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' Discuss the importance and reliability of

crime statistics when researching into


crime rates’

Name: Adina-Monica Campean-Petruca

Module: Fundamentals of Effective Learning

Tutor: Harry Harris

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Introduction
Crime rates and statistics data are both of active interest when we research about
crime, its evolution and impact onto society. Crime levels are issued to address public
concerns, political policies, and law enforcement; they try to portray what is actually
happening in society regarding crimes and evaluate how effective policies are. In other
words, they put crimes into numbers and make us understand crimes’ context and dynamics
(LawTeacher, 2018: 1). Besides the rigorous results of crime levels and identifying which
offences tend to be dominant, statistics and crime rates are also used to predict, prevent
and design ways to reduce crime incidence. Assessing levels and crime trends is a necessity,
not only to assure citizens of their safety but also to understand how criminal offending
occurs and in what circumstances this can be changed. Other than offering an insight into
the crime scale, statistics are important because they help us find reasons, point out areas
with problems and enable future crime predictions (LawTeacher, 2018: 1). To be able to
think of policy revisions and new measures, that come to control and reduce crime or better
rehabilitate offenders, we need to make sure that crime figures are accurate and reliable.
What this report seeks, is to present and analyze different methods used to capture and
interpret crime, largely in England and Wales, through comparisons with the U.S. when
possible, and to find whether this statistical data is reliable, of public and governmental
interest, or to what extent comprehensible.

Police official figures and crime surveys


Police crime reporting and recordings make the “official figure” on crime, in England
and Wales. In the U.S. are known as the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) (Newburn, 2017: 45).
All police data, along with courts data, are sent to the Home Office (Newburn, 2017: 46)
since 1857 (Liebling et al., 2017: 163), and published into bulletins that aim to inform
annually about crime levels and trends. Initially, they were presented in the Command
Paper till 2001, and later in “Criminal Statistics, England and Wales” (Liebling et al., 2017:
164). Changes in the governmental approaches evolved from analyzing statistics to better
administer justice, to identify causes of crime and distinguish the criminal from non-
criminal, to the recent concerns on risk, assessments of performance and managing
outcomes (Newburn, 2010: 44) What this information indicates is that measures of crimes
served governmental purposes, policies and resource distribution, it started with the
concern on crime scale, emerged towards a better understanding of criminals and moved to
concepts of crime control and managerial performances. The importance of statistical data
results here from the fact that statistics figures directed the process of decisions and backed
it with evidence. Being dependent on reporting and recording procedures, police statistics
face their first and most important limitation and due to this are considered less reliable for
analyzing crime trends (Smith, 2006: 1) Due to a change in “notifiable offences”, introducing
common assault and harassment in their categories, an extra 250.000 offences of violence
against the person were added into counts, and so the percentage of recorded crimes raised
from 62% in 2000-1 to 75% in 2003-4 (Liebling et al., 2017: 171) but not due to an effective
increase in crimes.

With the alarming increase in crimes between 1950 and 1960 till 1990 (Newburn,
2017: 65) and the accusations that the official police crime statistics were manipulated by
the police forces to benefit themselves (increased pay and manpower) (Smith, 2006: 1), a
new form of crime measurement was developed, the British Crime Survey (BCS) in 1981
(Lewis, 2013: 224), that is now known as the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW)
(Liebling et al., 2017: 165). They were primarily victimization surveys and questioned
random household inhabitants if they experienced victimization in the previous twelve
months. In the U.S. the National Crime Victimization Survey (1972) covered frequency,
characteristics and consequences of criminal victimization (Newburn, 2017: 55). The survey
approach came to reveal unreported crimes (Liebling et al., 2017: 165) and the results were
amazingly true, crime recordings were incomplete and unable to provide a global view on
crime levels and trends, nevertheless unique. “Under half of the offences identified by the
surveys were recorded by the police” (Walker, 1995: 4). Walker (1995) in her study indicates
that in 1991 crime surveys showed that only 50% of the identified offences were reported
to the police, and about 60% recorded, and the main reason for not reporting was that
respondents found the offence to be too trivial (55%) (Walker, 1995: 11). Another 25%
thought that police could not do anything and 12% dealt with the offence privately (Walker,
1995: 11). Highlighting the issues of the “dark figure” (unreported crimes) and mistrust in
the police capacity, crime survey statistic’s figures shortly become more credible and
revealed a different extent of crime (ONS, 2018: 9). Consequently, it had brought to our
attention possible factors that made the two datasets to report different crime rates. One of
the reasons we can easily deduct is the different procedures they have used to measure
crimes, surveys instead of reporting.

Self-reports and unexplored figures


Our understanding of crime trends, incidence, and offenders can also be shaped by
crime theories. It is said that demographic data is insufficient to capture the complexity or
the dynamics of crimes (Zhao and Tang, 2017: 1). Theories propose that crimes are seeing
high levels in poorer areas and that youth delinquency can come as opposition to culture
and community values (Zhao and Tang, 2017: 3). With the help of statistics, we do not only
engage to quantitatively understand crimes and criminals but at the same time test theories
and descriptive inferences. The fact that official figures were not an all-encompassing
offending report, self-reports were employed to obtain direct information from people and
ask them directly if they have ever been involved in criminal activities (Newburn, 2017: 72).
This was aiming to better measure the extent of crime, explore and test theories of crime
and offender behavior, and to get a view on the social distribution of crimes. What studies
have shown, like Nye’s study, was a strong relationship between delinquency and social
class, and a delinquency connection with age. Similar results are found with the Cambridge
Study in Delinquent Development, offending peaks at 17, if offenders engage early in life in
crime al behavior they have more chances to accumulate more convictions, and that
frequency is a strong predictor if an individual is a violent offender. Rather than a bulk of
data and tendencies in offending, these reports offer a closer look at offending patterns,
along with the longitudinal studies, which may not be caught within the national statistics.
All these showing the important aspect that statistics should capture different social
characteristics and their relation to crime, as is the age group issue (LawTeacher, 2018: 2).

Local crime surveys, like the Islington Crime Survey, found higher level of sexual
assaults and that a third of local household in poorer areas had been subject by burglary,
robbery, or assault (Newburn, 2017: 60). Indicating that crime attitudes were related with
people’s own experience with crime (Newburn, 2017: 60), statistics become relevant or
contradictory to people’s experience and build trust, or, on the contrary, mistrust in crime
statistics and the way they are presented. In order to trust that crime rates are real, and to
be able to make sense of them not only in terms of crime trends and levels, we need to
make sure that they are backed with accuracy and strong reliability by more than one
official source (Smith, 2006: 11). Rather than having one single national view on crime it is
considered that a more local view will help to rehabilitate public trust in crime statistics
(Smith, 2006: 6).

Crime drop, limitations, and reliability of statistics


The British Crime Survey data came to complement police statistics, but it
contradicted them afterward (Liebling et al., 2017: 165), from 2002 to 2004 (Smith, 2006: 2)
showing a fall in crime rates rather than a rise (Liebling et al., 2017: 165). Police statistics
tend to count the “more serious offence”, and these raised from 1.7 million in 1971 to 5.1
million in 1991 and started to fall (Walker) to, for example, 3.7 million in 2012 (Lewis, 2013:
223). Crime surveys count the lesser offences and exclude homicides, sexual offences, drug-
related or fraud, till recently, and now being analyzed separately. Results in 2012 showed
8.9 million crimes against adults, with 5% less than 2011, a first count of 0.9 million offences
against children age 10-15, the business survey counted 9.2 million crimes, but police
records were only 2.3 million anti-social behavior incidents for the same year. Police figures
tend to distort the frequency of crimes due to their recording behaviour (Liebling et al.,
2017: 168). Though, crimes against a victim may go as one offence or may prove less reliable
when present an overlap of cases, reoffenders victimizing the same victim (LawTeacher,
2018: 2). Although showing that crimes against the property are more common, the failure
to capture more domestic violence in the Crime Surveys numbers might be caused by
victims’ characteristics, some respondents are reluctant to give details about the traumatic
experience of being offended (Liebling et al., 2017: 168). Differences in reported crime could
be caused also by the choice of surveyed areas or the methodologies used (Liebling et al.,
2017: 169). In terms of applicability the two sets slightly differ, we can see how police
statistics come to assess police forces and policies efficacy, and how crime surveys,
addressing victims can contribute to victim support and ensure their rights are respected.
Also, as a possible long term intervention, police agencies can implement education
measures, help tackle crimes and benefit from survey statistics to counteract biases and
improve law and policies that are not proving effective.

In a cross-examination, Buonannano et al. (2013), between the U.S. and E.U., to test
the veracity of “crime drop” and a possible global tendency, tried to correlate factors like
incarceration rates, unemployment, and age to crime rates. Research shows how age is
strongly related with crimes, how unemployment might influence criminal behaviour and
how incarceration rates, that should deter crimes, could correspond with high
imprisonment rates (Buonanno et al., 2013: 6), but not how the positive correlation of
socio-economic factors with different crime types is affecting crime trends and if this could
prove that crime drop figures are reliable. They analyzed how a change in the proportion of
one of these factors changed crime rates and found that incarceration decreases crime
rates, but seen no or limited connection between unemployment and incarceration. In E.U.
for homicides cases, no role of incarceration was found but a positive impact for
unemployment and young males (Buonanno et al.,2013: 25). In the U.S. they explained how
homicide rates are more likely to be influenced by firearms’ use and policies. What they
strongly believe is that one major cause for crime drop was incarceration. Maybe statistics
missed to capture all of the offences, but seeing offences’ causality and consequences
enable us to understand their influence on crime and explain partially crime rates tendency.
What statistics successfully delivered is to point that, regardless of the crime
increases through time, the last tendency of crimes was to decrease or stay level, as is the
last year case (ONS, 2018: 7), and even when we exclude a number of crimes we still have
an important number of offences that lower their rates. Mistrust in statistics come from the
confusions that they might rise into the public opinions (Smith, 2006: iii). The risk of
becoming a victim according to British Crime Survey 2006/7 is 24% compared with 45% in
1995 (Loveless, 2008: 24), and the preconception that women and elderly people are more
exposed to street crimes it proved wrong. British Crime Survey reported in fact that young
males and people who are going out for drinking are being exposed to a higher risk of
assault.

Conclusion
The reflections on crime through crime rates, after extensive research, become more
expansive than police figures and survey results. We start to question the “dark figure”
through auxiliary surveys investigations, self-reports, and cross-examination. It becomes a
subject of more important attention when unreported or unrecorded crimes reveal that the
actual crime drop maybe did not occur, but statistics might rather minimize their data
range. Crimes not captured in the official statistics or crime surveys, and the past
manipulation of data or different contradictory sets of data, make the public perception to
still fear the imminence of crime. The actual rates reassure that the individual is not so
exposed to crimes as it is largely believed (Loveless, 2008: 24), but rather its properties and
goods are more likely to be part of offences and “experience fraud, than a violent offence”
(ONS, 2018: 14). What statistics are missing to represent are the factors and variables to
which they are subject to, like changes in recording procedures that altered crime trends or
failure to identify crimes, which still raise matters of concern regarding measurement errors
and to what extent we can consider these statistics data reliable.
List of references:

LawTeacher (2018) Benefits and the Limitations of Crime Statistics. LawTeacher. [online]
Available at: https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-essays/criminology/benefits-and-
limitations-of-crime-statistics.php?vref=1. [Accessed: 7 February 2019].

Lewis, C. (2013) The truth about crime statistics. Police Journal, (Issue 3), p. 220-234.
[Accessed: 6 February 2019].

Liebling, A., Maruna, S. and McAra, L. (2017) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. Sixth Ed.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Loveless, J. (2008) Criminal Law: Text, Cases, and Materials. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Newburn, T. (2017) Criminology. Third Ed. Oxon: Routledge.

Office for National Statistics (ONS). Crime in England and Wales: year ending September
2018. London: Office for National Statistics. Available at:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/crimei
nenglandandwales/yearendingseptember2018#main-points. [Accessed: 5 February 2019].

Smith, A. (2006) Crime Statistics: An Independent Review. Available at:


https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110218135925/http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk
/rds/pdfs06/crime-statistics-independent-review-06.pdf. [Accessed: 2 February 2019].

Walker, M. (1995) Interpreting Crime Statistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zhao, X. and Tang, J. (2017) Crime in Urban Areas: A Data Mining Perspective. Available at:
https://www.kdd.org/exploration_files/20-1-Article1.pdf. [Accessed at: 3 February 2019].

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