SOC209H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Uniform Crime Reports
Representations of crime
October 2, 2017
Epistemology
• validity of knowledge
• source and
Problems with understanding crime
• hidden – deliberately hidden behaviour
• Insight – criminals have little understanding of their own behaviour
• Cost – criminology research takes time and money to execute
• scope – most crimes are inaccessible
• Access – sociologists can’t always pass into every situation
• Barriers – limitations of information due to exclusive social worlds
• Representation – not all criminal groups can b representative
Official sources of crime statistics
Crime rates – number of incidents known to the police – reported crimes
Crime funnel – levels of crimes in existence with relations to rates known by police – actual
level of crime (dark figure of crime – unknown amount of crime) – difference between how
much crime occurs and how much crime is reported to or discovered by police
Clearance rates – police identify and lay charges on suspects
Uniform crime reports – standardize counts of crime known to police across the country
self-report survey – asks people about crimes they commit – largest group of criminal offenders
and victims are young men
Victimization surveys – direct measures – loss, harm, emotional or physical damage, indirect
measures – response to crime, precautions and risk assessment
Limitations – sampling often misses offenders, unreported crimes against organizations
Media representations of crime
• Crime – overrepresentations of crime than data would indicate
• Criminals – pathologically different – not always anti social – certain archetypes;
professional criminal – dissociation from structural issues
• Criminal justice system – false idea of support for criminal justice actors, euphemised
perspective of cases, enforcement, detection and investigation
• Gangs – empty signifier -applicable to multiple groups of criminals but unrealistic to due
connotations, often tied to race and class
Perceptions of crime
