Chapter 4 Summary - Counting Crime - Introduction to Criminology PDF

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Counting Crime...

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Chapter 4: Counting Crime - This chapter is about statistics on crime and criminal justice. - This chapter describes how social scientists count crime. - Finally, the chapter describes victimization surveys and self-report surveys. Controversies over Counting Crime - The first concern of those who first sought to measure crime was coverage: how can we obtain data about the amount and nature of crime in a society? As the official sources of statistics have increased, and as creative methodologies for data collection have advanced, reliability and validity have become the most pressing concerns. - A particular difficulty arises in crime counts because as the reliability of a statistical measure increases, its validity as a count of crime often decreases. - The criminal justice system operates as a funnel; only some fraction of incidents result in a police record of a criminal incident, only a portion of recorded incidents result in suspects identified, only a portion of suspects are arrested or charged, only a portion of charges result in conviction, and only a portion of convictions result in incarceration. - Also, there are built in biases because some crimes are more likely than others to be reported and to result in arrest, charge, conviction, and a sentence to incarceration. - For example, murderers are more likely to be arrested and go to jail than are corporate criminals. - How have criminologists handled these problems? For a long time, they acknowledged the problems and then, when they needed data, they pretended the problems away. - Social scientists have often been accused of letting their methods or the most readily available statistics dictate their theories. - Many of the early theories of criminology discussed elsewhere in this text were built upon rather uncritical acceptance of official sources of statistics. - In the 1960s and 70s, a number of sociologists and criminologists focused their attention on the systematic biases of past theories built on official records. New theories suggested that official records shows us how the criminal justice system operated to create crime and criminals. - One can distinguish three broad types of criminal justice statistics: statistics about crime and criminals, statistics about the criminal justice system and its response to crime, and statistics about perceptions of crime and criminal justice. Statistics on the Criminal Justice System - The criminal justice system produces an enormous amount of raw data in the form of police reports and records, the recorded decisions of prosecutors and judges, and the administrative records of prisons and penitentiaries. From Records to Statistics - Records are concerned with individual cases and are intended primarily to help practitioners make decisions about these individual cases. - Statistics are aggregated; they are concerned with what is common among individual cases. - The following issues must be addressed before records can be converted into statistics:

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unit of count, levels of aggregation, definitions, data elements, and counting procedures. Unit of Count: COnsensus about What It Is That We are Counting - In the course of everyday activities, police may count many different things: suspects, offences, charges, or calls for services. - Some units of count are specific to a particular sector. For example, the prison sector can count inmates; the court sector, convictions; and the police, suspects. Levels of Aggregation: Consensus about How to Combine Data - A crucial decision is the level at which we want our statistics. - For example, do we want to combine police records for a city? - Do we want to combine statistics for an entire province? - Several criminologists have warned that the further you move from those who produce the data and the more you try to combine data from difference sources, the more questionable is the result. - They prefer the richer and more detailed information available from local police to the abstracted, less complete data available about national policing. Data Elements: Consensus about What Specific Information Should be Collected - While the police will need certain kinds of information to help them in their investigative activities, this information will be far more detailed than, and sometimes quite different from, what is needed as aggregated statistics. Counting Procedures: Consensus on How to Count Units and Elements - If an offender goes on a break-and-enter spree and hits six houses in an evening, how many offences should be counted - six or one? Or if, during a break and enter, an offender is confronted by the homeowner and assaults him or her, is this one or two offences? Canadian Criminal Justice Statistics - In Canada, attempts to answer these questions have long been the responsibility of our national statistical agency, Statistics Canada. More recently, the federal and provincial governments have created a national institute - the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics (CCJS) - which is a division of Statistics Canada and is governed by a board of directors of senior officials responsible for justice. Official Statistics: Canadian Uniform Crime Reports - Despite their problems, we rely heavily on official counts of the amount of crime. Until 50 years ago, we were dependent on local police records collected for police purposes, which we handled differently in each locale. For over five decades Canada has had in place a system called the Canadian Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), which is designed to provide uniform and comparable national statistics. - In Canada, two version of the UCR collection instrument operate simultaneously: the UCR Aggregate (UCR 1.0) and the UCR2 Incident-Based Survey. - A number of studies have documented some of the problems in the recording and scoring rules and how these rules are applied. Specifically, the studies have examined the implications of the “seriousness rule,” which holds that only the most serious crime is to be scored in an incident involving several crimes.

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The concerns this rule creates are threefold: 1. It deflates the total crime count 2. It inflates serious crimes 3. The way in which seriousness is scored is problematic because not enough qualitative data about these crimes are recorded to use a sophisticated scale of seriousness. - Concerns have also been expressed that the crime categories used are too general. - For example, thefts and attempted thefts are recorded under the same category. Crime Severity Index - To address the matter of the crime rate being driven by high volumes of less serious offences, the CCJS developed Crime Severity Indexes. - The crime severity index is calculated by assigning each offence a weight derived from actual sentences given by the criminal courts. The more serious the average sentence, the greater the weight. - Thus, more serious offences have a greater impact on the severity index. Victimization Surveys - Victimization Surveys ask people whether they have been victims of acts that the Criminal Code defines as criminal. - They are asked to: - Describe the nature and consequences of their victimization experiences; - To describe the criminal justice response; - To indicate whether victims or others brought the incidents to official attention, and if not, why not; - And to indicate their perceptions of and attitudes toward crime and criminal justice in Canada. - The first large-scale victimization survey in Canada was carried out in 1982. - Since 1988, Statistics Canada has conducted a victimization survey about every five years as part of the General Social Survey. - Respondents who had also been victims of a crime in the previous 12 months were asked for detailed information on each incident, including when and where it occurred, whether the incident was reported to the police, and how they were affected by the experience. - Note that of the incidents identified, just under one-third had been reported to the police or had otherwise come to police attention. - The survey data confirm many of the concerns about official sources of crime data. Some crimes are more likely to come to police attention than others. - Some categories of victims are more likely to report their victimizations, and some categories of offenders are less likely to be reported.

Self-Report Studies - Yet another approach to generating data on the nature and distribution of crime is the

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self-report study. The people who know the most about crime are those who break the law. Rather than relying on police data, which will inevitably be incomplete or on the knowledge of victims, why not just ask criminals what they do and how often they do it? There are two problems with self-report studies: 1. It would appear that those who are typically law abiding are more likely to report completely their occasional infractions than are the more committed delinquents to report their more serious and frequent infractions. 2. Differences between official statistics of delinquent behaviour and self-report data may reflect not simply biases in official data, but biases in the self-report method as well. The official data are likely to include more serious offences, and selfreport data are more likely to include more minor infractions.

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