether other initiatives may be more effective.It has been documented that increasing the number of police can reduce crime in certain areas. Nevertheless, Roman wants decision makers to answer the following question:
“Is the benefit-to-cost ratio of adding more police higher than it is for alternatives?”
This kind of analysis is essential. Nevertheless, we also think that there are factors that are not easily quantifiable, and that these can be important too. CuringCrime also urges caution in the degree to which quantification is embraced. Any decision made that is based on data is based on how that data was collected, processed, and analysed. The collecting, processing, and analysis of data remains one of the areas where assumptions can creep in unseen.
Dead Children and Guilty Parents
We enthusiastically ask you to subscribe to
, which explores crime in Victorian England.3 This post is about a parent murdering a child. Michell shares:“If you study murder in any era, you soon find out that parents murdering their children is the most common type of homicide…..Children like little John never had the chance to do anything with their lives. They were born, they learned to walk and talk, to feed themselves, they played, they overheard their parents argue and, in bewildered innocence, they died.”
One of the biggest changes in the past century is how we see children. Michell suggests that Victorians struggled with the personhood of children. Such big shifts in thinking should make us question our own assumptions and reflect on our own practices.
I end today’s post with this moving passage,
“Children like little John never had the chance to do anything with their lives. They were born, they learned to walk and talk, to feed themselves, they played, they overheard their parents argue and, in bewildered innocence, they died.”
As a rather crude aside, I have watched many movies where an “evil” character who appears to have been defeated is not quite dead. I fear that this could result in individuals engaging in overkill, just to be sure.
While I have not looked into this in detail, I think that such infrastructure also makes Europeans walk more. This factor, along with diet, could partly explain differences in obesity rates between them.
The wonderful Sophie Michell encourages interested readers who cannot afford the subscription to reach out to her.