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 are 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. Finally, we will cover some correlates of crime, including sex, age, race, temperament, personality, and the like.
Learning Objectives
- Describe how official crime statistics are collected.
- Describe how crime data for the Unifrom Crime Report are collected and organized.
- Describe the method of data collection of the National Crime Victimization Survey.
- Discuss alternatives methods of learning about crime.
- Know the main correlates of crime.
Workflow
To Read:
*The Nation’s Two Crime Measures. FBI (2011): FBI: The Nation’s Two Crime Measures
crime_measures_final*Chapter 2 in Piquero, Alex R.. The Handbook of Criminological Theory, edited by Melissa L. Rorie, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/reader.action?docID=4035968&ppg=38
Download the chapter here.
The_Handbook_of_Criminological_Theory_-_2_Correlates_of_Crime-1*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:
- How much do you know about the world? Hans Rosling, with his famous charts of the global population, health, and income data (and an extra-extra-long pointer), demonstrates that you have a high statistical chance of being quite wrong about what you think you know. Play along with his audience quiz — then, from Hans’ son Ola, learn 4 ways to quickly get less ignorant.
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.
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