SOCIOL 3410 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: True Crime, Aero A.11, Homicide
Document Summary
Perceptions of crime: perception = more crime; reality = steadily dropping since 1990s, possible reason = more media coverage. Primary sources of crime data: uniform crime report (ucr) Represents over 17,000 police/sheriff stations and 96. 3% of us population. Reports on number and rate of various types. Includes: crimes against people (part i crimes), public order and property (part ii crimes) Police departments provide raw number of part i and part ii crimes and rates of crimes. Rate b/c risk of being victimized and populations change over time. Raw number useful when dealing with small populations. Ucr good because can analyze rates and raw numbers. May be because feel nothing will happen, retaliation, mistrust police, etc. True crime rate will be higher than index rate but hope they match. Certain crimes are vastly underreported such as hate crimes (reluctant to report) Underreports crimes because only counts most serious offense by offender in particular crime.