Sociology 1020 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Motor Vehicle Theft, Victimless Crime, Official Statistics
1 Oct 2018
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Document Summary
The official recording of a crime involves many steps: Step 1: someone must know about the crime. Step 2: the person must report the crime to police. Step 4: what kind of crime it is. Step 5:to write a report about the crime. Dark figure of crime: the crimes that are excluded from ucr official data. Two main shortcuts when it comes to measuring crime. First much crime is not reported to the police, victimless crimes are violations of the law in which no victim steps forward and is identified. In addition, many common assaults go unreported because the assailant is a friend or relative of the victim. The second short coming of official statistics is that authorities and the wider public decide which criminal acts to report and which to ignore wider public decide which criminal acts to report and which to ignore.
