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Crime Statistics Essay: The Ethical and Social Implications of Collecting and Reporting Crime Data



Official statistics give information on the number of crimes commit that are collected directly from each police. They claim to provide answers to two questions; the extent of crime, and who commits it. Criminologists have identified the problem of official statistics giving a false picture of the level and type of crime that actually exists. As a result, other types of information are turned to including victim surveys, longitudinal research and self-report studies. This essay will begin by exploring the uses of official statistics then go on to explore the problems with the data. The other types of data available will then be outlined and the usefulness of them will be evaluated. Get Help With Your EssayIf you need assistance with writing your essay, our professional essay writing service is here to help!


It has been a year since the U.S. Department of Education updated, via the new Handbook for Campus Safety and Security Reporting, its guidance about the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (often referred to as just the Clery Act). But many campus officials charged with reporting campus crimes remain unclear about how to comply with the changes. And each inaccuracy or omission can cost an institution tens of thousands of dollars in fines and create the appearance that campus safety is not a priority -- consequences that can shake student confidence and hinder recruiting.




crime statistics essay



A substantial number of colleges and universities have received notices of Clery audits, noncompliance and associated fines in recent years. The most common triggers have been: 1) federal student aid program reviews, 2) complaints made to Education Department or 3) inconsistencies in institutional crime reports required by the federal government.


In fact, each year on October 1, all institutions participating in federal student aid programs must submit an Annual Security Report detailing what they have done and are doing to protect students and employees from violence on campus. These reports can be extensive and include information about how the institutions collect, classify and report certain crimes, investigate and process complaints and reports, and notify students and employees of emergencies.


Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of LawTeacher.net. You should not treat any information in this essay as being authoritative.


The BCS along with the police records determine the amount of criminal offences that have been recorded in England and Wales, the data that has been recorded by police are that of people/victims and police recording criminal offences whereas the BCS enquires by asking people about crimes they have experienced within the last year. By this survey this provides information to inform crime reduction measures and to evaluate their effectiveness. This is one of the key methods in which information about crime has been distributed to the public through the use of crime statistics. This again provides an important role in informing Government policy and to provide paramount indication of the extent of crime committed in England and in Wales. Using both police recordings and the British Crime Survey it gives us a more accurate and a better overall picture of the extent of crime being committed each year.


Statistics does not include offences recorded by the British Transport Police, the Ministry of Defence Police, or customs and exercise. It is apparent that there are various factors that contribute to the continuous dilemma of the dark figure of crime.


There are various difficulties associated with the use of the official criminal statistics connected to the concept of the dark figure. There are a number of factors that may contribute to the unequal amount of recorded crime compared to the actual crime that has been committed and to the openly mistrust of criminal statistics. One of the key issues is embedded in which offences that are committed and changed into statistics.


For a criminal offence to be actually reported it must be detected and detectable. A lot of circumstances criminal offences are not identified or recognised as a crime. Criminal offences that are trivial and go unreported are crimes such as vandalism, minor shop thefts. Also white collar crime is sometimes identified as a victimless crime this is where there is no victim to detain a crime like this could be fraud.


Alternatively a victim may fear that they will not be taken seriously by the police and therefore does not substantiate the effort that may be vital or possible consequences such as further victimisation. For example, a victim would not report rape to the police he or she fears that they will not be taken gravely. Or another victim of crime of racial harassment may not want their local police authorities because he or she may worry that the police will not act to protect his or hers interests.


Further more people were not taking into consideration the extent or the seriousness of the crime that had been inflicted on them or they may have thought that the police could not take further into account of the crime.


Summary: In the past 12 years, several new studies found that increases in the prevalence of gun ownership are associated with increases in violent crime. Whether this association is attributable to gun prevalence causing more violent crime is unclear. If people are more likely to acquire guns when crime rates are rising or high, then the same pattern of evidence would be expected. An important limitation of all studies in this area is the lack of direct measures of the prevalence of gun ownership.


Conceptually, the effects of gun prevalence on violent crimes are ambiguous. Firearms could embolden criminals or disputants or make their encounters more lethal, suggesting that as the prevalence of firearms increases, so too would the number of violent crimes. But gun prevalence may also deter would-be criminals, which could have the opposite effect on violent crime (see the essay on education campaigns and clinical interventions for promoting safe storage). In this essay, we examine the empirical evidence on the relationship between firearm prevalence and violent crime, including homicide, domestic violence, aggravated assault, rape, and robbery. Most of the studies we examined used the proportion of suicides that were firearm suicides (FS/S) as a proxy for gun prevalence.


Our synthesis focuses on research published after NRC (2004) and takes up where that report left off, reviewing the literature from 2005 to 2016 to assess available new evidence on the relationship between firearm prevalence and violent crime. Our search yielded 25 studies that examined the relationship between gun availability and homicide, other types of violent crime, or domestic violence. We focus our synthesis on U.S.-based studies that met similar methodological criteria for our policy discussions, in that they attempted to identify a causal effect of prevalence on violent crime. The studies we include here either identify the effect of gun prevalence on violent crime using changes over time in gun prevalence and in violent crime outcomes or use an instrumental-variable approach to cross-sectional data on gun prevalence and violent crime (N = 11).


Four of the six studies found the prevalence of firearms to be significantly and positively associated with homicide rates, and these associations were found across reasonably independent data sets. A fifth study found no significant effect of gun prevalence on the intimate partner homicide rate and the firearm intimate partner homicide rate, and a sixth study found significant negative effects (indicating that gun prevalence reduced violent crime) in the preferred specification. While most of the new studies provide evidence consistent with the hypothesis that gun prevalence increases violent crime, the methodological weaknesses that led NRC (2004) to conclude that the causal effects of gun prevalence were not proven to continue to apply. In particular, if people are more likely to acquire guns when crime rates are rising or high (as suggested by, for instance, Bice and Hemley, 2002, and Kleck and Patterson, 1993), then the same pattern of evidence would be expected, but it would be crime rates causing gun prevalence, not the reverse.


Stronger study designs may be available to more persuasively establish the causal effects of gun ownership or gun prevalence on violent crime; however, many such study designs are currently hampered by poor information on the prevalence of gun ownership and the consequent reliance on proxy measures of availability and prevalence. For this reason, we recommend that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or another federal agency resume routine collection of voluntarily provided survey data on gun ownership and use.


However, there is no understanding systematic overrepresentation without understanding certain structural risk factors : levels of socio-economic inequality (exclusion from communities and markets), because of different welfare states, ideologies and approaches crime. The Wire, not as genuinely reliable statistical document, but a realistic portrayal of society politics, interestingly shows the parallel between poverty and illegal drug trade.


In the justice system, there are a number of ways to discuss and evaluate crime, based on the different metrics of documenting it. In particular, the two major methods to collected crime statistics are official crime data and self-reported statistics from particular areas of a city (Mosher et al., 2011). There are both advantages and disadvantages to using both methods, and they have to be considered when deciding on the correct approach to crime data analysis. Official crime statistics are valuable in analysis due to their officiality, as they are documented records of crimes that have occurred or have been committed by people. 2ff7e9595c


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