ADMJ 300: Chapter 2 (Crime Data)

Welcome back! So last week you learned about what crime is. Remember it's a social construct that we as a people have defined. And you got some exposure to what crime rates are, but this week I want to take a take it back a step and start digging into how we come up with or measure the rates of crime that we discussed. Basically where does this data come from? You probably heard me mention the uniform crime reports or the UCR last week. Multiple times and we're like, "Hey lady, what the heck is this? I'm new to this whole admin of justice thing and I need you to explain something." So here I am to hopefully do just that. So where does crime data come from? We mainly use the UCR here with a full switch to Nibers, which is the National Incident-Based Reporting System, expected relatively soon. Both are centralized federal databases of reporting crime run by the FBI, the compiled reporting crime data from nearly every one of the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in this country. I hope you noted that I said reported crime. This is one of the flaws of that data as it only includes what was reported to the police and estimates generally indicate that only about half of violent crime is reported and less than a third of property crime is reported. So note that this metric isn't necessarily all the way complete. Additionally, the UCR uses a hierarchy rule, meaning that if someone was arrested for say the crimes of assault, kidnapping and homicide, all in the context of one event, only the homicide would be captured in the data is this is the highest ranked one. Nibers should give better data on all types of metrics, but this one in particular will be much better recorded. Another issue with UCR is that there are no set standards for crime classifications across states. So capturing this data into neat little categories is not always easy and could also distort the reality of the data. Lastly, the UCR measures reporting crime for part one and part two offenses, but this is nowhere near exhaustive of crimes and really only tells us about traditional violent and property crimes. So it lacks info for things like drug crimes and internet based crime, which as you can imagine in today's day and age is a lot. However, it is still a good measurement of crime and it is at least the best we have. And remember from last week, it shows a downward trend. For some context on how much of a downward trend, let's just say that the violent crime went from 400 or 747 per 100,000 to only about 366 per 100,000 now. The rate now is quite literally half of what it was in the early 90s. And property crime has done the same going from 4,470 per 100,000 in 1993 to only 2,109 per 100,000 at the most recent count. So again, half of the rate that it was 30 plus years ago. And please note that it keeps saying per 100,000. This is the metric used with that we used to talk about crime data so that we can control for population size increases and decreases and so that we can compare say Sacramento to Chicago. Of course, Chicago has more total crime because it's a bigger city with about 2.6 million people compared to the 500 or so thousand in sack. And want to know where we actually fall on that comparison? Glad you asked because if not my dig into crime data would have been for nothing. Anyway, Chicago was associated with murders and crime by many has a violent crime rate of 540 per 100,000. Sack on the other hand has a rate of 658 per 100,000. So there you have it. Sacramento actually has more crime than Chicago. Who would have thought? Moving along with data sources, we also use the National Crime Victimization Survey to gauge how often people are victimized. This is a measurement tool that has been administered through the Bureau of Justice Statistics since the 70s and VA interviews essentially. Each year a sample of about 100,000 households with about 160,000 to 200,000 individual respondents aged 12 and up are utilized throughout the US to give us a nationally representative sample of individuals. The person's interview to answer questions about the frequency, characteristics, and consequences of their personal criminal victimization. Basically, we ask people to tell us how much they have been victimized. And what this data shows us is that not everyone reports crime to the police. Surprise. Some are uncomfortable going to the police. We know sexual assault and domestic violence have low reporting in particular. Some might not know what happened to them was a crime. FYI, there's a lot of robbery occurring in youth populations. If you take something from someone else unlawfully by force or threat of force by definition, it's robbery. But I doubt many high schoolers are reporting if somebody takes their lunch money. And some downright don't like the police nor think that they would help them so they don't report. If you've been victimized in the past and call the police and they don't actually help you are you really going to call them for time number two, number three, number four, etc. But again, this measurement is useful because it gives us more information. And taking collectively our NCBS data shows the same trend as the UCR data. Crimes down over the last 30 years. Again, with some peaks and valleys over that time though. The third and last main measurement that we gauge crime is by self-report surveys. These are mainly used in the high school environment. So you may have taken this in 10th and 12th grade. And these ask you about your bad behaviors. Monitoring the youth survey is one of the most common and has been administered since the 70s. These types of surveys typically ask if you've ever taken something from someone else by force, stolen something from someone else, done drugs, drank alcohol, etc. within the past 30 days. Now the issue of self-report surveys is the issue of both under-reporting and over-reporting. While their anonymous sum are still afraid to admit to their bad behaviors, and while some actually just want to seem cool and they may over-report what they've done. However, this is still useful because it gives us yet another measurement that we can use to better understand crime. And you probably guessed it. These also show a decrease, especially with some drug and alcohol-related issues. So all three of these measurements show us something a bit different and give us a different perspective on crime from official data, victims telling us how often they've been victimized, and people telling us how often they've committed crimes. And all of these show us the same trend. So it's much more believable that it's actually true. When all the metrics follow the same trend that's pretty high-opening. So I've said it before and I'll say it again, that the crime trend is down or decrease. While there may be upticks especially over one-year increments, as many likely notice a news media in particular, it doesn't change the direction of the actual trend itself. Okay, so now you know a bit about measurements of crime. Great. So what do we know, or what do we do with this information? We be very, very careful. That's what we do. One thing we know is that we are notoriously bad at crime prediction. Please, please watch that Super Predator's video this week. Even the top ranked criminologists in this country can run the statistical equations correctly, and we can still be dead wrong. In the 1990s, though, they thought that crime was going to skyrocket. Because based upon the data and the trends, it should have. But it didn't. So why didn't it? There are no easy answers here. There's speculation, but it's likely to be many confounding variables working together so we may never have an entire answer to this question. For a long time, it looked like crime was tied closely to the economy. However, then we had a big recession in the late 2000s. So crimes should have gone up. But guess what? It continued on its downward trend. There's also been research that says that perhaps it was technological advances that helped. Essentially, especially as teenagers started playing video games, it kept them inside and gave them something to do other than being out and about and up to no good. So perhaps this contributed. And there's a controversial perspective that addresses the rise in legalized abortion as a potential contributing factor. And that those who would have been born to the most criminogenic, genetic environments never came into existence. So that's crime went down. Again, very controversial, but has been addressed through the research. Others have speculated that it's the policing that matters. While the amount of police is at least correlated with this, actual policing styles are not, which is a big surprise for most. We'll talk about this more when we get to our policing sections. So the takeaway here is that we don't necessarily know and we have to be really cautious with our data because we are really bad with prediction in the first place. All right, there's some more content for you throughout the week. Make sure to dig into, especially those outside resources. And then we will address things for next week. So until then.