2: STATE

practitioner of criminology would deny, whatever their sociological

perspective. Indeed, criminal justice workers themselves, notably the
police, are some of the strongest critics of the utility of official crime
statistics as measures of the “real” volume of crime (Meehan 2000:
338), as teachers of criminology who have them as students can testify.
When reference is made in the news media or elsewhere to “crime
statistics,” what is meant is what police record as “offences known to
the police.”While the criminal justice system also counts convictions,
and the dispositions of offenders by sentence (fine, probation, prison,
etc.), we will confine ourselves to the count known as “offences
known to the police” in what follows. The “errors” to which crime
statistics are prone are well known. Thus:
1. Victims may not know they have been victimized. An employer
or employee may be defrauded by the other and never discover
it. A citizen may be “disappeared” by the security forces of their
country without those concerned about them ever knowing for
sure. Consider the case of the missing 43 Mexican students from
Ayotzinapa (Goldman 2015). Consider the missing indigenous
women in Canada (Walter 2015).
2. Victims may never report alleged offences to the police for
understandable reasons.
3. When reports of offences are made, the police may never record
them as such. In the 1980s, officials in Canada and the United
Kingdom publicly acknowledged that police had standardly
“unfounded” about a third of reported rapes (Eglin 1987: 191).
Bell (1960) reveals a practice employed by New York detectives of
holding back complaints and reported burglaries so as to reduce
the number of unsolved crimes. If a felon was apprehended, he
was then more or less coerced into confessing to some number of
this backlog of offences, thereby allowing the police to clear their
books (Duncan and Eglin 1979: 13).
4. In observing the “sanctity of work shifts” and the “division of
department labour,” police officers quite readily ignore perceived
offences that occur as they are “going in” at the end of a shift, and
offences that do not concern them, such as thefts they encounter
while doing narcotics work (Turner 1969).
5. The selection of the category under which to record some reported
or detected offence will vary with the administrative recording
procedures of the jurisdiction in question (Silverman 1980).

59