Multiple Crimes

Read the article titled “How Crime in the United States Is Measured”. Next, compare and contrast the fundamental differences, strengths, and weaknesses among Uniform Crime Report, National Crime Victimization Survey, and the National Incident-Based Reporting System.

Summarize the main forces that may contribute to possible civil disorder in your community. Next, propose the overall strategy for the local police/sheriff chief to prepare them on how to deal with these possible civil or violent demonstrations. Provide a rationale for your response.

RESPOND TO THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT:

Measuring historic crimes has always been hard. Criminologists agree on the ambiguity of the knowledge that the public have about crime. This is because crime is both time specific and context based. An interesting twist about crime is that some people commit crimes on a frequent basis but never get caught while others will be caught on committing their first crime. In order to address this criminologists have developed yardsticks that approximates the extent and nature of criminality.

Uniform crime report data offers a way out of the village watchman guesses. However, there still some criticism that comes with its accuracy. For instance UCR reports the crimes that are known to the police. A large number of people do not report crimes to the law. We therefore end up with a situation where we have an invalid number of crimes and also the number of those offended will be inaccurate. Victims report crimes for various purposes. Otherwise consider it a s a private matter or even fear reprisal. This leads to a big difference between the crimes that have actually been committed and those that have been reported to the authority. Unreported or undiscovered crime is what we refer to as the dark figure of crime. Another weakness is that UCR does not report offences related to drugs and federal crimes such as insurance fraud and evasion of taxes. These raise serious concerns on the reliability of UCR. UCR reports only serious crimes as it follows the hierarchy rule. This means that incase a person robbed someone and murdered him afterwards, only murder will be reported by UCR. This is contrary to other countries where this would have been reported as multiple crimes. UCR does not collect all the information that is relevant for a case. It collects details of the offender, the victim and the nature or circumstances in case of a homicide. Details of the weapons used are collected only in cases of murder aggravated assault or robbery. The UCR reveals more about the behavior of the police than it does on the crime. Since UCR relies mainly on the crimes reported o the police, the police are under the pressure of making sure the information about crime is adequate and accurate.