Official Crime Statistics: ‘Criminal Activity’ Measure

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Data Collection
Public Surveys and other Surveys
Classification
Conclusion
Bibliography

Introduction

Crime statistics in general emerged in the early 19th century to measure whether criminal activity in certain areas was increasing or decreasing. However, it is a common fact that a high proportion of crimes do not come to the knowledge of the police, and alterations in police procedures and strategies can have quite a huge impact on how crimes are reported and categorized. This essay will present an argument that crime statistics cannot give an exhaustive measurement of crime trends due to several shortcomings and flaws that are experienced during the various stages of handling crime figures.

Since the crime, by definition, is an illegal activity, every employed in measuring it is likely to have flaws: the disparities in the reporting and analytic procedures are generating different sets of crime victimization statistics. This essay will critically examine ways that explain why crime statistics do not necessarily reflect a true measure of criminal activity. Attention will be drawn particularly to the way data is collected, reported, and classified to highlight its inaccuracy and disparity.

Data Collection

One of the strongest criticisms against crime statistics revolves around the data collection process. Since crime rates and other parameters relating to crime depend on the accuracy of the data collection process, any flaw in the process could heavily affect the reliability of information derived from the data.

There are two major methods for collecting crime data. The first method uses law enforcement reports that only reflect reported crimes. The second is the use of victimization surveys in which information is collected by asking a population sample of the crimes that have been committed against them, and whether or not they have passed over this information to law enforcement agents. The accuracy of victimization surveys, therefore, depends on the honesty of the respondent or the ability of the respondent to have a good memory of the criminal instances. Besides, the methods used for data collection vary between jurisdictions comparing crime statistics between and even within countries and this can create ambiguity while computing the national or comparing criminal activity between states. For example, in Australia, some states use a prima facie system in that essentially, all crime reported is recorded, however, other states, such as Victoria previously used an ‘evidentiary’ system where only the crime with evidence was recorded. These inconsistencies and administrative changes can invalidate comparisons between jurisdictions and across time.

Another criticism that has been leveled against victimization surveys is the unfair treatment or discrimination of specific communities, social groupings, or ethnic minorities during data collection. Maguire states that ‘booster’ samples have been used to prove, or disapprove, victimization of ethnic minorities and separate methods have been used to collect information from older people. The reliability or accuracy of data derived through this data collection method may also be affected by the wording of the interview question, the population sampled, and the situation on which the research is based. For example, the degree of empathy that is created between the surveyor and the respondent may influence the respondents to answer in a considerable manner. Again, some surveys are based on loosely defined samples and lack thoroughness in defining the duration covered: plainly, it makes a significant disparity if a respondent is asked whether he/she has been a victim of a specific crime within the past year, past few years, or ever.

Public Surveys and other Surveys

Another type of criticism regarding the validity of crime statistics is the use of public surveys. This form of data collection is sometimes used to estimate the proportion of crimes that are not reported to law enforcement agents. Information derived from such surveys is normally useful for evaluating crime trends. Most public surveys do not cover all crimes, rarely employ statistical analytical methods, often overlook crimes against children, and do not keep records of suspects brought before the criminal courts. For instance, when faced with a domestic dispute, a law enforcement officer may opt to arrest the man in the argument that the woman may have other family roles to play, such as caring for the children, despite both the couple is responsible for the offense. Hence, in public surveys, it is the respondent’s discernment that a crime occurred, or even their comprehension of what amounts to the crime being investigated. Consequently, this data collection method can exhibit partiality. Also, contradictory methods may make comparison with other surveys tricky. Likewise, often statistics from law enforcement organizations are used. Despite the obvious credibility of this method, surveys frequently tend to mirror the efficiency of law enforcement processes of the officers and may bear little association to the real amount of crime. This is because officers can only document crimes that come to their attention, still, these offenses can only be recognized as ‘crime’ by the officer on duty. Biasness or partiality of these statistics may also stem from actions taken by the officers while on routine patrols.

Another important criticism regarding crime statistics is directed toward recording practices. Crime statistics recording norms differ not just between nations and authorities, but even between officers under the same system handling a similar situation. Due to the authority accorded to them, officers can heavily influence crime statistics. In the same way, even though a person may report a crime to a police officer, it may not be regarded as so unless that crime is recorded in a manner that makes it possible to be included in the official crime statistics. For this reason, minor offenses may be considerably ignored when officers have lots of work or do not perceive the crime as worth documenting.

Law enforcement agencies tend to record or fail to record certain high-profile crimes, especially if there is an incentive. For instance, officers record almost all cases of traffic offenses due to the financial incentive in form of fines. In contrast, only a few of these traffic offenses make it to the official crime statistics. In the same way, it is observed that certain criminal activities may be omitted from the official crime records due to factors ranging from work avoidance or a wish to improve the overall clear-up rate. According to Maguire, the more the ‘hopeless’ cases, in terms of their probability of detection if they are omitted from the records, the higher the number detected (and hence the higher the clear-up rate). If a law enforcement division’s clear-up rate is small, the officers can be criticized by their seniors for tarnishing their image, or by the media. Unfortunately, this negligence does a lot of harm to crime statistics as it reduces their reliability and accuracy.

Surveys in themselves are good in that they help identify different types of crime and assist in crime prevention. However, it is how they are conducted that raises some concern. It could be argued that it is fair to say that the public knows little about the criminal justice systems and how policymakers evaluate crime. Therefore from this point, it would be necessary that these reservations are somewhat dispelled. First and foremost would be that these policymakers investigate further what the public perceives to constitute a crime to accurately measure crime. Determining the public’s responses as to what they perceive as important would further assist with the feedback they get from them including having their full participation in these surveys. They would then accordingly improve the questions used in a survey to uncover crime, and as a result of this, the survey methods would be enhanced and, consequently, the scale of crimes measured would be widened. The argument here is that at times the surveys conducted are for different purposes, which perhaps focuses on different aspects of crime such as violent crime, while burglary, property damage, and theft are at the lower end of the scale. Additionally, these surveys could also be used as a resource to provide an insight into public perceptions of the police and the criminal justice systems that to some level impact the reasons why the public chooses not to report the crime.

Classification

Another inaccuracy in the measurement of criminal statistics is regarding the area of classification. In order a clear picture of crime trends, it is vital that various forms of crime are classified into different categories. This procedure has a flaw in that a crime can be interpreted in different ways according to the reporting person and the officer on duty. The ambiguity of the classification process also arises from the differences in policies among various jurisdictions. The punishment for a crime may also differ and the degree of the punishment depends on each jurisdiction’s definition of the specific crime.

Further criticism of crime statistics is drawn from their lack of specificity, for example, a crime classified as ‘robbery’ comprises several actions such as significant as a bank raid to trivial crimes such as stealing from a retail shop at knifepoint, or snatching a handbag from a woman in the streets. Therefore, such crime statistics only give information relating to the general criminal activity and not the decline or increase in the prevalence of specific forms of robbery. Failure to have distinct classes of crime could stem from the law enforcement officer’s indolence or lack of adequate information on the importance of the crime statistics.

Conclusion

The use of official crime statistics as a measure of ‘criminal activity’ has come under intense criticism owing to their lack of credibility, accuracy, and flaws in the data collection, analysis, and differences in crime policies and strategies. This is widely acknowledged and referred to universally as the ‘dark figure’ of crime. Flaws mainly occur through lack of detection, underreporting by the public, and underrecording by the police. It impacts official crime statistics. This has led to the augmentation of police-recorded crime statistics with surveys of the general public (generally referred to as crime victim surveys) or surveys of offenders. The gaps between the police-recorded statistics and the self-reported statistics of victims or offenders are marked but depend on the type of crime. For example, studies have shown that only 31% of assaults were reported to the police in Australia in 2005, but they also highlight that this may depend on the victim’s perception of the act as a criminal event. There are many other methodological issues with these types of surveys. For example, the survey sample needs to be large enough to provide reasonably accurate estimates for relatively rare crimes. The sampling frame needs to be sophisticated enough to address the problem that the people who are most likely to be victims are probably the least likely to be in a position to participate in a survey.

Bibliography

Boni, N. Youth and Serious Crime: Directions for Australasian Researchers into the New Millennium, 1999, Web.

Maguire, M. The Oxford handbook of criminology, 4th Ed. NY: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Stossel, J., and Grayling, C. Crime Statistics, 2011, Web.

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