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From page 404... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 404 B Measuring and Counting Violent Crimes and Their Consequences People often ask, "How much crime is there? " "How many violent crimes are committed each day, month, or year in the United States? Read the entire page →
From page 405... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 405 of violent crime is not covered by any current institutional means of counting. New means of counting are not easily compared with existing systems, because each has its own rules for selecting, classifying, and counting crime events. Read the entire page →
From page 406... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 406 social rather than police service organizations. Hence, their criminal status remains undetermined. Read the entire page →
From page 407... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 407 types of violent behavior that laws have recently criminalized lie at the margin of institutional processing as violent crime -- date rape is an example. Other forms of coerced sexual behavior may lie outside the criminal law, as is currently the case in most states with marital rape. Read the entire page →
From page 408... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 408 The Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990 mandates development of a national reporting system for bias crimes. Statistics on bias crimes committed in 1990 or earlier are available from only a few of the police reporting agencies in UCR. Read the entire page →
From page 409... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 409 the moral obligation to report all coerced as well as completed nonconsenting sexual intercourse as rape regardless of the victim's relationship to the offender. In years past, few rapes or attempted rapes that occurred on a date were reported because of the youth of the women involved and the social stigma occasioned through its reporting. Read the entire page →
From page 410... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 410 Systemic Influences: Drug Markets Systemic changes in recent decades appear to have affected the composition and volume of violent crime in ways that raise new counting and classification problems. The most noteworthy of these is the growth of illegal drug markets and the population of drug users. Read the entire page →
From page 411... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 411 Measuring and Counting Violent Crimes Statistics about violent crimes and their victims are usually reported in terms of incidents -- specific criminal acts or behaviors involving one of more victims in a single event. An offense is specific behavior that is legally prohibited; the major violent offenses are homicide, rape, robbery, and assault. Read the entire page →
From page 412... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 412 (1) Violent crimes reported to law enforcement agents and their investigation are the basis of the Uniform Crime Reports system of classifying and counting crimes. Read the entire page →
From page 413... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 413 the National Crime Survey was that a great many violent crimes are not reported to the police, and hence a substantial proportion of violent crimes are not measured and counted in UCR. The NCS provides another institutional means for measuring and counting violent crime by securing reports of victimizations from a national sample survey of households and their members who are age 12 and older. Read the entire page →
From page 414... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 414 said they reported 940,000 aggravated assaults to the police, and the police recorded 910,000. The same pattern recurs for robbery and rape." The stark increase from 49 to 97 percent of victim-reported assaults being recorded by the police provides compelling evidence that changes in police recording practices account for differences between NCS and UCR trends. Read the entire page →
From page 415... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 415 Until the incident-based NIBRS reporting system is fully implemented, ethnic status-sex-age distributions cannot be obtained. Moreover, the same offender may be arrested more than once in a given year, so that it is impossible to calculate prevalence rates for arrest or to determine the characteristics of an offender population. Read the entire page →
From page 416... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 416 from studies of special incarcerated populations or by tracing the careers of cohorts of arrested offenders using the arrest records available through state and federal identification bureaus. Some information on criminal careers also is available from small-scale longitudinal follow-ups of cohorts sampled from the general population (e.g., Elliott et al., 1989) Read the entire page →
From page 417... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 417 For example, interventions that reduced the supply of guns in the population would reduce the chance that an injury kills the victim, one of the conditional probabilities in the chain. It would reduce the number of robbery murders provided there are not offsetting conditions that would increase other chances of a fatal injury during a robbery, such as more frequent victim resistance. Read the entire page →
From page 418... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 418 Progress in understanding violent crime is severely hampered by the lack of information to calculate conditional probabilities. This is a severe limitation not only for understanding causal chains leading to violent crimes and their outcomes but also, as noted above, for our capacity to assess the effect of interventions to reduce violent crime. Read the entire page →
From page 419... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 419 the NCS survey organization follows a particular procedure to determine which of the behavioral incidents are to be considered violent crimes; this procedure substitutes for the discretionary decisions of citizens and the police. The NCS uses an algorithm to classify violent and other crimes based on the answers to individual survey questions. Read the entire page →
From page 420... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 420 that in each city a substantial proportion of the rapes and attempted rapes, robberies, and assaults that occurred were not reported to the police; the NCS survey also failed to capture a sizable proportion of the violent crimes that were reported to the police. In San Jose, for example, just under half (48 percent) Read the entire page →
From page 421... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 421 Roughly 1 in 10 victims says that he or she reported the victimization to the police because "it was a crime" (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1990: Table 102) Read the entire page →
From page 422... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 422 not reporting in fewer than 5 percent of the assault victimizations. For crimes not reported to the police, there are not only more reasons given but also much greater diversity. Read the entire page →
From page 423... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 423 are more likely to report their victimization by rape than are older females (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1990: Table 97) Read the entire page →
From page 424... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 424 TABLE B-1 Crimes of Violence, 1988: Number and Percent Distributions of Series and Nonseries Victimizations by Type of Violent Crime Total Victimizations Series Victimizations Victimizations not in series Type of Number Percentage Number Percentage Number Percentage crime Crimes of 6,455,800 100.0 546,230 100.0 5,909,570 100.0 violence Completed 2,338,690 36.2 158,700 29.1 2,179,980 36.9 Attempted 4,117,100 63.8 387,520 70.9 3,729,580 63.1 Rape 137,350 2.1 9,970 1.8a 127,370 2.2 Completed 65,550 1.0 0 0.0a 65,550 1.1 Attempted 71,790 1.1 9,970 1.8a 61,810 1.1 Robbery 1,111,160 17.2 63,150 11.6 1,048,000 17.7 Completed 730,870 11.3 46,610 8.5 684,260 11.6 With injury 275,250 4.3 12,380 2.3a 262,870 4.5 From 133,920 2.1 3,820 0.7a 130,090 2.2 serious assault From 141,320 2.2 8,550 1.6a 132,770 2.3 minor assault Without 455,620 7.0 34,220 6.2 421,390 7.1 injury Attempted 380,280 5.9 16,540 3.1 363,730 6.1 With injury 118,540 1.8 8,260 1.5 110,270 1.8 From 56,850 0.9 6,360 1.2a 50,490 0.8 serious assault From 61,680 0.9 1,900 0.3a 59,780 1.0 minor assault Without 261,740 4.1 8,280 1.6a 253,450 4.3 injury Assault 5,207,290 80.7 473,090 86.6 4,734,190 80.1 Aggravated 1,842,100 28.6 100,710 18.4 1,741,380 29.5 Completed 610,720 9.5 40,130 7.4 570,580 9.7 with injury Attempted 1,231,380 19.1 60,580 11.0 1,170,800 19.8 with weapon Simple 3,365,180 52.1 372,370 68.2 2,992,800 50.6 Completed 931,540 14.3 71,950 13.2 859,580 14.5 with injury Attempted 2,433,640 37.8 300,410 55.0 2,133,220 36.1 without weapon a Estimate is based on about 10 or fewer sample cases and should not be considered reliable. Read the entire page →
From page 425... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 425 rather than completed crimes of violence. Series victimizations are less often the more serious crimes of rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Read the entire page →
From page 426... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 426 Statistical and Other Compensating Mechanisms Just how seriously the national violent crime rate is underestimated given the fact that each of the two main methods misses a substantial proportion of victims captured by the other cannot be estimated precisely at the present time. Using a capture-recapture statistical model of estimation for the 1980 NCS data on aggravated assault and the data on aggravated assault reporting from the San Jose reverse-record check study, Reiss estimated that the estimated 1980 crude aggravated assault victimization rate using multiple capture was almost twice as high as that estimated by the NCS and over three times that estimated from police case reports (Reiss, 1985:166-167) Read the entire page →
From page 427... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 427 to St. Vincent's General Hospital Accident and Emergency Center in Sydney, Australia, reported that 57 percent of the 60 percent of self-reported victims of assault who consented to be interviewed did not intend to report their assault to the police (Cuthbert et al., 1991:138, 143) Read the entire page →
From page 428... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 428 in the attempted crime" and "property recovered" for completed crimes. These would seem to be related to the type of violent victimization with the former reason more commonly given for rape and assault and the latter for robbery victimizations. Read the entire page →
From page 429... ... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 429 Elliott, D.S., D Huizinga, and S Read the entire page →

From page 404...

... MEASURING AND COUNTING VIOLENT CRIMES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 404 B Measuring and Counting Violent Crimes and Their Consequences People often ask, "How much crime is there? " "How many violent crimes are committed each day, month, or year in the United States?