respond to students

Guidelines_ RESPOND TO THESE TWO STUDENTS DISCUSSION

2. Comment to at least two other student responses

3. Reference if you are citing someone else

5. Commenting on another student’s post is worth 2 pts. (Comments must be 3-4 sentences)

6. If comments are less than 3-4 sentence only 1 pt. will be given for the comment

First student, Brian Webb

According to the text, The Uniform Crime Report was created to gather data to answer questions such as the amount of people harmed per year, if victimization was becoming more of a problem and what individuals are targeted the most and least often. In addition, I do believe the UCR is in some sense the virtual “bible” of crime statistics. The UCR is one of the oldest recordings of crime throughout the United States and with the advancement of technology we are able to better keep track of this information. The UCR has progressed over the years with identifying areas where crime is committed more often than others, ages of individuals who commit these crimes, the seriousness of these crimes and so forth. Like any data that is collected of course the UCR has its flaws. The UCR places crime into a format making it easier for everyone to understand while allowing individuals to see the history and transition of crime throughout the United States. With the use of this information from the virtual “bible”, researchers can track trends in crime, if certain implementations are working in efforts to reduce crime or whether or not certain law enforcement agencies need to focus their attention elsewhere.

The Uniform Crime Report collects its information from law enforcement agencies who send their statistics to the FBI. It’s mainly broken down into 2 parts either part 1 or 2. Part 1 crimes consist of serious felonies like murder, arson, rape, grand theft auto and so on. Part 2 crimes are all other crimes like fraud, embezzlement to include a few. What makes the UCR statistics less accurate is not all crimes are tracked or reported. Another problem with the UCR is they don’t keep track of public order crimes like disorderly conduct or white collar crimes even. In comparison, a bank robbery would be reported where as a 15 million dollar hacking crime would go unreported. Also, the structure of the reporting needs to be improved because if an individual had their residence broken into and robbed, yet they were murdered, the most serious offense gets reported not the other crimes in this case being murder. In contrast the National Crime Victim Survey measures crime from victims who do not report to law enforcement agencies as well. This was established to combat the crime that was not reported to authorities, which I feel we could all agree not all crime is reported. Like the UCR the NCVS also collects basic information like the age, ethnicity, gender, relationship to the offender, weapons involved and so forth. The NCVS also goes into further detail explaining if alcohol or other drugs were abused at the time of the incident. However, terminology also alters the data because there’s a difference between being robbed and burglarized or being assaulted where it could have actually been battery. Ultimately I would feel more comfortable using the UCR even though there are crimes that go unreported. The reason being because often times there are other methods used to account for those crimes that don’t go reported but also because law enforcement agencies even with their flaws collect more information than NCVS not to say it doesn’t have its benefits as well.

Second student. Florence

1. What are your thoughts on the quote below? Do you agree or disagree that the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) is said to be a virtual "bible" of crime statistics? Why or why not?

I don’t think that the UCR should be considered the “bible” of crime statistics because although the UCR has a lot of information about crimes committed annually it does not tell the whole story from the beginning to end and of the victims affected by the crime. In fact, it only reports the crimes that affect the victim the most. An example would be, if the crime was rape, kidnapping and robbery it does not report data on the kidnapping and robbery it will only be reported as rape. Another reason I would not call the UCR the bible of crime statistics is because it only reports on crimes reported to the police. This would question the validity of the report being a complete and thorough report on crime statistics due to underreporting.

Part I of the UCR focuses on eight index crimes, street crimes. Only four counts as crimes against persons and the other four are property crimes. Part II reports on other crimes such as sex offenses, other than rape and prostitution, embezzlement, fraud, vandalism are just a few of the crimes reported in part II keeping track of the age, sex and race of the offender, not the victim not the impact of the crime (Karmen, 2016).

I believe they call it the bible of crime statistics because there is no other source that collects these kinds of crime statistics.

2. Which of the two government reports, Uniform Crime Report & National Crime Victimization Survey published annually, do you believe to be more reliable? Why? Give examples of why they differ from one another.

Both the UCR and NCVS have its flaws, but the National Crime Victimization Survey I believe to be the most unreliable.

The NCVS is dependant solely on the honesty of others. It is a National Crime Victimization Survey that only surveys a small portion of the population. It obviously would not reach many people who change mailing addresses frequently or who don’t have access to a phone. This survey has to take into account that people may over exaggerate or not report a crime such as child abuse, sexual abuse or even domestic violence as those may be too personal. Households that do receive a survey may not even return them, making the sample smaller. This report is also limited to national statistics and cannot be broken down by cities.

UCR tracks crimes reported to the police, most police departments provide the data for this report while the NCVS surveys households of the United States population, relying on a portion of the population to be honest in their account of the victimization.