The Limitations of Statistics in Crime Solving

Many people such as sociologists and criminologists use official crime statistics in their research. There are many reasons why using official statistics can be useful as they are readily available and provide detailed data which can often include large numbers of participants giving information. Within Australia the use of information collected from crime statistics amounts for a large proportion of what we know about crime in general, but with the use of crime statistics when measuring criminal activity there are also some criticisms. Two of the main criticisms include the limitations of statistics in general and the dark figure of crime, which can be described as the undetected or unreported act of crime.

The first criticism for using statistics to measure criminal activity is the fact that statistics can be very limiting as there is no way of gaining a complete number of crimes or measurements of criminal activity within any set of circumstances. Though the use of data from many different sources increases the power of the statistical analysis, it is also understood that some sources are more reliable than others when measuring certain statistics. With this being the case it makes it very difficult for an accurate analysis of these statistics to be established.

Within Australia, National crime statistics are generally taken from two major sources, Administrative data which includes records from hospitals, police, courts and corrective services, as well as Crime Victimisation surveys which include the Women Safety Survey (replaced by Personal Safety Survey), the International Crime Survey and the Australian Bureau of Statistics Crime and Safety Survey.

The reliability of these two major sources varies. When Hayes and Pr...

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