Criminology For Dummies. Steven Briggs
that you think a victim would report, the actual report rate is quite low. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, only two out of five violent crimes were reported to the police in 2019.
Besides not receiving reports for every crime, another significant problem with the UCR is that a police agency must pick only the most serious crime from a criminal incident to report to the FBI. In other words, the police can’t report multiple crimes that occurred during a single incident. So, if a man steals a car and then later sets the car ablaze to conceal his first crime, the investigating police agency reports only the arson, not the motor vehicle theft.
This will change in 2021 as the FBI completes its transition to a new reporting methodology — the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which is designed to efficiently and accurately gather more information on more crimes from police agencies’ computerized record management systems. The full nature of a multi-crime incident will now be documented.
Figure 3-1 compares the overall violent crime rates over the past three decades (provided by the UCR). The numbers reflect how many violent crimes occurred per 100,000 people in the United States.
Tallying the number of arrests
In addition to the number of crime reports, the UCR also collects information on the number of arrests. For these statistics, the UCR looks at not only the Part 1 crimes I mention in the preceding section, but also 21 other crimes, including simple assault and driving under the influence of intoxicants.
Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation
FIGURE 3-1: The U.S. violent crime rate has dropped fairly steadily since 1991.
Figure 3-2 shows the 2018 national clearance rates for various crimes.
Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation
FIGURE 3-2: The clearance rates for various crimes in 2018.
You can see that police are much more likely to solve violent crimes than they are to solve property crimes, which is largely a result of the greater resources that police commit to solving violent crimes. Another important factor that leads to the increased clearance rate for violent crime is the fact that violent crimes often leave eyewitnesses who can help identify the perpetrators. In contrast, property crimes often happen in the absence of witnesses.
Arrest statistics provide another tool for evaluating crime rates: Tracking the number of arrests helps track certain trends for crimes that people usually don’t report, such as driving under the influence of intoxicants. Yet, tracking the number of arrests has its shortcomings. For instance, a decrease in the number of arrests for a certain crime may have alternative explanations, including these:
Fewer people are committing the crime.
Police are putting fewer resources into investigating the crime.
Criminals have figured out ways to commit the crime without being caught.
Spotlighting unreported crime: Victimization surveys
How do researchers get around the problem that so many crimes go unreported? The best answer is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Each year, the U.S. Census Bureau, in cooperation with the Bureau of Justice Statistics (part of the U.S. Department of Justice) conducts a survey of 95,000 households and asks people 12 and older questions in a series of interviews about crimes they experienced over a three-year period. Based on this sampling, the Bureau of Justice Statistics then estimates rates for a variety of crimes. (The survey excludes uncommon crimes, such as kidnapping, because the sampling isn’t large enough.) To see the 2019 version of the survey, you can visit the Bureau of Justice Statistics website.
Like the other forms of measuring crime, victimization surveys have their shortcomings, too. Primarily, they’re very expensive. Because of their high cost, the NCVS sampling of 95,000 households is not large enough to draw meaningful conclusions at the state and local levels. For instance, a criminologist in Pueblo, New Mexico, can’t draw any conclusions about rape trends in his home state or town from this national survey. Thus, the NCVS data isn’t very helpful in planning to provide resources to local domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers.
Separate from the NCVS, local and state governments, nonprofit agencies, and universities sometimes conduct their own localized surveys. Such surveys aren’t limited to victims, however. Researchers rely heavily on surveys of youth alcohol and drug use to identify new and dangerous trends. For example, in 2019, the number of 12th graders vaping marijuana in the previous 30 days had doubled since 2018.
Accepting the shortcomings of crime statistics
As I explained previously, none of the three primary methods of gathering crime stats — crime reports, number of arrests, or victimization surveys — is perfect.