Predicting Crime With The Uniform Crime Reporting System

The Uniform Crime Report or the UCR is the official crime data collected by the FBI from the local police. It is not always a hundred percent correct. It uses the Part 1 and Part 2 crimes way to help solve the crimes. Though one of its weaknesses is that some crimes go unreported. Another weakness is that police records are not perfect and only the serious crime is reported. So, some of the crimes in the Part 1 which involves murder, nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, arson, and motor vehicle theft. Whereas Part 2 crimes involves all the other crimes reported to the FBI; which are less serious crimes and misdemeanors, excluding traffic violations. Some of its strengths is that it helps the FBI tally and annually publish the numbers of reported offenses by city, county all other United states. And that is easy to contact them when in needed of turning in a crime.

Crime measurement and statistics for police departments are very important when it comes to money allotment, staffing needs or termination and it is also used to determine the effectiveness of new laws and programs. There are three tools used to measure major crime in the United States: Uniform Crime Reports, National Crime Victimization Survey and the National Incident Based Reporting System- which is currently being tested to replace the Uniform Crime Reports. Although there different tools used to measure crime, crime rates can be deceiving. Each different tool reports a different type of rate, crime rates, arrest

Law enforcement agencies use three different sources to collect crime statistics. They use official statistics, victimizations surveys, and self-report surveys as their main sources of collecting data. The University of Texas at Arlington and the University of Texas at Austin both have pretty similar crime statistics.

UCR or known as the Uniform crime reports is an annual report published by the FBI in the DOJ, which is meant to estimate most of the major street crimes in the United States.The main purpose of the UCR is basically to collect as many crimes or reliable crimes that come up as crime statistics so it can be used in our law enforcement administration. The Ucr is a very helpful tool for the law. The system was created in 1929. It provided information for criminologists,sociologists, and even the media. The Ucr mostly concentrates on assaults and robberies. The NIBRS or the national incident based reporting system is the system that the government uses for gathering data about recent or past crimes. The system has a lot of purposes but one of the main purposes’ is to evaluate the crimes associated with any current culture of violence theories.

A system called “CompStat” was used to track crime reports and other data in an effort to track areas with high crime rates and gang hot spots. Karoliszyn reports that “after patrolling these hot spots for a year, murders had dropped by 60 percent. By 2003, murders were the lowest they had been since 1964” (338). With these statistics, Karoliszyn proves the effectiveness of the system when actually used in the workforce. There is a flaw in his claim. The author only proved the system’s effectiveness in one city, and in one year. As with a great majority of statistics, these numbers could vary either towards or against the system’s value if done in different cities and in different amounts of time. With more data spread across the spectrum, a bigger picture could be seen regarding the reliability of a precognitive policing system.

The Uniform Crime Report, which was developed in the 1930s, is commonly used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a record of crimes committed all across the United States. These crimes, which fall under two categories, Part I and Part II offenses, are reported by local police to the Federal Bureau of Investigation each year. Part I offenses are considered to be the more serious of crimes recognized by society. Such examples of this are homicide, forcible rape, robbery, arson, motor vehicle theft, etc. Part II offenses are those that are considered less serious, such as fraud, simple assault, drug abuse, gambling, stolen property, embezzlement, etc. Part I crimes can also be subdivided into what are known as violent crimes and

The Uniform Crime Report and the National Crime Victimization survey are similar in creating data for crime and aim to be accurate as possible and they both are valuable in helping with crime statics. The UCR reports crime and the NCVS aim to look for unreported crimes. However, the purpose of the UCR (Uniform Crime Report) reports to law enforcement agencies accordingly to our textbook (Understanding violence and Victimization, Meadows, Robert-6th ed. P. 3). It helps to enable law enforcement to exchange information about different crimes on a nationwide system, but there is certain information that would not be available because crimes are only reported to

Ever wonder how crimes are measured? What is FBI Uniform Crime Report data? How these Crime Statistics are produce? And how is burglary define?

orting System fall under the Uniform Crime Reporting Program that provides information on crime all of the United States. This includes regions, states, counties, cities, towns, tribal law enforcement, colleges and universities. In this paper we will compare and contrast the two primary crime data sources used within the United States, the Uniform Crime Report and the National Incident-Based Reporting System. Before we do this, we will discuss each source individually and how it is used in Criminological research. The purpose of this study is to determine which source is lacking in function and which provides the best accurate information.

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).

In the late 1920s, the Committee on Uniform Crime Records was established by the International Association of the Chiefs of Police (IACP). The goal of the Committee was to develop a systematic way to measure crime in the United States. The Committee collaborated and decided to focus on seven (7) specific crime areas which they felt were the most known crimes and the most likely to be reported. These crimes were: burglary, robbery, larceny-theft, rape, auto theft, murder and aggravated assault (James & Rishard, 2008).

The Federal Bureau of Investigation utilizes the Uniform Crime Report which began in 1930, it compiles data of crime committed in the United States. Over 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country give data on a voluntary basis to the FBI. So if a crime was not reported to a law enforcement agency it would not shown up in the Uniform Crime Report. According to the Department of Justice, crimes including hate crime and sexual assaults go unreported. Therefore the UCR data and statistics are not hundred percent accurate, but the program bases

Statistics have been made to show what races are linked to certain types of crime. The Uniform Crime Report has been made to show these types of information. However, these reports only show information about offenders that the crime was resulted in an arrest. This presents many issues because there are a lot of crimes committed that were not reported. Also, the UCR only shows crime reports linked to only four racial groups, Caucasian, African American, Native American, and Asian.

Firstly, recorded crime statistics are collated through the collection of data by law enforcement agencies, such as the police in England and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in America. It focuses on the crime that is reported by the public and then what is chosen to be recorded by the police. During the mid-late 19th century, these statistics formed the basis of information about crime, however, although they still provide raw data for publications such as the Offenders Index, they are now viewed critically. This is because, according to Mayhew and Hough (1988), the recorded crime statistics are “adequate as a measure of police workload, but because of unreported and unrecorded crime – deficient as an index of crime”.

Uniform Crime reports, National Incident Based Reporting System and the National Crime Reporting Survey are all major crime reporting systems here in the U.S. Each crime reporting system has its own advantage and disadvantage towards the criminals and victims as well as the law enforcement involved. Each has a unique history on how it started and when, how it became as popular of a system as it is now and will it keep growing or will it one day start to fade into the background while other reporting systems take its place.