Criminology For Dummies - Steven Briggs

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that you think a victim would report, the actual report rate is quite low. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, only two out of five violent crimes were reported to the police in 2019.

      Besides not receiving reports for every crime, another significant problem with the UCR is that a police agency must pick only the most serious crime from a criminal incident to report to the FBI. In other words, the police can’t report multiple crimes that occurred during a single incident. So, if a man steals a car and then later sets the car ablaze to conceal his first crime, the investigating police agency reports only the arson, not the motor vehicle theft.

      This will change in 2021 as the FBI completes its transition to a new reporting methodology — the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which is designed to efficiently and accurately gather more information on more crimes from police agencies’ computerized record management systems. The full nature of a multi-crime incident will now be documented.

      

Despite its problems, the UCR provides a solid, nationwide picture of long-term crime trends and allows for year-to-year comparisons among each of the Part 1 crimes because its problems are generally consistent from year to year.

      Tallying the number of arrests

      In addition to the number of crime reports, the UCR also collects information on the number of arrests. For these statistics, the UCR looks at not only the Part 1 crimes I mention in the preceding section, but also 21 other crimes, including simple assault and driving under the influence of intoxicants.

      Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation

      FIGURE 3-1: The U.S. violent crime rate has dropped fairly steadily since 1991.

Obviously, arrest statistics don’t give a full picture of crime. (Arrest doesn’t necessarily mean guilt, and no nationwide statistics show the percentage of arrested persons who are found guilty in state court.) Even so, arrest statistics do help evaluate police effectiveness by showing clearance rates — the percentage of reported crimes that end in arrests. Obviously, the higher the clearance rate, the more effective the police are at catching the bad guys.

      Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation

      FIGURE 3-2: The clearance rates for various crimes in 2018.

      Arrest statistics provide another tool for evaluating crime rates: Tracking the number of arrests helps track certain trends for crimes that people usually don’t report, such as driving under the influence of intoxicants. Yet, tracking the number of arrests has its shortcomings. For instance, a decrease in the number of arrests for a certain crime may have alternative explanations, including these:

       Fewer people are committing the crime.

       Police are putting fewer resources into investigating the crime.

       Criminals have figured out ways to commit the crime without being caught.

      

A decrease in a certain crime can have some other explanations, too, so you can’t draw many conclusions from these arrest statistics alone. For example, from 2008 to 2018, reported property crime decreased by 26 percent in the United States. However, it is quite possible that as usage of the Internet has exploded in society, some criminals have stopped stealing purses or committing burglary and instead have gone online where the risk of arrest is very low. An enterprising thief can send emails to millions of targets and only one victim needs to respond for the thief to get his payday. And if you are like me, you don’t call the police every time a Nigerian Prince emails you with an offer to make you rich. (See Chapter 6 for a discussion of Internet fraud.)

      Spotlighting unreported crime: Victimization surveys

      How do researchers get around the problem that so many crimes go unreported? The best answer is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Each year, the U.S. Census Bureau, in cooperation with the Bureau of Justice Statistics (part of the U.S. Department of Justice) conducts a survey of 95,000 households and asks people 12 and older questions in a series of interviews about crimes they experienced over a three-year period. Based on this sampling, the Bureau of Justice Statistics then estimates rates for a variety of crimes. (The survey excludes uncommon crimes, such as kidnapping, because the sampling isn’t large enough.) To see the 2019 version of the survey, you can visit the Bureau of Justice Statistics website.

As expected, the NCVS shows that many crimes aren’t reported to the police. For example, the number of rapes reported to census workers for the NCVS in 2018 is 35 percent higher than the number of rapes reported to police. Women often don’t report rape for a variety of reasons, such as shame, embarrassment, fear of the suspect, a process that can seem degrading, and a concern that the report won’t do any good. (See Chapter 5 for more information about violent crimes, including rape.)

      Like the other forms of measuring crime, victimization surveys have their shortcomings, too. Primarily, they’re very expensive. Because of their high cost, the NCVS sampling of 95,000 households is not large enough to draw meaningful conclusions at the state and local levels. For instance, a criminologist in Pueblo, New Mexico, can’t draw any conclusions about rape trends in his home state or town from this national survey. Thus, the NCVS data isn’t very helpful in planning to provide resources to local domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers.

      Separate from the NCVS, local and state governments, nonprofit agencies, and universities sometimes conduct their own localized surveys. Such surveys aren’t limited to victims, however. Researchers rely heavily on surveys of youth alcohol and drug use to identify new and dangerous trends. For example, in 2019, the number of 12th graders vaping marijuana in the previous 30 days had doubled since 2018.

      Accepting the shortcomings of crime statistics

      As I explained previously, none of the three primary methods of gathering crime stats — crime reports, number of arrests, or victimization surveys — is perfect.

      

Despite the shortcomings of each approach, together (and combined with other observations) they provide a decent picture of crime in the United States, in general. And with the FBI’s move to the National Incident-Based Reporting

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