CRIMINOLOGY

Criminology



Criminology

Introduction

Crime data is the primary type of data used in crime analysis. There are many issues about crime data that can lead to misinterpretation or misuse of statistics. The section covers some of the general issues with crime data and then discusses the various ways in which crime can be counted.

The various ways in which crime is measured affect statistics created from them. Below are the four major ways in which crime is measured and considerations for each.

Crime Reports

“Crime reports” refer to individual crime incidents that are reported to the police and are contained within the agency's RMS. It is important to note that even though all crime data collected by police agencies is generally the same, how and when incidents are recorded can vary by region, state, and even by police agency. For example, one agency may call tools taken from the back of a truck a theft, whereas another may call it a burglary from vehicle, two very different crime classifications even though it is the same crime. Thus, how an agency records its data will affect its statistics. Because each agency has its own policies, procedures, and RMS (there are no national standards for recording crime incidents), it is problematic comparing statistics based on crime report data across agencies. This is why crime statistics of different agencies are compared using federal standards (e.g., UCR or NIBRS).

Uniform Crime Report (UCR)

The UCR is a national standard of classifying crime uniformly that disregards state laws (see www.fbi.gov/ucr for further details). It was created to provide a way to consistently count crime across the United States. The UCR does not collect information from agencies about all crime, only selected types (e.g., homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson) and has a hierarchical coding system (i.e., if a rape and a murder are committed to the same person, only the murder is counted). However, it does collect information on all arrests no matter the type of crime. Compliance is voluntary, so not all police agencies report their statistics (though over 95 percent of the U.S. population is represented in the UCR statistics). The numbers are typically reported on a monthly basis to a state agency that then reports it to the FBI. These numbers are not updated (static). The most important differences between crime reports and UCR for a crime analyst are that UCR ...