ADMJ 0500 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: National Incident Based Reporting System, Motor Vehicle Theft, Larceny
14 May 2019
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The Crime Picture
Uniform Crime Report (UCR)
- Aggregate crime counts, suppressed lesser-included offense, and did not distinguish
between attempted and completed crimes
- Original UCR program included a Crime Index which permitted comparisons of trends
over time
o Included: murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-
theft, motor vehicle theft, arson
o Discontinued in 2004
- Current UCR
o Crime in the US: compilation of violent and property crimes
o Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted
o National Incident-Based Reporting System: detailed information on single crime
occurrences
National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS)
- Developed to provide detailed data on every single crime
o Place of occurrence
o Weapon used
o Type/value of property damaged or stolen
o Characteristics of offender/victim
o Relationship between offender and victim
o Outcome of complaint
- Created in 1988
- 22 general crime categories and 46 specific crimes called Group A offenses
Both are primary and official counts of crime in the US
- Statistics are based on reports to police by victims of crime
- Collected by individual law enforcement agencies and then compiled annually by the FBI
- Includes index crimes
Historical Trends in Crime
- In the US, there have been 3 major shifts in crime
- First Shift in the 1940s: decrease in crime due to young men serving in WWII
o Fewer young males = less crime
- Second Shift between 1960 and 1990s: increase in crime
o Post-war baby boomers reaching crime-prone age
o Growing professionalization of some police departments resulted in greater and
more accurate data collection
o Increase in drug-related criminal activity and gangs
o Crime rates peaked during the early 1990s
- Third Shift after the 1990s: decrease in crime
o Criminologists do not agree on the cause of this stead and consistent decline
o Incarceration rates have increased dramatically, but only has a limited impact on
crime rates
o Other explanations
▪ Decreased demand for drugs such as crack cocaine and heroin
▪ Baby boomers “aged out” of criminality
▪ Increases in technology make homes safer, cars more difficult to steal,
and fewer people carrying cash
▪ A strong economy (until the Great Recession of 2008)
▪ Improvements in policing and larger police departments
▪ Immigration and gentrification (more diverse neighborhoods are less
criminogenic)
▪ Phasing out lead paint and fuel (lead exposure in childhood is linked to
aggression and cognitive delay)
▪ Legalized abortion (theory argues that children who are unwanted or
whose parents cannot care for them well are more likely to become
criminals)
Crime Today
- Depends on how much media you consume and what sources (on the rise, out of
control, crime drop has flattened out)
- Chicago and Baltimore have increases in crime (especially violent crime)
- Mass shootings and police brutality on the rise
- Don’t have enough data points to know if crime is on the rise
- What matters more to citizens and community, the hard data of the perceptions of the
crime? Why?
UCR is divided into Pat I and Part II crimes
Part I = submitted each month by participating law enforcement agencies, known offenses,
offenses cleared by arrest or exceptional means, age, sex, and race of those arrested
- Personal/Violent Crimes
o Murder: unlawful killing of another human being by another
▪ 1st degree: premeditated
▪ 2nd degree: unplanned, heat of the moment
▪ Manslaughter
▪ Spree murder: killings in 2 or more locations with almost no time in
between
▪ Mass murder: 4 or ore victims in one location
▪ Serial murder: several victims in 3 or more separate events
▪ Index crime that is the least likely to occur, but most likely to be cleared
o Forcible rape
▪ Until 2012, this could only occur to females by definition
▪ Definition: the penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus
with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of
another person, without the consent of the victim
