Police Crime Statistics

10 Key excerpts on "Police Crime Statistics"

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  Research Methods in Criminal Justice and Criminology

  • Marko Nikolic(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Society Publishing

    (Publisher)

  The chapter highlights the official mode of measuring crime which was defined by the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). Also, discussed are the challenges that are associated with the measurement of crime. 6.1. INTRODUCTION Criminology is the scientific study of the nature, extent, management, causes, control, consequences, and prevention of criminal behavior, both on individual and social levels. It is an interdisciplinary field in both the behavioral and social sciences, which draws primarily upon the research of sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, biologists, social anthropologists, as well as scholars of law. To supplement criminology, it is important to know how much crime takes place. Attempting to understand requires taking into account a number of factors including what causes it, who it victimizes, what its general social impacts are, and what should be done about it. Gauging the extent of the problem means discovering how much of it there is, where, and when it occurs most often, and among what social categories it occurs most frequently. The kinds of crime statistics typically seen and used in criminological research are often referred to as quantitative data, which generally refers to data that are represented in numeric form and generated by methods that are highly structured and seek to aggregate as many cases as possible. In crime analysis, quantitative data are often contrasted with qualitative data, which involves the application of social science data collection procedures (like interviewing research participants), analytical methods, and statistical techniques. Crime analysts use qualitative data to for the purpose of discovering the underlying causes of crime and studying crime in the social context. Worldwide concern over violence as an issue of social justice, public health and, increasingly, of economic development, has brought this debate onto the agendas of governments, donor agencies and civil

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  Criminal Justice

  An Introduction

  • Peter Joyce, Wendy Laverick(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It might thus be concluded that official crime statistics do not provide an objective statement relating to the amount of crime in society but are instead the product of a complex process of interplay between the main stakeholders of the criminal justice system – politicians, the media, criminal justice practitioners and the public. They reflect not the volume of crime in society but, rather, attitudes towards social behaviour which changes across historical time periods.

  The usefulness of crime statistics

  The above discussion might suggest that police recorded crime statistics have little value to those wishing to study crime and deviance. This impression would not, however, be totally accurate, since these figures do convey useful information both to those who work within the criminal justice system and to those wishing to study its operations from outside. The information can be employed in two ways:

  • Crime pattern analysis. Crime reports form the basis of crime pattern analysis. This may be conducted locally or nationally, in connection with crimes that occur in different police force areas. A contemporary application of this is the mapping of crime using geographic information systems (GIS ) in order to identify trends and patterns of crime in order to prevent future occurrences and aid detection. GIS is an important component of a police management strategy known as Computer Statistics (or Comparative Statistics), termed CompStat.
  • Omissions are revealing. Useful information regarding the operations and purpose of the criminal justice system may be gleaned from omissions in crime statistics. The under-reporting of certain types of crime such as sexual violence may provide valid information concerning victims’ perception of the operations of agencies within the criminal justice system and provide a rationale for their reform. Conversely, changes in the rates at which certain crimes are reported may evidence improvements to the working practices of key bodies that operate within the system. It has been concluded that statistical products of this kind may reveal more about changing attitudes and decision-making of those involved in the process than about changes in offending behaviour itself (Bottomley and Pease, 1986

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  The Mismeasure of Crime

  • Clayton J. Mosher, Terance D. Miethe, Timothy C. Hart(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Statistics of crime. . . are of little value because of the lack of uniformity in the definitions of crime, because of the close relation between police work and politics, because of the lack of comparability among categories employed in reporting, because of varying police practices, and because of the absence of centralized reporting. (Tibbits, 1932, p. 963) Despite attempts by the Census Bureau to collect crime statistics based on law enforcement data as early as 1907, it was not until 1930 that such statistics became available at a national level. In 1927, a committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) was formed to examine the feasibility of collecting uniform crime records (IACP, 1929). In this period, most crime reports produced by state and municipal agencies were virtually useless for comparative purposes. Definitions of crime were not uniform across jurisdictions or even within states, there were no centralized reporting procedures, law enforcement policies varied across jurisdictions, and crime statistics were frequently used for political purposes. In the 1920s, aside from Massachusetts, no state published any statistics on the total number of arrests, and no state released statistics on crimes known to the police. Virtually the only sources of information in the field of police statistics at this time were the annual reports of individual city police departments, with only 14 cities publishing data covering the more serious offenses that were reported to them (Maltz, 1977). Exhibit 2.5, based on data compiled by Monkkonen (1994) reveals some of the vagaries associated with cross-jurisdictional and longitudinal comparisons of early police arrest data. In 1880, arrests for drunkenness offenses ranged from a low of 1,630 per 100,000 population in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a high of 5,098 in New Haven, Connecticut

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  Writing the History of Crime

  • Paul Knepper(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  WRITING THE HISTORY OF CRIME 44 analysis than archival research. It was not so much quantification as a technique, but social science as replacement for historicism as the basis for historical inquiry that alarmed traditional historians. Jacques Barzun, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Geoffrey Elton wrote down their concerns about what the enthusiasm for social science was doing to history. The struggle for the soul of the profession was on. The moment had arrived when historians stood at the crossroads: Should they run with the new social scientific history or cling to the old traditional history? 54 Among historians writing about crime, this struggle took place over crime statistics. The debate about the long-term decline in violence had to do with court statistics, that is, with the processing of individual cases. Beginning in the nineteenth century, governments in Europe began issuing crime statistics, that is, the amount of crimes known to police (whether or not a suspect had been identified or anyone had been convicted). In the United Kingdom, the Judicial Statistics series commenced in 1856; each annual volume consists of three parts. The first, known as police statistics, shows indictable offences known to police. The second part, the criminal statistics, gives details of criminal proceedings for judicial districts and the third part, the prison statistics, provides information about commitments to gaols, prisons, reformatories and industrial schools. These statistics were valued by criminologists since the early decades of the twentieth century, especially in the United States, where nothing like it was available. National crime statistics were not published in the United States until the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports series began in the 1930s. In his 1967 study of crime in Victorian England, John J. Tobias pronounced British crime statistics available for this period to be worthless.

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  Psychology and Crime

  2nd edition

  • Aidan Sammons, David Putwain(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  chapter 2 Defining and measuring crime 11 (see Chapter 8). An associated claim is that the excess of crime among black males is accounted for by the types of ‘victimless’ crime (e.g. possession of drugs) where the authorities have more discretion about who to arrest, investigate and charge. Critical perspectives on race, ethnicity and crime are explored in Chapter 12. Measuring crime Just as it may seem simple at the outset to define what a criminal is, it might also seem relatively straightforward to measure how much crime there is. Surely it is just a matter of counting how many crimes occur? Again, matters are not so sim-ple. The crime rate of a given country or area is calculated by counting how many offences occur and dividing by the number of people who live there. The problem is that there are several ways of counting crimes and they tend not to agree with one another. The three main sources of information about the extent of crime are offi-cial statistics, victimisation surveys and offender surveys. Each of these sources of information has its strengths and limitations but all of them distort the ‘true’ figure of crime to some extent. Apply your learning Two candidates are standing for election as local police commissioner. The current commissioner is campaigning on the basis that her policies have resulted in a low level of crime. The challenger is campaigning on the basis that crime is ‘out of control’ in the locality. How might each justify their campaign position? How might each criticise their opponent’s stance? Official crime statistics In England and Wales, official crime figures are published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on the basis of two sets of data, the crimes recorded by the police and a victimisation survey now known as the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW). Similar arrangements are in place in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

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  An Introduction to Criminology and Criminal Justice

  • Chris Crowther-Dowey(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  This is linked with the expansion of positivism and the belief that human society can be examined in the same way that scientists study natural phenomena. For instance, crime can be measured in the same way that reactions between particles can be observed by physicists. The growing influence of scientific values occurred in many areas of social life, including urbanization and industrializa-tion. However, it was the rationalization of society resulting from the expansion of huge impersonal bureaucracies that brought about a major change to the way society was organized. There was an increased emphasis on quantifying social phenomena and measuring various aspects of day-to-day life. The use of statistics by state administrators and social scientists was a consequence of this transformation. Official statistics are therefore an important source of information if a student or researcher wishes to gain some understanding of the volume of crimes committed. A modicum of caution needs to be exercised because there is sometimes a tendency to give criminal statistics too much power. It is not unusual to hear politicians debating law and order present statistics as if they capture the ‘true’ facts about offending behaviour. Because these figures are treated as facts they are seen as being beyond dispute and debate. Statistical facts are claimed to be more relevant than opinions, which are perceived as subjective and less reliable. To gain a fuller understanding of the different uses of statistics it may be helpful to consider how they are used in relation to two main perspectives, the state administrator perspective and the questioning academic viewpoint. The state administrator perspective This is underpinned by a ‘consensus’ approach advanced by functionalist sociologists such as the nineteenth-century writer Emile Durkheim.

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  Criminology

  • Tim Newburn(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Despite the warnings of criminologists and government statisticians alike, these statistics are still treated by many politicians and journalists as an accurate ‘barometer’ of crime, and any sizeable rise in the figures they produce tends to receive widespread publicity and spark off arguments about police or government ineffectiveness or the need for sentencing changes (falls, conversely, tend to be largely ignored). The figures are also used a great deal at a local level to inform the distribution of police resources and, increasingly, the preparation of crime ‘audits’ and crime reduction plans, as well as the measurement of police and crime reduction partnerships’ ‘performance’ in comparison with targets and other areas.

  Some limitations of Criminal Statistics

  The numbers of particular crimes, and the overall level of crime, recorded in Criminal Statistics , can be profoundly affected by changes in:

  • • decisions about which offences to include (only 'notifiable' offences are included; this excludes 'summary' offences, as well as those offences recorded by non-'Home Office police forces' such as the British Transport Police, the Ministry of Defence Police, etc.);
  • • changes in the 'counting rules';
  • • changes in public attitudes toward the reporting of particular offences;
  • • changes in police practices toward particular offences (the 'upgrading' or 'downgrading' of particular offences).

  In addition, Criminal Statistics are a poor tool for:

  • • understanding the social context of crime (very diverse crimes are included under broad offence headings);
  • • understanding the relative risks of victimization.

  Review questions

  • 1 When were official crime statistics first collected in Britain?
  • 2 What is meant by ‘attrition’?
  • 3 What are the main reasons people fail to report crimes to the police?
  • 4 Why might the police decide to, or fail to, record crimes that are reported to them?

  Victimisation surveys

  The essence of the victimisation survey is the standard sample survey. The objective is generally to seek to interview a representative sample of a particular population and to ask them a series of questions about their experience of victimisation – usually over the past year. As with so many elements of modern social scientific inquiry, the victimisation survey began life in America. The product of President Johnson’s government in the 1960s, victimisation surveys were intended to provide a more accurate measure of the extent of crime, and of trends in crime, than the hitherto standard method of relying on official statistics – the Uniform Crime Reports.

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  Fundamentals of Criminological and Criminal Justice Inquiry

  • Daniel P. Mears, Joshua C. Cochran(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  of crime, but in reality one has far more than the other. Use of different data sources can help us determine the extent to which crime may go unreported and sets the stage for studies that can unpack why discrepancies between actual crime and reported crime arise. The topic is interesting in its own right and is certainly relevant for policy. Consider, for example, that in the United States, roughly half of all violent crime is not reported to the police. 13 Consider, too, that under-reporting can vary across racial, ethnic, gender, age, and other groups or by area. And it can result from diverse causes, such as differences among groups in their trust of the police. 14 Identifying Socially Meaningful Descriptions and Possible Causes of Social Phenomena Measuring and counting phenomena that interest criminology and criminal justice researchers requires an understanding of how to describe and discern such phenomena. When such understanding already exists, then empirical descriptive accounts can readily proceed. However, when it does not, research is needed for creating this understanding. Consider a community in which attending church is expected of every- one. In such a community, not attending church amounts to defiance against the community’s way of life and even its laws. If we want to count crime in such a community, we would need first to understand how citizens view church attendance. We otherwise would fail to include non-attendance as a type of crime or, at the least, as a type of antisocial behavior. A prominent goal of social scientific research thus consists of identify- ing cultural and social frames of reference for how to interpret certain behaviors or actions in particular societies. Such research seeks to determine how individuals, groups, organizations, or communities discuss, describe, or think about ways of acting. In all instances, the focus lies with the “social world” or “social phenomena,” not with the natural world.

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  Crime Statistics in the News

  Journalism, Numbers and Social Deviation

  • Jairo Lugo-Ocando(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In bringing these contributions into the discussion, the chapter aims to provide a comprehensive picture of these issues. Overall, it also seeks to offer insight into the reasons for the gap and the issues of perceptions and pre-conceptions that also define the interpretation of statistics by the public. These issues are explored in the light of wider theories of public opinion such as the role of crime statis- tics in reinforcing the “spiral of silence”; theories that could help explain, in part, how and why people react to these statistics in the way they do. The chapter then goes on to provide a political account of how statis- tics are interpreted by the public and how they help change and/or rein- force perceptions about issues and policies relating to law and order. It offers examples of news stories containing crime statistics that have been important in the shaping of the public’s views regarding crime while looking at how they influence, over the time, crime policy. In looking at the way the public engages with crime statistics through news media reports, this chapter also explores how this reporting affects economic behaviour, such as tourism flows, particular industries, such as leisure, and security-related areas of the economy. The intention is to offer a comparative analysis of the gap between what people perceive to be the main issues according to their views derived from what statistics say within news reports and what they actually mean in terms of “hard evi- dence”. All in all, the chapter will try to examine how the way crime statistics are reported by the news media influences how the general pub- lic sees crime. The Importance of Numbers Let us start by acknowledging that the reporting of crime statistics in the news media has two main purposes. First, it brings about accountability for government policy and hopefully triggers both the judicial system and police authorities to address crime in specific areas and around specific issues.

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  Municipal Benchmarks

  Assessing Local Performance and Establishing Community Standards

  • David N. Ammons(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  20 Police *; espite an abundance of potential benchmarks for police services, their -use as measuring rods for judging or comparing municipal police depart-ments has been controversial. When headlines in the local newspaper, for in-stance, proclaim that the community's crime rate is below the state or national average, the police chief and other local officials are understandably proud. A low rate of crime is touted as another example of the community's high qual-ity of life and a testimony to its competent police department. On the other hand, when local news media bemoan a community's crime problem, charge that police efforts are ineffective, and cite higher-than-average crime rates to substantiate their contentions, several predictable arguments against the use of crime rates invariably are raised by police officials and supporters of the local police force. Nationally collected crime statistics, formally known as Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), are not above challenge. Critics point out that crime statistics can only be as accurate as the data provided to the Federal Bureau of Investiga-tion (FBI) by individual police departments. If individual departments are sloppy in their data collection or reporting, or if they intentionally misrepre-sent their performance statistics, the quality of the UCR is thereby diminished. Furthermore, the UCR includes statistics only on reported crimes. Victimiza-tion studies indicate that many crimes go unreported and, therefore, are ex-cluded from the UCR. Finally, critics of the use of UCR crime rates for evaluat-ing police departments correctly contend that a host of community factors other than police performance also contribute to a community's rate of crime.

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