The Uniform Crime Reporting System

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Recommended: Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) essay

According to O’Brien (1985) The Uniform Crime Reporting system (UCR) was developed in the 1920’s in order to create a system that would report crime uniformly across the many different jurisdictions in the United States. For the purpose of this paper I am going to discuss the debate between the relationships of the overrepresentation of minorities in crime statics and if the results are biased based on race. There is a debate regarding the accuracy of the statistics provided by official data resources such as UCR and NIBRS in regards to racial disparities. The fact that racial or social class bias does have an impact on what crimes are reported and the neighborhoods that have the highest police presence does lead inevitably to an overrepresentation of minorities when viewing crime statics as quantitative data points. Official data leads you to believe that a criminal in the United States can be described as being urban, lower class, African American male between the ages of 13 and 20 years old (Feldmeyer, Lecture 1/15/2014). Why is this information important? I believe it leads to bias in the way neighborhoods are policed, the way police stop and search vehicles, the people that police view as being “suspects” and are subjugated to stop and frisk. I also believe that this stereotype plays a part into the sort of people that are reported for being or acting “suspicious”. This can impact that perceived description of the offender when a victim is filling out a police report. All factors help lead to establish some sort of bias that inevitably can lead to disproportionate representation of minorities in UCR statistical data.
Furthermore, another theory in this debate according to Harris and Shaw (2000) is that the UCR is primaril...

... middle of paper ...

...tal factors poor, urban, minority youths commit more crimes. Researchers also must be aware that crime is changing due to technology. There is now more instances of cyber theft, and computer crimes than in the past, therefore the dynamics of the people that are capable to commit certain sorts of crimes are changing.

Works Cited

Feldmeyer, B. Seminar in Criminology. Lecture notes 1/15/2014.
Harris, A.J., & Shaw J.A. (2000) Looking for Patterns: Race, Class, and Crime. Chapter 4( pp.85-127) Criminology: A contemporary handbook: Wadsworth.
Hindelang, M.J., Hirschit, T., & Weis, J.G. (1979) Correlates of Delinquency: The illusion of
Discrepancy between Self Report and Official Measures. American Sociological Review
43, 93-109.
O’Brien, R.M. (1985). Crime and victimization data. Beverly Hills, Calif.: SAGE publications.
(Chapters 1, 2, 3, & 5 up to page 91)

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