The Uniform Crime Report

In this essay, I will be discussing and evaluating the effectiveness and reliability of various police reported crime statics, such as the Uniform Crime Report; also known as the UCR. In the process of discussing these reports, I will outline some of the strengths and weaknesses of these reports and discuss ways to better understand crime in Canada. In accordance with this, I will compare crime stats in 2015 vs. 2016, using these crime reports as reference and find patterns and disruptions of crime rates in Canada, and whether crime rates in Canada are increasing or decreasing in accordance with these reports.

In 1962 Canada implanted the Uniform Crime Report, which includes the crimes that are reported to police and recorded by police, and

Prior to the Crime Severity Index, statistics Canada evaluated crime in a way that made it easy to see the volume of crimes for each geographical area, and the severity of crimes were on the same level, meaning crimes such as rape which are more serious crimes and theft under $5000, were all placed in the same category of seriousness. Since the introduction of the CSI, now crimes that are more serious are acknowledged in the report vs. crimes that are less

The UCR2 allows for more detailed crime analysis, the most helpful being that it goes into more depth on the incidents that are reported to police. The UCR2 now, “adds detailed information on individual criminal incidents including victim, accused persons and incident characteristics” (Boyd, 2015). Moreover, UCR2 allows up to four different types of offences committed in one incident, to be reflected in the report, which better shows the different types of offences that occur, whereas in the UCR only the most severe crime was reflected, for example if there was a theft followed by a homicide then the homicide would most likely only be reported. Finally, the category of violent crimes and property crimes was broadened and new crimes were included in these two categories. For example the violent crime category was widened to include, “criminal harassment, sexual offences again children, forcible confinement/kidnapping, extortion, uttering threats and threatening/harassing phone calls, while the property crimes category was revised to include mischief and arson”(Boyd, 2015).

Another beneficial improvement made when interpreting crimes was when Canada implemented the CSI. Chapter 4 in the textbook explains how each crime is, “weighted according to seriousness, for example murder is weighed at a value several hundred times