When measuring crime, it can be broken down into three different reliable sources of data that is used for analysis: official police records, self-reporting surveys and victim surveys. Each form of data has its own value for quantitative and qualitative data analysis. Official police records has serious limitations on what is included and can be subject to misleading or fraudulent numbers (Mosher, Miethe & Hart, 2011). Victim surveys and self-reporting surveys can lead to more accurate representations of crimes that are unreported to law enforcement (Mosher, Miethe & Hart, 2011). Despite the issues with official police data, I still believe it is a valuable tool and is the most important data source when evaluating crime.
Victim surveys, are
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An analogy is showed by describing police reports like pouring crime into a funnel, not all of it makes it into the final results (Mosher, Miethe & Hart, 2011). Even though not all crime is reported, it can be speculated that criminal reporting rates will be stable from one year to the next. The main issue with this speculation, is that criminal reporting rates will likely change over a large period of time, such as decades. However this goes hand and hand with the issue of better recording keeping by the law enforcement agency. Many times over the past several decades crime rates have raised and law enforcement has attributed that hike to better record keeping or reporting practices (Mosher, Miethe & Hart, 2011). I believe that this does not how that the records are not accurate, however it shows a limitation in the analysis over longer lengths of time.
Another major issue is the drops in crime rates themselves. One major criticism is that the law enforcement agency or political figures may alter the crime statistics to make them artificially low (Mosher, Miethe & Hart, 2011). The concept behind this is that if the law enforcement agency or political figure can show a drop in crime, then that shows that he or she is doing a good job. There have been several reported cases of manipulating the crime statistics for personal gain, including, The New York Police Department after the implementation of CompStat in 1995 (Mosher, Miethe & Hart,
Crime data is a resource being used to help understand who the victims are, their age, race, what type of crime they have committed. The more information someone has about crime the more prepared they can be to deal with the victim, evaluate programs that help prevent crime. There are several official sources used UCR, NCVS, NIBRS that are used. There are pros and cons to each source and the following information will include some of the positive and some of the negatives points of each report. This is not inclusive by any means, there are many different various pros and cons of each report.
This information comes from the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR). The Uniform Crime Reporting technique was established in 1930, by the FBI. Crime was something that was very hard to keep track of. The FBI started this technique to keep track of crimes that are happening in our nation. Police use uniform crime reporting for their data. Some police departments or officers are required to focus on one specific area and crime. The most popular crimes all deal with drugs. CompSTAT help to map these crimes so that police officers know what geographical location to pay the most attention to. CompSTAT is the most popular technique for police departments to use. When they collect the data of crimes, they take this information and they start to evaluate and create techniques on how to stop or prevent this crime from happening again. According to Police Executive Research forum, “Compstat changed how police view crime problems. Instead of merely responding to crimes after they are committed, police fundamentally expanded their mission to include preventing crimes from happening in the first place” (Compstat: Its Origins, Evolution, and Future In Law Enforcement Agencies, 9). After collecting data for crime mapping the next step is for them to analyze the
The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is information that is gathered by the U.S Census Bureau. Unlike UCR this information is not given by law enforcement officials, but by a household survey that is conducted about twice a year. When the survey is being commenced they place the crimes into two different categories; person crimes and property crimes. NCVS has four objectives when obtaining information; “(1) to develop detailed information about the victims and consequences of crime, (2) to estimate the number and types of crimes not reported to the police, (3) to provide uniform measures of selected typed of crimes, and (4) to permit comparisons over time and types of areas.” (NACJD)
Such sources involved inquiries from the community including victimization surveys, departmental data, questionnaires from neighborhood residents and business owners, police encounter evaluations, surveys regarding police response times, participant observer surveys, and questionnaires regarding victimization. Pre-experimental data were also obtained for comparison purposes such as crime data, traffic data, arrest data, and response time data (Kelling et al.,
In Canada, crime is measured using a combination of both police and victim-reported information. Statistics Canada presents surveys to criminologists to analyze the data of criminalization and victimization to determine understand criminal behaviour, how the public perceives it, and how to prevent it. Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR) intended to standardize the collection of police-reported crime statistics from across Canada. Figures generated by UCR are less than perfect, due to variations in the grey lines of recording and interpreting crime between different police. (Cartwright, 2015) The General Social Survey (GSS) was implemented later as a broad social survey to poll for crimes not reported to police. This was because Statistics
For decades now, including the years 1994 and 1995, the time of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, American law enforcement has used two major data sources to measure crime. First, there is the Uniform Crime Report or UCR. The UCR is compiled data from reported crimes, it is a very accurate system used for murder and those crimes that cannot go unnoticed. Next, we have The National Crime Victim Survey or NCVS which is a unanimous survey, better at accounting for the crimes that may not get reported, crimes such as rape or assault.
The COMPSTAT ( Compare-Statistics) system was developed by the New York Police Department in 1994 and is credited with having a significant impact on the reduction of major crimes in New York city. COMPSTAT is internationally recognized as having become an extremely successful tool, incorporating accurate crime intelligence analysis methods and streamlining law enforcement management processes, including the seeding of power to local district commanders. In broad strokes, COMPSTAT can be described as a series of process used for the collection and analysis of criminal intelligence data which in turn assists commanders in developing effective strategies and tactics to combat crime.
The process of using behavioral evidence left at a crime scene to make inferences about the offender, including inferences about personality characteristics and psychopathology is called criminal profiling. Around the country, several agencies rely on the minds of criminal psychologists to lead them in the right direction to finding the correct offender. Criminal profiling provides investigators with knowledge of the appearance and behavior of a potential criminal.
Rosen, Lawrence. “The Creation of the Uniform Crime Report: The Role of Social Science.” JSTOR. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2011.
Rosenfeld, R. (2011). Changing Crime Rates. In J. Wilson, & J. Petersilia, Crime and Public Policy (pp. 559-588). New York: Oxford University Press.
In order to find out what caused crime rates to rise; one must first determine whether or not crime actually rose during the time period. Manuel Eisner in his Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime claims that by using homicides as an indicator one can opt that crime actually showed a downward trend during the second industrial revolution (Eisner 85). But Eisner fault lies in the fact that his work only looks at violent crime. David Philips claims this may appear to be because of lack of “full-time paid uniformed police forces” thus the inaccurate, “uncoordinated” system, “contained apparent contradictions” (O'Brien and Quinault 156). Philips goes on to plot an upward trend in crime using committals and not just violent crime like Eisner; Philips plot shows a “very clear and rapid increase” in crime, one that was larger that could be accounted for by population increase alone (O'Brien and Quinault 158). Phi...
Related to the UCR, the NCVS is a more recent addition to measuring crime. This report collects its data by calling the population of the US asking if people were ever victims of a crime. This report creates a more accurate picture of crime in our nation because it solves the problem of under-reporting in general. As we all know, crime goes unreported to the police every day, but with NCVS even the ones that are not recorded are still mentioned. However the NCVS does not solve the problem complelty, because it is a survey and with any survey problems with validity arise.
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;
The U.S. Department of Labor (2011) reported the national average of unemployment for 2008 was 5.8 percent. The rate dramatically increased in 2009 with an average of 9.3 percent and 9.6 percent for 2010. While unemployment rates have increased, the FBI’s preliminary reports for 2010 show that law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have reported a decrease of 6.2 percent in the number of violent crimes for the first 6 months of 2010 when compared to figures reported for the same time in 2009. The violent crime category includes rape, murder, robbery, and aggravated result. The number of property crimes also decreased 2.8 percent when compared to the same time last year. Property crimes include burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Arson decreased 14.6 percent when compared to the same time periods of 2009 (FBI, 2011).