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In: Psychology

Discuss the importance of crime statistics for criminologists. In your discussion, point to the advantages and...

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.

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Expert Solution

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:

  • The NIBRS can furnish information on nearly every major criminal justice issue facing law enforcement today, including terrorism, white collar crime, weapons offenses, missing children where criminality is involved, drug/narcotics offenses, drug involvement in all offenses, hate crimes, spousal abuse, abuse of the elderly, child abuse, domestic violence, juvenile crime/gangs, parental abduction, organized crime, pornography/child pornography, driving under the influence, and alcohol-related offenses.
  • Using the NIBRS, legislators, municipal planners/administrators, academicians, sociologists, and the public will have access to more comprehensive crime information than the summary reporting can provide.
  • The NIBRS produces more detailed, accurate, and meaningful data than the traditional summary reporting. Armed with such information, law enforcement can better make a case to acquire the resources needed to fight crime.
  • The NIBRS enables agencies to find similarities in crime-fighting problems so that agencies can work together to develop solutions or discover strategies for addressing the issues.
  • Full participation in the NIBRS provides statistics to enable a law enforcement agency to provide a full accounting of the status of public safety within the jurisdiction to the police commissioner, police chief, sheriff, or director.
  • The major problem with NIBRS today is that is has not been universally implemented. Agencies and state Programs are still in the process of developing, testing, or implementing the NIBRS. In 2004, 5,271 law enforcement agencies contributed NIBRS data to the UCR Program. The data from those agencies represent 20 percent of the U.S. population and 16 percent of the crime statistics collected by the UCR Program. Implementation of NIBRS is occurring at a pace commensurate with the resources, abilities, and limitations of the contributing law enforcement agencies.
  • A commonly cited problem with the UCR is that there are many, many crimes that do not come to the attention of police. This is not limited to minor offenses. For example, it is estimated that nearly half of all rapes go unreported. These undocumented offenses are often referred to as the dark figure of crime. This is the reason that the United States is the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) developed the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS, which began in 1973, provides a detailed picture of crime incidents, victims, and trends. Today, the survey collects detailed information on the frequency and nature of the crimes of rape, sexual assault, personal robbery, aggravated and simple assault, household burglary, theft, and motor vehicle theft. It does not measure homicide or commercial crimes (such as burglaries of stores).
  • The NCVS collects information on crimes suffered by individuals and households, whether or not those crimes were reported to law enforcement. It estimates the proportion of each crime type reported to law enforcement, and it summarizes the reasons that victims give for reporting or not reporting.
  • The survey provides information about victims (age, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, income, and educational level), offenders (sex, race, approximate age, and victim-offender relationship), and the crimes (time and place of occurrence, use of weapons, nature of injury, and economic consequences). Questions also cover the experiences of victims with the criminal justice system, self-protective measures used by victims, and possible substance abuse by offenders. Supplements are added periodically to the survey to obtain detailed information on topics like school crime. BJS publication of NCVS data includes Criminal Victimization in the United States, an annual report that covers the broad range of detailed information collected by the NCVS.


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