Crime Statistics Strengths

Crime Statistics; the ways they are collected, collated, used and their effectiveness

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?

Police recorded crimes, Crime Victim surveys, self report surveys (also know as crime victimisation surveys) , police arrest data, court data and also accident and emergency data are sources of information for the statistics collected. Each different way of collecting data has its own strengths and weaknesses as well as levels of reliability due to it being an official report or an unofficial report. Official reports are things such as Police reports;

It is useful in relation to the bigger crimes that happen on a lesser level such as homicide where it can show the trend In what age group is committing the crime more so then others and also which sex it tends to be more, however, the information can be affected by evidence and whether the police are intending on and actually do charge a person with the crime, also it does not depict lesser crimes statistically as it can for larger crimes.

(Weatherburn)

Self reports are anonymous surveys that can be produced by the police or government to inquire about crimes that people commit but do not report, it is especially useful for drug crimes, creating different trends of crimes that aren’t reported, finding out which crimes are becoming increasingly larger, however, it is can be greatly effected by people not saying anything at all or by inputting false data into there response of the survey.

Court Data is useful in providing which crimes have a higher re-offending rate then others on a basis of whether a person that was convicted re-offends more then a person that wasn’t convicted. The data however, provides a bad indication of crime and does not provide any useful data towards the crime rates and the current trends of crimes being committed. (Weatherburn)

It is similar to the Police charge data as it is official data that is collected and used.

Accident and Emergency Data provides a good indication on crimes that are resolving in injuries, at what rate these are happening and which crime it is that has resolved in an injury or fatality. This data alone is not able to depict trends in crime but in correlation to other types of data that is collected such as police recorded data it is able to show trends and different things that are happening. (Weatherburn)

The data collected is similar to Police Charge Data and Court Data as it comes from official reports that are