In: Psychology
Discuss the importance of crime statistics for criminologists. In your discussion, point to the advantages and disadvantages of the major methods of gathering crime statistics and show how these methods provide different pictures about the nature of crime.
Crime reports and statistics convey an extensive assortment of information about crime to the reader and include topics such as the extent of crime and the nature or characteristics of criminal offenses, as well as how the nature and characteristics of crime change over time. Aside from these big-picture topics related to crime, crime reports and statistics communicate specific information on the characteristics of the criminal incident, the perpetrators, and the victims. For example, crime reports and statistics present information on the incident, such as weapon presence, police involvement, victim injury, and location of the crime. Details such as the age, race, gender, and gang membership of the offender are also available in many of these reports. Also, details gleaned from statistics regarding the victim, such as, but not limited to, income, race, age, and relationship with the offender, education, and working status, are made available.
In order to understand crime and the criminal justice system, we need to understand the prevalence of crime. Good crime statistics are critically important to understanding crime trends. The more federal and state agencies know about crime trends, the more intelligently they can allocate precious resources and maximize efforts at crime suppression and prevention. Crime statistics are also frequently used as an evaluation tool for justice programs. If the rate of a particular crime is falling, then what the system is doing will seem to be working. If the rate of a particular crime is rising, then it will seem to indicate that the criminal justice system is failing.
In the United States, the most frequently cited crime statistics come from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). The UCR are crime data collected by over 16,000 local and state law enforcement agencies on crimes that have been brought to the attention of police. These law enforcement agencies voluntarily send information to the FBI, which compiles them into an annual published report along with several special reports on particular issues.
Crime reports can convey information that affects the complete population of individuals and/or businesses, or they can convey crime-related information on a subset of victims, such as males, the elderly, businesses, or the poor. Crime reports and statistics can focus on a short period of time, such as a month, or they can cover longer periods, such as 1 year or many years. In addition, these reports can offer change in crime and its elements over time. Statistics offered in crime reports may describe crime as it pertains to a small geographical region, such one city; one region, such as the West or the Northeast; or the entire nation. Finally, on the basis of statistics, these reports can describe crime in a static, point-in-time way, and they can provide a dynamic perspective describing how crime, its characteristics, or risk change over time.
Since its inception in the 1930s, many people have been critical of the UCR system for a variety of reasons. Among these reasons are the facts that the UCR includes only crimes reported to the police, only counts the most serious crime committed in a series of crimes, does not differentiate between completed crimes and attempts, and does not include many types of crimes, such as white-collar crimes and federal crimes. Another critical complaint (especially among scholars) was that the UCR did not obtain potentially important information about the victim, the offender, the location of the crime and so forth. Without this information, social scientists could not use the UCR data in attempts to explain and predict crime. These complaints eventually led to the development of a much more informative system of crime reporting known as the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
The NIBRS is an incident-based reporting system in which agencies collect data on each single crime occurrence. NIBRS data come from local, state, and federal automated records’ systems. The NIBRS collects data on each single incident and arrest within 22 offense categories made up of 46 specific crimes called Group A offenses. For each of the offenses coming to the attention of law enforcement, specified types of facts about each crime are reported. In addition to the Group A offenses, there are 11 Group B offense categories for which only arrest data are reported.
According to the FBI, participating in NIBRS can benefit agencies in several ways. The benefits of participating in the NIBRS are: