Outline and assess the usefulness of official statistics in measuring crime

Throughout crime in Australia, a noticeable increase in crime occurred between the 1970’s to the 1990’s but has declined to a stable rate of crime which is similar trend in America. However, crime itself is often complex to define due to the variety of crime. Therefore, it is difficult to accurately measure crime and if crime cannot be measured efficiently and it proposes concerns of whether crime in Australia is stable or not. Although Australia’s system of collecting crime data is striving to be as accurate as possible, the media will often manipulate the data which misleads the Australian public of crime stability. Inclusively, through gaining an understanding of defining crime, accurately measuring data and comparing Australia’s crime data

In the 2015 and 2016 Police-report, the statistics show, that since 2003, crime has been on a steady decrease, however, in the year 2015 and 2016 crime has

Since 1930, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been tasked with collecting, publishing, and archiving criminal data statistics in most

Although crime has been around for ages, we only started collecting crime data around the 1930’s. Crime statistics show a lot about a country, state, county, etc. Crime can be linked to the environment, behavior of others, and personal experiences, it all depends on how the person deals with the hand they are dealt. Crime data is collected from three sources, which are uniform crime reports (UCR), national incident based reporting system (NIBRS), and national crime victimization survey (NCVS).

The Extent to Which Sociologists Agree that Official Criminal Statistics Do Not Give an Accurate Picture of the Extent in Terms of Crime

Deviance is not usually a crime, but may be seen as one. Deviance is when someone breaks the norms and values of a society, but the act is not illegal. Crime is where a person beaks the law of land, they either do something they shouldn’t, or they don’t do something they should. Crime and deviance can be measured with the use of Official Crime Statistic (OCS). OCS is the crimes which are reported by the victim, and then further recorded by the Police. Not all crimes are recorded by the Police, which lead to a dark figure in the overall collected OCS. To avoid dark figures there are other methods to measure crime and deviance.

​The National Crime Victimization Survey has its strengths which include ‘estimating the total amount of annual crimes that are not reported, in addition to, the crimes that are reported to the police. The NCVS provide more information on crimes that the Uniform Crime Report (UCR). The survey is done in the comfort of one’s home where the individual are more comfortable reporting the incident that occurred as opposed to entering a police department to report a crime or a potential crime. According to the textbook, the NCVS help people to understand why crimes are not reported to police and whether the type and nature of the criminal event influences whether the police will ever know it occurred. In some

When we look at both the NIBRS and the UCR, we see that the “NIBRS revises some of the existing data, such as crime definition that have been found in the summary based reporting system in the UCR.” (Hagan, 2003). One example of the difference between the NIBRS and UCR is how crimes are classified and then broke into categories and then divided into

There are methodological problems with how this survey is conducted, this then has a knock on effect of the original sky news media report. As this survey is sampled and not censes, it does appear to create sampling issues which are resulted in the data. This appears when respondents do not recall an incident, recalled crimes which were not within the time frame of the survey, crimes which haven’t been recorded to the police or simply incidents which have been miscoded when entered.

Since crime was first measured in Canada, fluctuations have been noticed in the crime rate from year-to-year. According to Statistics Canada, from 1962 to 1991, the police-reported crime rate increased steadily, and then started to decline. As a matter of fact, in 2013 reported crime rate was at its lowest point since 1969. Furthermore, the homicide

The Extent to Which Official Crime Statistics Provides a Reliable Estimate of the Amount of Crime Committed in England and Wales

Crime as a social construction is the idea that reality is created in our minds. What we perceive something to be ends up to be what it is. Crime, often described as deviance is a labelled behaviour. If one does not view an action as deviant at the time then it is not deviant, this shows us how deviance is a relative concept. In terms of how different people perceive crime, depending on what religious or ethnic backgrounds one may come from, there is heavy variation between individuals. What is illegal or legal in one culture can be very different in another culture. It can

During this essay, I will be discussing recorded crime statistics and victimisation surveys as they are our primary techniques of measuring levels and trends of crime. After briefly explaining what is meant by these terms, I will seek to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses in order to question the extent to which they are reliable resources that provide us with accurate information.

This report aims to explain how the CRQ was answered. It will also critically analyse four pieces of literature used to help with the primary research and how the British crime survey (BCS) was used in comparison with the primary data.

Measuring crime is also as hard as defining crime. Even though official crime levels are taken from police reports, they are usually not a hundred percent accurate because they fail to include the criminal as well as the criminal act, victims may not know that they were subject to a criminal act so it goes unreported or victims fail to report crimes because of many factors like fear and relations they might have to the criminal. Many psychologists have been interested in serious criminal offenders and understanding how they might have a different personality from ‘normal’ people. They have stated that common characteristics of someone with a criminal personality are impulsiveness, lack of feelings of guilt, pleasure seeking, being over- optimistic, and having a high sense of self-importance.