Criminology Chapter 2

• official sources of crime data: collected by govt and govt agencies
• unofficial sources of crime data: collected by private or independent agencies / researchers
• positivist criminology: collection of data about people follows the same scientific procedures as data in science
  • not a perfect view because data doesn’t speak for itself
• uniform crime records: compiled each yr in washington dc by fbi staticians
  • most reliable set of crime data
  • provides diverse info for 4 violent crimes and 4 property crimes
  • provides data about arrest trends by location
• National Incident-Based Reporting System: FBI-coordinated supplementary reporting system
• Evaluation of the UCR
  • does commendable job, could do better w more sophisticated methodology
  • because of inherent biases, UCR can’t accurately measure crime rate
  • a large number of crimes go unreported ➝ can’t show up in UCR
  • police participation in UCR is voluntary
  • UCR doesn’t include federal crimes
• Criminologists have turned to victimization surveys to understand volume and rate of crime
  • examine representative samples of a pop to discover what crimes have been experienced in a given period
• Unofficial sources of crime data
  • self-report data
  • life-course data - official crime data, self-reports, psych evals, iq tests
  • life-history data - lived experiences of individuals
  • criminal biographies
  • observation research and participant observation research
  • comparative and historical research

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