Week 3: Studying Crime and Crime Trends

Overview

This week we will discuss how we know about the crime. Official police statistics have been created to measure crime in the population. Uniform Crime Reports were used to determine crime rates. Although valuable, weaknesses arise with the UCR data resulting in the development of the NIBRS system. We will also learn about victimization surveys such as National Crime Victimization Survey, as a supplement to the official crime data. Alternative data gathering strategies including self-report surveys are also discussed in detail.

Learning Objectives

1. Describe how official crime statistics are collected.
2. Describe how crime data for NIBRS are collected and organized.
3. Describe the method of data collection of the National Crime Victimization Survey.
4. Discuss alternative methods of learning about crime.

Workflow

To Read:

FBI. National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS): https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/nibrs

Bureau of Justice Statistics (2021): Criminal Victimization, 2020: https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/cv20.pdf

*Pew Research Center (2020). What the data says (and doesn’t say) about crime in the United States: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/

To Watch:

1. The transition to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) will improve the accuracy and timeliness of our nation’s crime statistics, help identify crime patterns and trends, and aid in crime prevention. More at https://www.fbi.gov/nibrs

2.  When she became the attorney general of New Jersey in 2007, Anne Milgram quickly discovered a few startling facts: not only did her team not really know who they were putting in jail, but they had no way of understanding if their decisions were actually making the public safer. And so began her ongoing, inspirational quest to bring data analytics and statistical analysis to the US criminal justice system.

3. What’s behind the sharp rise in murders across the U.S.? PBS News Hour. Murders across the U.S. have skyrocketed in 2020, while nonviolent offenses have largely dropped, according to publicly available crime data. But efforts to curb homicides come at a time when police departments are facing both staffing shortages because of the COVID-19 pandemic and lingering distrust in communities of color following months of nationwide protests. John Yang reports.

To Study

PowerPoint:

Discussion Forum 3

Discussion Forum 3: Myths and Realities of Crime Trends