SOC 2136 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: National Crime Victimization Survey, Uniform Crime Reports, Motor Vehicle Theft
Document Summary
Historically it has been difficult to measure crime . Come is context and time specific: behavior is evaluated differently depending on where and when it occurs. Most popular sources of data for estimating delinquency are the uniform crime reports (official), victimization surveys, and self-report studies. Collects data from 17,000 city, county, and state law enforcement agencies nationwide. Participation in the program by law enforcement agencies is voluntary; roughly 95% of us policing agencies participate. Ucr includes information on 1) crimes known to the police 2) number of arrests 3) persons arrested. In 1929 a committee outlined a program for collecting crime statistics that became the foundation of the ucr: crime index is a classification system of 8 crimes. Measure the extent to which arrests occur in a specified population and time period. Why do we need to compute rates: verifying crime between two different groups. Standardizes arrests to permit comparisons over time, geography, and characteristics of the population.
