Reviewing The Usefulness Of Official Statistics Criminology Essay

Reviewing The Usefulness Of Official Statistics Criminology EssayOfficial statistics give entropy on the number of abominations commit that ar attracted directly from sever aloney law of temperament. They claim to provide answers to two questions the achievement of offensive, and who commits it. Criminologists have identified the stretch out of positive statistics giving a false picture of the level and token of abhorrence that actually exists. As a publication, new(prenominal) types of communicateation argon turned to including victim surveys, longitudinal research and self- score studies. This essay go forth go by exploring the manipulations of authorised statistics then go on to explore the chores with the data. The some other types of data available will then be outlined and the service program of them will be evaluated.Offical statistics ar figures that have been collected by the law and argon published by the Home Office yearbookly and abide data o n crimes enjoyn to by the police. Official statistics have the use of hand overing trends in crime that can easily be comp bed all over time. For example, the Office for National Statistics (2008) published a report saying In England and Wales, 4,060 Anti- friendly Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) were issued in 2005, over 18 per cent oft than the fore red ink year. They also dupely show which social group is more promising to commit accepted types of crime. This could be the individuals age, ethnicity, social class. They allow police to know where their priorities should be and aid governments in setting their policies on crime. To a criminologists localize of view, they are a free, secondary source of data that are going to be efficacious even if it is just to identify how much of a threatening-figure on that point is.The term Dark-figure is ultimately the entire problem with using formal statistics to turn over crime. The downhearted figure is defined as the amount of c rime which is un account or unknown virtually(predicate). The total amount of crime is do up of those that are known of and spirited, and the dark figure of crime (Online mental lexicon Of The Social Sciences 2008). The dark figure is said to exist due to the social construction of crime. This is the idea that what is seen as criminal conduct to one person whitethorn non be to another. The result on that point are crimes that the domain to do not report to the police, and there are crimes that the police to not record. These make up a big(a) number of crimes that are not preserve by the police, and make up the dark figure.Unreported crimes communicate for a range of reasons, and are a massive contributor to the dark figure, which removes utileness from official statistics. The police rely on the public to inform them about crime, they do not cosmopolitanly find out about crimes themselves. As Maguire et. Al (2002322) said whether bulk perceive a incident(prenominal) action or event as crime, let alone whether they report it as such to anyone elsecan vary according to their own knowledge, awareness, or feelings about crime, which in turn may be influenced by the oecumenic public mood or the preoccupations of politicians and the media. Crimes will only generally go reported where there is a victim, therefore there is a humongous number of victimless crimes which the police are not amazeting told about. Typical crimes of this nature include traffic offences and violations of laws take careing public decency such as public drunkenness. These crimes will all contribute to the dark figure. Crimes may not be reported to the police if it is not perceived to be serious. The victim may regard the offence as trivial and believe that reporting it to the police is more effort than it is worth.A study source of unreported crime comes from pink-collar crimes. Edwin Sutherland came up with the concept in 1945 which, at the time, was a very different i dea of crime from anything before (Coleman and Moyniham 19969). Sutherland (1940 cited in Coleman and Moyniham 19969) defined the concept as crimes committed by persons of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupations. Crimes of this nature could include bribery and corruption in vocation and politics, the breaking of trade regulations and breaking food and drug laws. Some crimes may be committed by organizations or corporations themselves, rather than an individual, and are a great deal known as corporate crimes. Sutherland (1940 cited in Coleman and Moyniham 19969) explains how these types of crimes are very widespread, unless a measure of them doesnt appear in police records. Prosecutions are unbelievable due to the apparent trivial nature of the crime, and often it is difficult to get sufficient evidence. Generally, other procedures are used to deal with these criminals, such as civil actions or those of special agencies. Firms are unlikely to pros ecute employees over internal crime to the company such as stealing property, as they believe the result will be their company looking bad. He goes on to explain that white-collar criminals are the most damaging of all due to the results. These crimes will therefore make up a large proportion of all crimes committed, yet the majority of them are not included in official statistics, so contributing to making them useful to subscribe to. other major contributor to official statistics not giving a legitimate picture on crime is crimes that go unrecorded by the police. Simmons and Dodd (2003) direct out that the police have a legal obligation to record all crime, however over 30% of all crimes reported to the police in 2002/3 were not recorded. Cases where crimes arent recorded include cases where the crime is seen by the police as cosmos trivial and the offence minor. The police may see that the time taken to fill in the paper hold on a minor crime or one where sleuthing the vict im is unlikely is simply a waste of time. A exploit known as cuffing is where police downgrade crimes in order to refer Home Office efficiency targets. They may even make a crime disappear all together so it does not show up in statistics, for example theft can be downgraded to deep in thought(p) property, which is not a crime. This may be done in cases where police pay is partially determined by clean-up pass judgment, so it is in their amour to have a low number of crimes recorded. An example of this is in a recent news article where Alan Travis (2008) said, the Home Office disclosed that up to 17 police forces have been under-recording some types of the most serious ruby crime.There is further dispute in the usefulness of official statistics from the problem that certain crimes appear more frequently than others. A key sustain of this is media amplification. This is where certain crimes are concentrated on by the media and made out to be big problems (often when they are n ot), known as moral panics. The result is that the police will concentrate more of their time in areas where these battalion are. This could mean that the hightail itency of the police to concentrate in low income areas may mean higher arrests of the working class, which may distort the figures. It could also be argued that police resources are devoted to patrolling public places, which is where most young males slide by their social life, so leading to higher arrest rates amongst them and contortion to the statistics.As a response to the problems of the data in official statistics, a number of alternative ways are also used to study crime. The most popular alternative if the British Crime Survey, which is a using study. The British Crime Survey was first conducted in 1981 and has become an annual event since 2000. The Home Office carries out the victim study so they dont have to simply rely on using police statistics to study crime, and see it as being more reliable than polic e statistics for certain types of crime. The survey itself involves asking a sample of 47,000 adults if they have been the victim of crime in the previous year. It also asks individuals if they reported the crime, and whether the police ultimately recorded it. Data from the British Crime Survey may reveal that there are either more or less offences in particular categories, implying that an offence is being either under reported or that it is being reported accurately. All in all then, the BCS data seems to indicate that official statistics on crime do not provide a sound picture of the extent of crime, and boilers suit they may underestimate the trend.However, we cannot say that the British Crime Survey is giving a true picture, as there are also many limitations with the survey. Maguire (2002) explains how there are categories of crime that are not included in the British Crime Survey that are included in police statistics. This could include cases where there is a technical or corporate victim (such as shop-lifting), or if it is a victimless crime. He also noted that sexual offences have been reported so seldom that it is not possible to put forward reliable statistics. Another major flaw with the survey is that it excludes offences against victims under sixteen years old. He goes on to explain that national surveys are therefore much less useful at obtaining information about certain incidents of crime than others. He makes it clear that the BCS, therefore, it cannot be too heavily stressed, provides an alternative, rather than a directly comparable, overall picture of crime to that offered by police statistics it is fuller than the latter in some respects, but narrower in others. (Maguire 2002).Another form of information on crime is Self-report studies. These are where questionnaires or interviews are conducted in confidence to collect information about individuals, and ask them to admit to the number of crimes they have committed, including those whi ch they were not caught. The data can then be compared with official conviction rates to determine which offences are most likely to be committed. Maguire (2002) concluded thatOn the one hand, these suggest that crime is committed by a much larger proportion of the population than is officially held responsible for it. On the other hand, survey respondents who have previously been in trouble with the law tend to admit to more serious and more frequent offending behaviour than people who have never been convictedThe studies are useful as people generally do not fear getting in trouble for admitting to the offences, so a more valid picture of the number and extent of crime is given.Self-report studies do however come with fundamental problems. Unreliable answers are believed to be obtained as respondents may exaggerate when answering questions, respondents may be embarrassed so either not admit to a crime or give an unreliable account of it, respondents may have forget the full detai ls of a crime they committed. The majority of self-reported studies survey are conducted on samples of school and college students, and are rarely used on adults. This therefore doesnt make them a good technique in studying the general level of crime in society. The surveys are also likely to cloak-and-dagger minor and trivial crimes, but not find out about the major and less common more serious crimes. For this reason, the self-report study cannot be said to be an strong way of investigating crime.Overall, it appears that there is not single method effective in studying crime, and while the official statistics do contain the dark-figure, they do provide a very useful starting point. When used in combination with the British Crime Survey, the inaccuracy from the dark figure becomes less problematic, and a truer picture of crime is given. Neither is an effective source of information on its own, and only give part of the picture.