MEASURING CRIME

Measuring Crime

Measuring Crime

Introduction

Crime is basically the violation of the law. Every individual society explains crime in a different way, undoubtedly every crime breaches the law but not every breaching of law considers as a crime. A general definition defines crime as unexpected behavior of an individual that breach the existing values, tradition, cultural standards. In short it is an act which is committed in breaching of law and on that penalty/punishment is being imposed.

Crime can be classified as taking anything valuable by force from somebody called robbery, in aggravated assault the person unlawfully attack another person and caused bad injury to that person, in burglary the person commits an unlawful action to commit theft ,in larceny theft the person takes unlawfully the valuable thing from another and takes its possession also , in motor vehicle theft the person filch the vehicle by force of another person ,in arson the person willingly burn the property or valuable things of other without their consent etc. there are four elements without them crime can't be committed the offender, the victim, the offense that is un lawful act and last the incident. There are myriads reason for committing crime but some of the major reasons can be poverty, the statistics proved that with the changes in the poverty rates shows the fluctuations in the crime rates, the cause can be moral and the societal breakdown of the well being or if the person is having some mental instability then in that state of mind that person commits crime , or if the person is having the high level of insecurity, jealousy or personal disliking/abhorrence from the other person that can also the reason that forces the individual to commit crime like murder, rape etc .

In many countries most of the crimes neither are nor recorded also they are not reported either, some of them are not yet followed or they are not proved yet. The crimes which are reported and recorded can be seen in the crime statistics, which is gathered and also reported by different countries and these statistics are areas of interest for many different international organizations like UN and Interpol. The reported crimes in the form of statistics are being published by FBI, Home office etc thus the methods used for the research of crime statistics are as follows.

There are various methods for measuring crime; these measures include the survey of the households' house, records of different hospitals or insurances, and the record compilations which are kept by the police and law enforcement agencies.

The crime statistics which are official are considered as final and concluded, one drawback is that there are some offences that are not recorded ,sometimes public surveys which are conducted to calculate the criminal amount are not reported to police or any other law enforcement agency. These types of surveys are more reliable for evaluating trends, and it has also advantages like through survey that data is also collected which isn't reported to the police, it ...