Uniform Crime Summary

The public has a fascination and obsession over crime and criminals, but people want to know how those crimes are dealt with in the criminal justice system, in court and on the streets. “Now that the penal system has forsworn the former, and confined the latter within prison walls, the public turns to the news media. Stories relating to criminal justice are never far from the front pages and from the collective consciousness” (Roberts 99). We as American citizens have no choice but to watch the news or read the daily newspaper and get the latest crime right across the headlines. Learning about the new political and economic burning topics of the day seem to be at the majority of peoples interest.

It is no secret that the media is able to influence the general public’s opinion on most anything. Whether the subject is fiction or non, movies, documentaries, and the news especially, are capable of swaying the public’s opinions and perceptions one way or the other. Not even the world of law enforcement is safe from the media’s purview (Barlow, M. H. and Barlow, D. E. and Chiricos T. G., 1995), as media portrayals often romanticize law enforcement as a well oiled machine that always gets the bad guy, and has a perfect relationship with the public. On top of this, the media has displayed a poor habit of portraying crime as predominantly violent and racial, rather than showing the whole picture(Gilliam, F. D. and Iyengar, S. and Simon, A. and Wright, O., 1996). In this paper, the motives driving these depictions, as well as the scope and effect of the media’s influence on public perception of law enforcement, will be explored and discussed.

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.

I feel the single most misreported crime in the UCR is aggravated assaults. Aggravated assaults is the one crime that can easily be miscoded or reported in a why to downgrade the severity of the crime. “The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program defines aggravated assault as an unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury.”

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

It is unfortunate that crime exists in our daily lives. There really is no way to stopping crime completely, no matter how many laws or punishment are present, people will continue to keep breaking rules. There are many theories of why that may be the case, for example, Caesar Lombroso and his “atavistic” theory with the Positivist School theory and how people were “born criminals”, or the Rational Choice Theory, devised by Cornish and Clarke, described that people could think rationally and how people will naturally avoid pain and seek pleasure referred to as “hedonism” (Cartwright, 2017, lecture 4). Since it is apparent that crime will continue to exist, it is not only important to understand the study of crime and the feedbacks to it,

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 1927, the Committee on Uniform Crime Records was formed under the direction of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) to create a system for gathering uniform police statistics. The committee first determined how to measure the criminality within the United States. After this was determined, members assessed several crimes and identified seven crimes that would be reportable to the Uniform Crime Reports Program. The Uniform Crime Report is now a nationwide assessment of reported crimes from various law enforcement agencies. Its main purpose is to provide statistical information on crime that can be analyzed for later use in multiple arenas that includes law enforcement administration, operation, and management. It is also used by policy makers, politicians, administrators and the press. Beginning in 1930, now under

Law enforcement agencies like State, Local, Tribal, colleges and universities are all included in these two different reporting systems that they use to create and send data to the Federal Bureau of Investigation so that other police agencies can have data on the number of crimes that are committed, where committed, if anyone was a victim or was it a victimless crime and information about the offender. Out of the two reports that will be discussed in this paper, the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) was first created in 1929. However, when we think of that year it is usually about crime statistics but of the Wall Street Crash and great depression. While the second reporting system that of the National-Incident Based Reporting System was not created

The UCR collects massive data from all of the nation's police precincts reporting on various crimes known to law enforcement. However, the UCR has various strengths and weaknesses. Five weaknesses or critiques regarding the validity of the UCR are: underestimation of the amount of crime, diversion from attention on white collar crime, misleading characteristics of arrestees, citizens' reporting of crime, and police recording practices and scandals. The UCR underestimates the actual amount of crimes committed in individual states, cities, and in the United States every year. When Part 1 crimes are found are focused on entirely, the UCR emphasizes these as the most serious crimes and diverts attention from white collar crime. The data collected by the UCR is the most valid indicator of the behavior of police than offenders. Because of this fact, the characteristics of people that get arrested presented by the UCR is not reflected of the majority who escape arrest. This is due to police arrest practices discrimination against certain types of people. And this alone creates police bias. So the UCR cannot accurately know the number of crimes admitted every year. Lastly, an official number of crimes may change because of changes in policing attitudes and behaviors. This can happen by the use of police crackdowns or changes in recording practices of crimes. On the

Crime is an ongoing problem in the united states. Victims of crime are individuals who have been assaulted in an immoral matter that can cause various damages to the person. The Uniform Crime Report (UCR) is the FBI’s yearly publication of serious crime that occurred within the following year, which are reported by victims, police officers, and other sources. The UCR is not fully seen as an accurate source of crime calculation for various reasons. One main reason is the underreporting of crime done by both the officers and victims.

From a business perspective, and when dealing with the more violent crimes, the Uniform Crime Report would be more accurate. Crimes such as murder or a kidnapped child are crimes that can usually be counted on to be reported. The only down fall is that the UCR only reports crimes that are reported to the police. Crimes that are frequently not reported to the police can include, but are not limited to sexual assualt and household theft. In the business stand point, we can only assume how many rapes actually occur in the United States. Even with this downfall, I feel that the UCR is more accurate than using surveys due to the fact that we are not relying souly on whether or not a victim is being honest or that the survey will be filled out at

Uniform Crime Reporting data is delivered to the public in two ways: One way is by Web publications of traditional Uniform Crime Reporting offerings such as Crime in the United States, Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, Hate Crime Statistics, other periodic or special compilations (Soares, 2004). Older Uniform Crime Reporting publications (from 1930 to 1995) are available from the FBI’s CJIS Division as scanned Portable Document Format (PDF) files on compact discs (CDs) (Biderman, and Lynch, 1991).

The Uniform Crime Report and the National Crime Victimization Survey were both developed to perform differently. The Uniform Crime Report was a program whose primary goals were to provide a reliable set of criminal justice statistics for law enforcement administration, operation, and management. The Uniform Crime Report was developed in 1929. It was developed by the International Associations of Chiefs of Police.

The importance given to certain crimes in the daily newspapers and other media sources shows us proof to the fact that crime is a topic that has the public’s interest and is a focus of their worries (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001). It goes on to discuss the fact that crime as reported on by the media increases the public’s levels of fears and that there is little or no correlation to actual levels of violent crime in our society today.