The Uniform Crime Reporting System Essay

Official statistics include the UCR, Uniform Crime Report, and NIBRS, National Incident-Based Reporting System. UCR is a summary based reporting system that collects data on the eight index crimes, murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft, auto theft, and arson. The UCR is published annually by the FBI, but the data is collected by law enforcement agencies all around the United States. UCR looks at trends of crime and gives statistics of crime in certain areas. Three weaknesses of the UCR is it only reports the highest crime committed, so if someone commits burglary and murders someone in the process the UCR will only report the murder, it only reports crimes known to the police, and not all crimes are reported to enhance the view of cities and areas. Although the UCR has weaknesses, it also has its strengths. Three strengths of UCR are that it has multiple years of data available, almost all law enforcement agencies use this to report crimes, and helps law

Crime has always been a hot topic in sociology. There are many different reasons for people to commit criminal acts. There is no way to pinpoint the source of crime. I am going to show the relationship between race and crime. More specifically, I will be discussing the higher chances of minorities being involved in the criminal justice system than the majority population, discrimination, racial profiling and the environment criminals live in.

Studies on relationship between race and delinquency primarily focus on two groups, African Americans and Whites. Applicable arrest data reports that African Americans are disproportionately involved in delinquency, with larger differences for serious crimes. Recent analysis has indicated that these race differences have declined in recent years. Criticism of these studies note that crimes committed by African Americans may be more likely to come to attention of the police and that African Americans offenders are more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts. Early self-report data found little or no relationship between race and delinquency. Later self-report studies found that African Americans and whites commit similar levels of minor delinquency, while African Americans are more likely to engage in serious delinquency, but not to extent reported in arrest data. The studies attributed the discrepancy to a larger percentage of high-rate African Americans offenders than high-rate white offenders. Victimization data suggests that African Americans are more likely than whites to be both offenders and victims of violence. Race and social class explain some but not all of the factors contributing to serious delinquency (Wright and Younts, 2009).

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.

The UCR, also known as the Uniform Crime Reports, is a report put out by the FBI that shows a series of data on crime. It is summary based and a group level of analysis. The FBI gets the information for the UCR through agencies/jurisdictions volunteering the information to them. Some of the positives about the UCR is that it can compare certain agencies and areas in which more crimes were committed. The UCR also is quick, efficient, and easy to acquire the information. One of the drawbacks for the UCR is that it does not encompass all the crimes reported to the police. Since providing the reports is voluntary, jurisdictions vary in the completeness of the data they sent. There can also be clerical or filing problems. Only the most serious crime

In this article, Robert, April, and Jorge (2010) acknowledges previous research reports on this topic and reveals that race, and racial patterns have found their way in involvement of crime. However, Robert, April, and Jorge (2010) argue that there is no significant proof that there are meaningful racial disparities in the legal systems. Although some literatures provide research on the existence of racial profiling by police, in imprisonment, and sentencing, other researchers report no significant racial disparities in the legal systems (Black and Reiss, 1970; Pilivian and Briar, 1964). However, other researchers report on ample racial disparities based on race. These researches are controversial because the size of the differences in such reports tends to bring up the question of meaningfulness of the differences observed (Wilbanks, 1987).

On the other hand, others argue that disproportionality in arrest decisions is commensurate with the racial distributions in offending rather than residential distribution in the population (D’Alessio & Stolzenberg, 2003; Sampson & Lauritsen, 1997). Putting it differently, proponents of this group hold that differential involvement in crime commission leads to higher arrest rates. For this reason, employing frequency of crime involvement as a baseline measure would yield different findings as opposed to relying only population as a baseline measure (Golub et al., 2007).

Statistics do show that African Americans have a higher percent of crime rates than Caucasians. African Americans makes up thirteen percent of the countries total population; however they also make up thirty-one percent of all of the arrests. “... analysts say, [police] stop many more blacks and Hispanics on highways and on city streets then they do whites” (“Crime and Race”). Do the police target these minority races merely on race? Analysts not only believe the idea of racial profiling, they refute it. They consider the fact that these races commit more crimes than whites do. The high crime rates of minorities are argued that the minorities are arrested at a higher rate than whites because a higher population of minorities live in poor neighborhoods. Areas where unemployment is high, poverty is common, and schools are unfunded. Many socialists point out that crime tends to correlate with both poverty and unemployment. These factors may make minority youth feel they have to turn to criminal activities because of the “blocked opportunities” other adolescent people might receive. Minorities are not arrested at higher rate because they are targeted by police, they are just committing more crimes for the reason that they live in deprived regions (“Update: Crime and Race”).

Although a crime is reported in the Uniform Crime Report does not mean that the arrestee in that crime is representative of the population. It is easy to misinterpret the Uniform Crime Report and generalize a certain race or even gender to a particular crime. We often see poor, nonwhite males in the Uniform Crime Report for committing Part I crimes. This diverts the attention away from the wealthy white businessman who might be a part of white-collar crime. White-collar crime is hardly represented in this type of crime measurement (Barkan, 2012).

While both sides of this deeply entrenched controversy substantiate meaningful claims, neither of their arguments is exhaustive, although Walker, Spohn, and DeLone’s case is much more convincing. African American arrest statistics are best understood as the convergence of both a somewhat higher incidence of crime as well as racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. Although higher incidence of crime may initially appear to justify higher arrest rates, there is significant evidence demonstrating that not only is African American crime exaggerated by a racially discriminatory criminal justice system (one of the products of which is disparate arrest rates), the greater crime rates in and of themselves are a result of economic inequality.

Policing and punishment in America is hardly colorblind. It is not a coincidence that minorities serve longer sentences, have higher arrest and conviction rates, face higher bail amounts, and are more often the victims of police use of deadly force than white citizens. When it comes to criminals, many people have a preconception of what a criminal is. Usually when people think of a criminal they picture a Black or Latino face. The thought of an Asian criminal is often related to Asian gangs. Interestingly enough, White people as a group are rarely associated with the thought of crime, even though they account for 70% of arrests and 40% of the prison population each year (Russel xiv). This seems to be

Nunn, K (2002). Race, Crime and the Pool of Surplus Criminality: or Why the War on

Q1.The racial/ethnic differences in offending, victimization, and incarceration? Minorities, particularly African Americans, are generally overrepresented in the criminal justice system both as offenders and as victims.  According to the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for 2003, African Americans (who were 12.7 percent of the population in 2003) were arrested for 37 percent of violent crimes (murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault) and 29 percent of property crime (102:288). African Americans are disproportionately arrested for violent crimes and whites for burglaries and property crimes. Although most crime is committed by males, black women are also disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system. The rate of black women under control of the criminal justice system is growing faster than for any other group, including black men and white men (86:136). Blacks are victims of serious violent crimes at far higher rates than whites. In 2002, blacks were 6 times more likely to be murdered than whites; and although homicide levels have declined for all groups over the past decade, during the 1976 to 2002 period, rates were disproportionately high for African Americans at 47 percent of victims (28

A proponent of racial profiling’s use stand firmly on the empirical data, which suggests that Blacks are more likely to criminally offend than whites more generally and especially with regard to the drug courier profile. These groups point to research that indicates that racial minorities commit more criminal offenses, no doubt, in part, because of their higher exposure to social factors that provide opportunity and motive for criminal behavior. Blacks are highly over-represented in arrest rates and imprisonment, although whites still compose the majority of incarcerated persons and those arrested overall. Seventy percent of those arrested in 2000 were white. This result in

Arrest for whites and blacks often alter by the amount and gravity of the misdeed each rush commits. Is the higher occurrence of black apprehensions directly associated to their participation in serious lawless person perform (Walker).When revising arrest rates, racial discrepancies cannot be bypassed. exact to apprehensions clues propose that blacks are up to three times more expected to be arrested than whites (Huizinga). whereas numerous have speculated about the sources of racial discrepancies in arrests, few have empirically assessed promise explanations of these discrepancies (Kempf-Leonard). Environmental and communal factors like poor wellbeing care and the workforce lead blacks to a greater likelihood for apprehend because they may not have been the identical benefits as whites. Along these lines, risk components across multiple domains have been connected to white and very dark arrests (Leober). Blacks are more expected to be apprehended for drug offenses than whites even though they have alike benefits. African Americans are nearly four times more expected to be arrested than whites even, even though they use pharmaceuticals at similar rates, according to a new analysis of government data from the American municipal Liberties Union (Flatow). The lawless person fairness system is exceedingly bias in apprehend rates between blacks and whites.