Ideological Bias Reflected in American Crime Statistics

As Nils Christie argued, crime is a property of the state (2004). As such, it can be defined by the same systems of ideals which influence the state. Crime statistics, which refer to a category of human acts that society view as deviant, can consequently be argued to be without objectivity (Dorling and Simpson, 1999). The statistics they provide are thus arguably not exact. To a certain extent one could infer they are reflections of society, of those who present the data and most importantly of those who accumulate it. The facts themselves become a socially constructed foundation for social knowledge, which inevitably become subjective. This essay aims to discuss how ideological biases within the Police and to a certain extent the media are reflected in the crime statistics.
Police recordings of crime has been a main source for crime statistics for decades, but these recordings are known to greatly represent a particular ideological bias: Institutional racism. As defined by Macpherson (1999) Institutional Racism consists of the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. Though his accounts have been criticized, there has been evidence in studies that ideologies about particular groups has influenced policing to a certain extent. An example being Westley's study into violence and police during the 1970's. The study demonstrated that the police held a series of ideologies about the type of characteristics a criminal held. In fact, several officers believed the criminal was generally unemployed, uneducated and would resort to crime to obtain what they could not legally acquire (1970).
During the time of the study, t...

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