CRIME STATISTICS

Crime Statistics

Crime Statistics

Introduction

Statistics on crime are vital to the criminological enterprise. They help establish the basic social facts of crime, and these facts constitute the objects of explanation and provide evidence for the assessment of explanations. Unfortunately, crime statistics are among the most unreliable and difficult of all statistics on social phenomena. It is impossible to determine accurately the amount of crime in any given place at any given time. As indicated above, many crimes go undetected; others are detected but not reported, either to police or to researchers; still others are reported but not officially recorded. Thus, any record of crimes can be considered at most an index of the crimes actually committed. This fact has spurred both caution about sources of crime data and further inquiry to validate and improve empiricism in the field. A common solution is to compare the “behavior” of crime indexes across multiple data sources.

Discussion

Recent figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) report that violent and property crime are declining. For example, from 2003 to 2004, the index for violent crime indicates a drop of 2.2 percent. Perhaps more telling is that between 1995 and 2004 the same index reports an overall decline in violent crime of 32 percent. The trend for property crime is equally noteworthy. Figures from the NCVS report a 2.1 percent decrease from 2003 to 2004. Moreover, the rate of property crime from 1995 to 2004 fell by 23.4 percent. Clearly, these data suggest that the problem of crime is increasingly under control and that the mechanisms to contain it are working effectively. However, interpreting the data reveals another story.

Patterns of Crime

Criminologists endeavor to document pat terns of crime in order to understand the nature and extent of crime. While the public regards many crimes as random acts, criminological inquiry shows that crime is not randomly distributed across individuals or groups. Criminological research on the pat terns of crime is that crime tends to be an “intrastatus” activity. For a large proportion terns of crime focuses on the relationship of 0 criminal behavior to dimensions of time and space and dimensions of social structure. One important insight in documenting pattern of crime, the statuses that describe offenders also describe victims. Criminology has paid close attention to a variety of contextual and structural dimensions that underlie the basic patterns of crime. These include the temporal and spatial distribution of crime as well as the age, sex, race, and social class of the participants.

Time and Space

Criminologists have long been interested in the social contexts that shape criminal offending. Social context is defined in terms of the temporal and spatial features that are correlated with crime. Criminologists have been concerned with at least three metrics of time: annual patterns, seasonal patterns, and daily patterns. Historical studies of crime in the United States suggest that serious crime increased in the decades prior to the Civil War and continued to increase following the ...