Week 11 s.pptx

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Week 11
Measuring Crime
© 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

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Learning Objectives
• Recognize how different approaches to measuring crime
illustrate general principles of conceptualization,
operationalization, and measurement
• Understand what crimes are included in different
measures
• Describe different measures of crime and how they are
based on different units of analysis
• Understand different purposes for collecting crime data
• Explain different measures based on crimes known to
police
• Describe the main features of victim surveys

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Learning Objectives, cont.
• Distinguish the main differences between crimes known to
police and crimes measured through different types of surveys
• Understand why self-report measures are used, and list
different types of crimes for which they are appropriate
• Summarize major series of self-reported measures of drug use
• Understand how surveillance measures are obtained and used
• Explain how different measures of crime satisfy criteria for
measurement quality
• Recognize that we have different measures of crime because
each measure is imperfect

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Introduction
Measures of crime are important for
many criminal justice research
purposes

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Introduction
Crime is a fundamental variable in
criminal justice and criminology

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Introduction
Crime is a fundamental variable in
criminal justice and criminology

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Introduction
• Crime can be a dependent variable in
exploratory, descriptive, explanatory, and
applied studies
• Crime can also be an independent
variable, as in a study of how crime affects
fear and other attitudes
• It can be both: drug use <- -> other
offenses

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Introduction
• Crime is a variable.

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Introduction
• Crime is a variable.
• Two types of variables involved in
research are:
• Dependent
• Independent

Crime is a variable
• Dependent • Independent

Crime is a variable
• Dependent
• Sleep effects mental
health
• Mental health is the
dependent variable
• Independent

Crime is a variable
• Dependent
• Exploratory
• Explanatory
• Descriptive
• Independent

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General Issues in Measuring Crime
• What offenses?
• What units of analysis?
• Specific entities about which researchers collect
information
• Offender, victim, offenses, incidents
• What purpose?
• Monitoring
• Agency Accountability
• Research

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• Before specifying measures of crime
• Decide the offenses
• Units of analysis
• Purpose

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• What crime offenses?

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• Gottfredson and Travis (1990 p 15) ”Acts
of force or fraud undertaken in pursuit of
self-interest.” any act committed in violation
of a law that prohibits it and authorizes
punishment for its commission

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• One of the principal difficulties we
encounter when we try to measure crime
is that many different types of behaviors
and actions are included in our
conceptualization of a crime
• Example Indiana Criminal Code Ginseng
vs Non-serious Bodily Injury

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What units of analysis?
• Specific entities about which researchers
collect information
• Offender, victim, offenses, incidents

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Unit of Analysis
Crimes involve four elements that are
easier to recognize in the abstract than
they are to measure
• Offender
• Victim
• Offense
• Incident

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Crimes Known to Police
• Most widely used measures of crime are based
on police records
• Certain types are detected almost exclusively by
observation (traffic and victimless offenses)
• Most crimes reported by victim or witnesses
• What crimes are not measured well by police
records?
• Assaults
• Robberies

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What Purpose?
Different strategies for measuring crime
can be distinguished by their general
purpose
Measuring crime has at least one of the
three general purposes:
• Monitoring
• Agency accountability
• Research

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Monitoring
• Uniform Crime Reports
• National Crime Victimization Survey

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Monitoring
* In the field of public health , this is referred to as
a surveillance system.

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Agency Accountability

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Research
Distinct from the purpose of surveillance
or accountability
Criminal justice research often uses
measures of crime that are collected for
surveillance or accountability purposes,
not for research

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Crimes Know to Police
Crimes reported to police and recorded
by police
The most widely used measure of crime
based upon police records
Crimes not known to police cannot be
measured by consulting police records

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Implications Crimes Not Know to Police
Police come to know about crime in two
ways:
• Observation
• Report by others
Police do not always make official
records of crimes they observe, or crimes
reported to them

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Uniform Crime Reports (UCR)
• Circa 1929, under FBI since 1930s
• Originally, reporting voluntary, but now very common
• Type I offenses (index crimes/offenses): murder,
rape, robbery, larceny, burglary, aggravated assault,
motor vehicle theft, and arson (added in 1979)
• Type II offenses: a compilation of less serious crimes
• Summary-based, group level unit of analysis

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Uniform Crime Reports (UCR)

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The UCR and Measurement Quality
• The UCR is neither an exclusive nor an exhaustive
measure
• Not all law enforcement agencies submit complete
reports to the FBI, and the quality of the data
submitted varies
• Summary-Based Measure of Crime
• UCR data includes summary, or total, crime counts for reporting
agencies (cities/counties)
• UCR data are aggregates—cannot be used in
descriptive or explanatory studies that focus on
individual crimes, offenders, or victims

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Incident-Based Police Records
• Incident-based measures
• Summary-based measures

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Incident-Based Police Records
• Based on incidents as units of analysis
• Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR)
• Police agencies submit detailed info about individual homicide
incidents
• Can conduct a variety of studies that examine
studies of individual events

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National Incident-Based Reporting System
• Joint effort by FBI and BJS to convert UCR to a
NIBRS
• NIBRS reports each crime incident rather than
the total # of certain crimes for each law
enforcement agency
• Many features are reported individually about
each incident: offenses, offenders, victims
• UCR  NIBRS
• 8 Part I offenses  46 Group A offenses

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National Incident-Based Reporting System

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Other Revisions with NIBRS
• Hierarchy rule dropped
• Victim type (individual, business,
government, society/public)
• Attempted/Completed
• Drug-related offenses
• Computers and crime
• Quality control; states require certification

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NIBRS and Measurement Quality
• Eliminating the hierarchy rule means offense
classifications are mutually exclusive
• But not exhaustive, not all crimes are counted
• Creating auditing standards and requiring
submission of data on computer readable media
enhance reliability
• Crimes are selectively reported to police and
selectively recorded by police
• Voluntary: no agency is required to submit crime reports to the FBI
in any form

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Measuring Crime Through Victim Surveys
• Can obtain info on crimes not reported to police
• Can measure incidents police may not officially
record as crimes
• Provides data on victims/offenders (individuals),
and the incidents themselves (social artifacts)

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National Crime Victimization Survey
• Since 1972 by Census Bureau
• Sought to illuminate the “dark figure of
unreported crime”
• Longitudinal panel study: households agree to
participated for 3 years (7 interviews; one every
6 months) and then replaced
• Does not measure all crime
• Respondents are asked screening questions

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National Crime Victimization Survey

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Positive Elements of NCVS
• Measures both reported and unreported
crime
• Independent of changes in reporting
• More information about how crime
impacted victim than UCR
• Provides more victim characteristics than
UCR

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Negative Elements of NCVS
• Telescoping incident dates
• Faulty memory
• Little information on offenders
• No information on CJS response if
reported
• Excludes crimes against commercial
establishments
• Only includes residents of US

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NCVS Redesign
• Sought to improve measurement of domestic
violence and sexual assault
• Revised screening questions and added cues to
help respondents recall and distinguish minor
incidents
• More direct questions on rape and other sexual
crimes
• Greater attention to measuring victimizations by
someone the respondent knows
• Gradual increase of telephone interviews to
replace in-person interviews

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Community Victimization Surveys
• First Development in late 1960’s
• A series of city-level surveys by the Census Bureau
• 1998 BJS and the Office of Community
Oriented Policing Services (COPS)
launched pilot surveys in 12 large and
medium-sized cities
• Jointly developed a guidebook and software so that
local law enforcement agencies and other groups can
conduct their own community surveys

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Comparison
• Crimes Known to Police:
• UCR
• SHR
• NIBRS
• Victim Surveys
• NCVS
• Community Victimization Surveys

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Surveys of Offending
• Delinquency, "victimless" crimes, and
crimes rarely observed or reported to
police may be measured by self-report
surveys
• Examples: prostitution, drug abuse, public order,
shoplifting, drunk driving
• Two ongoing self-report studies
• National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH)
• Monitor the Future (MTF)

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National Survey on Drug Use and Health
Based on a national sample of households
Conducted since 1971; 2004 sample had 68,000
individuals
Includes questions to distinguish between
lifetime use, current use, and heavy use
Encourages candid responses via procedures
Includes residents of college dorms, rooming
houses, and homeless shelters

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Monitoring the Future
• Conducted since 1975 by the National Institute
on Drug Abuse
• Includes several samples of high school
students and others, totaling about 50,000
respondents each year
• Questions concern self-reported use of alcohol,
tobacco, illegal drugs, delinquency, other acts
• A subset of 2,400 MTF respondents receive
follow-up questionnaire

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Monitoring the Future

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Drug Surveillance Systems
• Surveillance systems have been developed to
obtain alternative measures of drug use
• Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) –
provides ongoing assessment of drug use
among arrestees
• Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) –
collects emergency medical treatment reports for
“drug episodes” from a sample of hospitals

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Measuring Crime for Specific Purposes
• Local Crime and Self-Report Surveys
• e.g., any purpose!
• Incident-Based Crime Reports
• e.g., Newark PD vehicle theft
• Observing Crime
• e.g., shoplifting, bar drinking, and violence

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Measuring Crime Summary
• UCR & SHR: best for murder and crimes in
which the victim is a business or commercial
establishment
• NCVS: best for crimes against persons or
households that are not reported to police
• Self-report surveys: best at measuring crimes
that do not have readily identifiable victims
and that are less often observed by or
reported to police

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