crime stats
Crime statistics are not what we are led to believe We hear a lot about the crime rates going up and down from the media and they tend to expand on specific types of criminal behavior that might be of interest to the public. When politicians are running for office we are told that the crime rates are down due to the tough crime policies that they have been implemented. Citizens seek crime rates for assistance in determining if the area they reside in is safe. Some people wish to get a general idea of the crime rates for a specific neighborhood where they are thinking of purchasing a house. But what is never explained is where do the crime statistics come from and were there any factors that could have had an effect on their reliability. Crime statistics, which are created from what is reported to the police, are often unreliable. There are several influential factors that can make crime statistics both increase and decrease at any time. Most police departments, but not all, use Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) to submit their statistics to the state. Attempting to compare two police agency's crime statistics is almost impossible because not all police agencies use the UCR program for classifying crimes. UCR is a national data reporti
ng policy that is maintained by the state and regulated by the FBI. This policy requires police agencies to report their monthly statistics by following a hierarchy scale for classifying the criminal offenses. A hierarchy scale is a list of crimes in a specific order of importance used to pick out the highest crime when there are multiple crimes committed in one incident. An example: a citizen contacts the police and makes a report of a burglary, a rape and a larceny all occurring in one incident. As per the hierarchy scale, the crime of rape would be the only one counted because of the higher classification of crime than the other two. By police agencies using this form of statistical classifying, there is a major loss in the data of the lower crimes on the scale. A complete total of certain crimes are not included in the statistics creating several inaccuracies in the totals. The UCR policy does not require all crimes to be reported to the state. Violations of the General City Ordinance and Vehicle and Traffic Law are considered too low for the hierarchy scale. These types of crimes are never included in the monthly submission and we generally never hear about them. Since crime statistics begin at the forefront of the police department, the police officer, this leaves a lot of room for unreliability. Police officers create crime data by completing and submitting crime reports and arrest reports. These reports include all of the pertinent information necessary for the committed crime(s) for a specific incident. There are times when police officers fail to complete written reports of certain crimes or they downgrade the offense of a report to a less serious offense. Meanwhile, some police reports are over-rated in the seriousness of certain offenses. At the end of each officer's shift the reports and arrest records are submitted to the appropriate unit or division of occurrence. Within a day or two these records are then transferred to a central records department and maintained at this location. During the transfer from one unit to another these records occasionally become misplaced and therefore cause a minor loss of data as a result. The information contained within the reports can come from three different sources. An officer can initiate a report by observing a crime being committed, a citizen can make a complaint to the police or, on rare occasions, the information will come from an offender. Citizen complaints, since they are the largest amount, generally depend upon the public's trust in the police at that point in time. These types of reports could rapidly decrease or increase at any time depending on the public's attitude towards the police. If the media decides to publicize an instance of police brutality or harassment the, community may perceive the police as being the "enemy" and the loss of trus
Some common words found in the essay are:
Traffic Law, Procedures SOP, Policing COP, Reporting UCR, , crime statistics, crime rates, police department, officer arrest, crimes reported, hierarchy scale, police officers, police departments, police agencies, trust police, marijuana officer arrest, trust police department,
Approximate Word count = 1907
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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