Crime statistics

Quantitative data on criminal behavior From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Crime statistics quantitatively describe levels of criminal behaviour in society, but should not be thought of as objective measures of crime itself. Official statistics, or those generated by law enforcement agencies, report the crimes reported to police. They are reasonably accurate for crimes such as auto theft, but systematically underestimate under-reported crimes such as sexual assault.

To better estimate levels of crime, criminologists and other scholars conduct victimisation and self-offending surveys that ask the public about their direct experience of crime, as victims and offenders respectively. However, even these crime statistics are thought to underestimate actual levels.

Crimes unmeasured by crime statistics are called the dark figure of crime.

Methods

There are three major methods for collecting crime data: official statistics, which count crimes reported to police; victimisation surveys, which ask representative samples of the population about crimes committed against them; and, self-offending surveys, which ask representative samples of the population about their own criminal behaviour.[1]

Official statistics

Counting rules

Relatively few standards exist[clarification needed] and none that permit international comparability beyond a very limited range of offences[clarification needed].[citation needed] However, many jurisdictions[clarification needed] accept the following[citation needed]:

  • There must be a prima facie case that an offence has been committed before it is recorded. That is either police find evidence of an offence or receive a believable allegation of an offense being committed. Some jurisdictions count offending only when certain processes happen, such as an arrest is made, ticket issued, charges laid in Court or only upon securing a conviction.[citation needed]
  • Multiple reports of the same offence usually count as one offence. Some jurisdictions count each report separately, others count each victim of offending separately.[citation needed]
  • Where several offences are committed at the same time, in one act of offending, only the most serious offense is counted.[citation needed] Some jurisdictions record and count each and every offense separately, others count cases, or offenders, that can be prosecuted.[citation needed]
  • Where multiple offenders are involved in the same act of offending only one act is counted when counting offenses but each offender is counted when apprehended.[citation needed]
  • Offending is counted at the time it comes to the attention of a law enforcement officer.[citation needed] Some jurisdictions record and count offending at the time it occurs.[citation needed]
  • As "only causing pain" is counted as assault in some countries, it let higher assault rates except in Austria, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden.[citation needed] But there are exceptions, like Czech Republic and Latvia.[citation needed] France was the contrasting exception having a high assault ratio without counting minor assaults.[2]

Offending that is a breach of the law but for which no punishment exists is often not counted.[citation needed] For example: Suicide, which is technically illegal in most countries, may not be counted as a crime, although attempted suicide and assisting suicide are.[citation needed]

Also traffic offending and other minor offending that might be dealt with by using fines rather than imprisonment, is often not counted as crime.[citation needed] However separate statistics may be kept for this sort of offending.[citation needed]

Classification

While most jurisdictions could probably agree about what constitutes a murder, what constitutes a homicide may be more problematic[citation needed], while a crime against the person could vary widely.[citation needed] Legislation differences often mean the ingredients of offences vary between jurisdictions.[citation needed]

The International Crime Victims Survey has been done in over 70 countries to date and has been a 'de facto' standard for defining common crimes.[citation needed] Complete list of countries[3] participating and the 11 defined crimes[4] can be found at the project web site.[5]

In March 2015 the UNODC published the first version of the "International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes" (ICCS).[6]

Surveys

Because of the difficulties in quantifying how much crime actually occurs, researchers generally take two approaches[clarification needed] to gathering statistics about crime.[citation needed]

These surveys also give insights as to why crime is reported, or not.[citation needed] The surveys show that the need to make an insurance claim, seek medical assistance, and the seriousness of an offence tend to increase the level of reporting, while the inconvenience of reporting, the involvement of intimate partners and the nature of the offending tend to decrease reporting.[citation needed]

These findings allow degrees of confidence to be assigned to various crime statistics.[citation needed] For example: Motor vehicle thefts are generally well reported because the victim may need to make the report for an insurance claim, while domestic violence, domestic child abuse and sexual offences are frequently significantly under-reported because of the intimate relationships involved, embarrassment and other factors that make it difficult for the victim to make a report.[citation needed]

Attempts to use victimisation surveys from different countries for international comparison has failed in the past.[citation needed] A standardised survey project called the International Crime Victims Survey[clarification needed].[7] Results from this project have been briefly discussed earlier in this article.

Limitations

For less frequent crimes such as intentional homicide and armed robbery, reported incidents are generally more reliable than victimization or self-report studies, but suffer from under-recording; for example, no criming in the United Kingdom sees over one third of reported violent crimes being not recorded by the police.[8] Because laws and practices vary between jurisdictions, comparing crime statistics between and even within countries can be difficult: typically only violent deaths (homicide or manslaughter) can reliably be compared, due to consistent and high reporting and relative clear definition.[citation needed]

The U.S. has two major data collection programs, the Uniform Crime Reports from the FBI and the National Crime Victimization Survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.[citation needed] However, the U.S. has no comprehensive infrastructure to monitor crime trends and report the information to related parties such as law enforcement.[9][10][11]

In official statistics, officers can only record crime that comes to their attention and might not record a matter as a crime if the matter is considered minor and is not perceived as a crime by the officer concerned.[citation needed]

Victimisation surveys ask respondents if they are victims of crime, without needing to provide any supporting evidence.[citation needed] In these surveys it is the participant's perception that a crime occurred that is being measured.[citation needed] As a consequence, differing methodologies may make comparisons with other surveys difficult.[citation needed]

International trends

Research using a series of victim surveys in 18 countries of the European Union, funded by the European Commission, has reported (2005) that the level of crime in Europe has fallen back to the levels of 1990, and notes that levels of common crime have shown declining trends in the U.S., Canada, Australia and other industrialized countries as well.[citation needed] The European researchers say a general consensus identifies demographic change as the leading cause for this international trend.[citation needed] Although homicide and robbery rates rose in the U.S. in the 1980s, by the end of the century they had declined by 40%.[9]

However, the European research suggests that "increased use of crime prevention measures may indeed be the common factor behind the near universal decrease in overall levels of crime in the Western world", since decreases have been most pronounced in property crime and less so, if at all, in contact crimes.[12][13][14]

Statistical measures of crime

More complex measures[clarification needed] involve measuring the numbers of discrete victims and offenders as well as repeat victimisation rates and recidivism.[citation needed] Repeat victimisation involves measuring how often the same victim is subjected to a repeat occurrence of an offence, often by the same offender.[citation needed] Repetition rate measures are often used to assess the effectiveness of interventions.[citation needed]

Other measures:

  • Crime rate, the number of crimes per unit of population, usually per 100,000 people.
  • Crime clearance rate, the percentage of crimes solved.

List of crime statistics

By country

See also

Notes

Further reading

External links

Related Articles

Wikiwand AI