Crime statistics endeavor to provide statistical measures of crime in societies. They provide a point of analysis and comparison, allow countries to form long-term patterns and trends and can help to develop and reform criminal justice policies as well as being more meaningful than raw numbers. Using the countries of Bahrain and the United States as a comparison point for the following issues which surround crime statistics such as biases, agendas and general influences like education and religion; this essay will be focused around analysing the statistical factors and wider influences which can allow a country to have low or high crime rates. Definitions of what exactly constitutes being a crime differ not only across countries but even across states. This can be an issue with statistics as in order to measure and compare crime consistently crimes need to be classified and placed into groups of similar offences. While murder is a crime recognized and agreed upon by most nations, what makes up a homicide may be more challenging and then even simply just a ‘crime against the person’ can vary widely. This often means that what makes up a crime for many offences can vary throughout jurisdictions. This is a problem when categorizing offences for international statistical comparison. An example of this is the way that laws differ state to state within the United States, while ‘offences known to police’ is a statistic seen as quite a high representative figure of the offences, a lot of researches see that no official measure can ever come close to the actual amount of criminality that exists in any form in society (Archer, 1984) Definitional problems are concerned with whether or not crimes have equivalent meanings between nations,... ... middle of paper ... ...al Justice Moore, R., (1987) “Courts, Law, Justice and Criminal Trials” – International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice. Souryal, S., (1988) “The Role of the Shari’ah Law in Determining Criminality in Saudi Arabia” – International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice. Vetere, Eduardo, Newton, Graeme. (1977) “ International Crime Statistics: An Overview from a Comparative Perspective.” – Abstracts in Criminology and Penology Federal Bureau of Investigation (1981-1987) “Uniform Crime Reports” Washington DC, United States Government Printing Office. Ministry of Information (1985), “Bahrain: Profile” State of Bahrain, Government Press. Religion in Schools (2004) retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/religion-in-schools State Compulsory Attendance Laws (2007) retrieved from http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0112617.html
In the article Victims and Offenders in Two Crime Statistics Programs: A Comparison of the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), (herein after NCVS and NIBRS will be called “systems” when referencing the statistics of the nature of the crimes), the comparison of the two reporting systems for crimes are similar. These two reporting systems are a visual representation of the crimes that are reported. They do not account for crimes that are not reporting or crimes that are reported after the date. They report crime only when there is an official report, such as one by the officer that comes to the scene of the crime to take statements from the individuals. NCVS and NIBRS are only report burglary, larceny, aggravated assault, and vehicle theft. They do not report on more serious crimes such as rape or murder.
Page 70, Eamonn Carrabine, Pam Cox, Maggy Lee, Ken Plummer and Nigel South, 2009. Criminology, A Sociological Introduction Second Edition Routledge USA
In conclusion this essay has shown the main problems involved in measuring crime and deviance. It is imperative for society to know that different police forces classify crimes differently, and crimes vary within different areas, time and generations’, and that the main reason crime statistics are hard to measure is due to the dark figure. So it is significant that official crime statistics are not to be taken at face value.
We hear a lot about the crime rates going up and down from the media and they tend to expand on specific types of criminal behavior that might be of interest to the public. When politicians are running for office we are told that the crime rates are down due to the tough crime policies that they have been implemented. Citizens seek crime rates for assistance in determining if the area they reside in is safe. Some people wish to get a general idea of the crime rates for a specific neighborhood where they are thinking of purchasing a house. But what is never explained is where do the crime statistics come from and were there any factors that could have had an effect on their reliability. Crime statistics, which are created from what is reported to the police, are often unreliable. There are several influential factors that can make crime statistics both increase and decrease at any time. Most police departments, but not all, use Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) to submit their statistics to the state. Attempting to compare two police agency's crime statistics is almost impossible because not all police agencies use the UCR program for classifying crimes. UCR is a national data reporting policy that is maintained by the state and regulated by the FBI. This policy requires police agencies to report their monthly statistics by following a hierarchy scale for classifying the criminal offenses. A hierarchy scale is a list of crimes in a specific order of importance used to pick out the highest crime when there are multiple crimes committed in one incident. An example: a citizen contacts the police and makes a report of a burglary, a rape and a larceny all occurring in one incident. A...
Crime statistics are collected, collated and used in many different ways, all the various types of statistics have strengths and weaknesses through their methods though. How might these weaknesses be overcome?
The collection of crime data in the United States is carried out through different approaches including Uniform Crime Reports and the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which also act as the two primary sources of crime data for crime reporting. The data obtained from these sources are used for research and documentation of crime status at the county, state, and national levels. Notably, the National Incident-Based Reporting System emerged as an advancement of the conventional summary of Uniform Crime Reports that were used to track crime in the country. In addition, the Congress uses data from these sources together with those from the National Crime Victimization Survey to guide policy decisions and create suitable responses to crime. While the use of these sources helps in dealing with crime in the United States, they have some similarities and differences between them with regards to methodological processes and implications.
The differences between using official crime data and those using self-reported data varies. While both report crimes, “the self-report and official statistics do not measure the same things” (Mosher et al. 2011 p.139) and the methods used are different, in some cases crimes are not reported to either one, and they both have their own margins of error associated with them. Official crime data is reported by law enforcement organization and only certain types of crimes are accounted for while self-reported is done via surveys, phone calls or even face to face interviews and covers any type of crime.
Crime and criminalization can be ambiguous; crime is only crime until certain authorities deem the actions illegal. However, social inequalities can lead to increased crime rates, notions such as gender, age, race, and class influence crime and provide criminologist with the date to determine who is most likely to commit a crime and where.
Winslow, R. W., & Zhang, S. (2008). Contemporary Theories of Crime. Criminology: a global perspective (). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Prentice Hall.
Crime is a difficult concept to measure and even moreso to measure accurately. The unavailabilty of a definition of crime itself poses problematic when wanting to measure it. However there are various insights into how much crime is present in society. Although there are ways to measure it, they are not always accurate. Statitics and surveys try to find out not just how much crime there is but also how serious it is. This essay will describe these different methods and explain how they affect the amount of unreported and undetected offences referred to as the ‘Dark Figure’ of crime (Bottomley & Pease, 1986).
In recent years crime has risen to astonishing heights. A survey from the period 1998 to the turn of the century, compiled by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ranked South Africa second for assault and murder per capita and first for rapes per capita in a data set of 60 countries. Total crime per capita was 10th out of the 60 countries in the dataset. (Nation Master, The Eighth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, 01/04/03, Web, 04/11/13)
of official data, not only were "offenses known" closest to the crime itself, but a more constant
In general, official statistics of crime recorded by the police and surveys of the public such as victim surveys and self-report studies are the three main measures of the extent of crime in Britain. The oldest method is to rely on official data collected by criminal justice agencies, such as data on arrests or convictions. The other two rely on social surveys. In one case, individuals are asked if they have been victims of crime; in the other, they are asked to self-report their own criminal activity. (Terence P. Thornberry and Marvin D. Krohn) Although these are a main secondary source of quantitative data, each of them may contain some drawbacks. Thus, this essay will introduce these three methods and demonstrates their disadvantages, such as the police crime statistics exclude the unreported and unrecorded crime;
Criminology is the study of crime and criminals. In criminology, crime data is gathered in many different ways. All of these ways are part of the National Incident-Based Reporting system, which is a program that collects data on each respond crime incident (CITATION). There are Primary Sources of collecting crime data, and Secondary Sources of collecting crime data. Under the Primary Sources of collecting crime data are the National Crime Victimization Survey, Self Report Surveys, and the Uniform Crime Reports. These reporting surveys and official records gather information for Criminologists about all types of crimes. Some examples of these are homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, arson, burglary, and larceny. Criminologists use these also to measure the nature and extent of the crime, along with behavior and personalities of the offenders. Secondary Sources of collecting crime data are Experimental Research, Observational and Interview Research, Data Mining, Crime Mapping, Meta-Analysis and Systematic Review, and Cohort Research. These gathering techniques gather informatio...
Federal Bureau of Investigaiton. (2010, December 22). Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January –June, 2010. Retrieved from http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjs/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s./2010/preliminary-crime-in-the-us-2009