HGA108 week 1 measuring crime flash cards

Hello and welcome to our lecture on measuring crime. What exactly will we be covering in today's lecture? Well, we're gonna answer two questions. Why should we measure crime? And how do we measure crime? We're gonna go through the first part quite quickly. I think you guys already know why it's important to measure crime, but we're gonna have a little bit of a philosophical discussion about crime before we answer that question. And then we're gonna move on to answering the question of how do we measure crime. Now, we're gonna spend the bulk of the lecture on this, particularly we're gonna spend most of the lecture on looking at quantitative methods of measuring crime and then moving on to having a little discussion about qualitative methods of collecting data and measuring crime. Before talking about why we should measure crime, I want to ask you guys a couple of questions about our knowledge regarding crime. How do we actually know about crime? Can we really say how much crime is out there? Have a little think about this yourself. Where does your own knowledge about crime come from? You know, I can say that part of my knowledge is shaped by what my friends and family share. If a coworker, if my friend or if myself have become victimised in a particular way, then that shapes my knowledge, my direct experience of a crime. On the other hand, the majority of the knowledge of my own knowledge and of most people comes from mediated experiences. So it comes from the media, whether it's the news article about a particular crime which has taken place within your community, within your state or within Australia globally, that shapes your ideas about why these crimes happen, where they happen to, what kinds of people they happen to. Recently in January 2024, I think there was a case of a couple sitting down in Hobart on a wharf, Princes Wharf, I believe, and a bunch of teenagers coming and pushing them into the water. The purpose was to steal the woman's handbag. Unfortunately, the man didn't know how to swim, so he passed away. He drowned in the water, and I haven't directly experienced this, but I'm seeing information about this crime on the media. So this is not only shaping my ideas about robberies, about theft, but it's also shaping my ideas about youth crime. Because when I'm reading the media reporting about this, they're providing me with statistics about youth crime in Glenorchy, in Hobart, out of control. So that certainly shapes, that's kind of a mediated knowledge about this particular problem. OK, and we can think about mediated knowledge in terms of sexual violence, in terms of sexual harassment. in terms of serial killers, in terms of spree killings, mass shootings in America. We all have those kinds of knowledges, even though we haven't directly experienced it. We also have academic and research knowledge. We're gonna discuss this in a little bit more depth throughout the lecture, but we have official sources and again, whether it's police statistics, court statistics, those are official sources which shape our knowledge, and they're often linked to each other, each of them. Each of these knowledge spheres don't operate in a vacuum. They, you know, our academic knowledge and official sources seep into our mediated knowledge. The media covers stories which are coming from the academic sphere. So really, they're all connected. But does that mean that we have a complete idea about what crime is and what kinds of crimes happen? It's important to note that none of these sources are capable of providing a full picture on their own, and I think that's what we cover in today's lecture. We look at various ways in which official sources leave out information. But our direct experience, the majority of us would not experience crime, all kinds of crimes in our lifetime so it really does come from different spheres. So do you think it's still worth measuring crime in this setting given our knowledge? So just while I talk through the next points in the next few slides, I want you to come up with reasons for why we need to just make mental notes of why we need to measure crime, why you think it's important. Now, another key point that I want to make is how we measure crime is linked to how we define crime. OK, so if we take a wider definition, then of course there's going to be more crime. Think about, you know, a classic example of this is decriminalising marijuana or even legalising marijuana. So if you're decriminalising it, then you're gonna have less statistics, less people being arrested for possession. If you're legalising it, then you can imagine that there, you would have a lot less people being arrested or being charged with or going through the court systems for selling marijuana. OK, so think about what that's going to do to the overall rates, um, of drug crime. So marijuana possession, marijuana - what, what - selling marijuana, that takes up a sizable portion of people being arrested. Let's think about the United States. The - there's a lot of different states within the United States are having a go with decriminalisation and legalisation, so that's where this discussion can go. But you can imagine that the overall drug rates of a particular state or a jurisdiction would reduce when you have less people being arrested for marijuana. OK, so how we measure crime is linked to how we define crime. Can we really say that there's a truth about crime if we are the ones who are defining it? If we are the ones who are choosing what is a crime and what isn't it, then is there really a truth about it? And this is kind of a philosophical question. But it really makes you think about politics and nature and power when it comes to what we view as criminal. You know, I have a little meme over here, which I think aptly captures this. You have Lisa Simpson saying if we legalise crime, then crime won't be considered as crime anymore. So then you have a graph with breaking news, that crime rate drops to zero. So look at that image. And that really does capture what we're trying to say over here, which is, if something isn't a crime, then we're not going to look at it. So the measurements and everything, what we measure is shaped by whether it's considered to be a crime or not. A classic example of this is image-based sexual abuse. Colloquially, we call it revenge porn. You know, sharing someone's intimate, intimate images without their knowledge for the purposes of revenge or for the - for whatever purposes it is is considered to be a crime now. So of course, we're gonna get statistics about it. We're gonna get measurements about it. But when it wasn't considered to be a crime, and this is well within our lifetime, so most of you guys are probably 18 up. I think laws were introduced in Australia about a decade ago. So 10, 12 years ago when it came to these kinds of criminal acts. So you can just imagine that, yeah, I'm going to make this point over and over again in this lecture. But just have a little think about that. Which brings us to our key question. Should we measure crime? What did you guys think? Do you think it was important to measure crime? And I think I would say, and most criminologists, I think most of the general public would say yes, it's important to measure crime for a number of different reasons. We could consider it, if we're thinking about the general public. Just knowing, having information about your risks is so important. People feel their fear of crime, their public safety, their need for public safety really shapes our lives in lots of different ways. So if we're not measuring crime, we're not being able to provide information to the community about risks and allowing them to feel safe. OK, so people, the public need that knowledge. We can also think about measuring the performance of different criminal justice institutions. Think about it. What do we see on the news?  Crime rates are through the roof. This government has failed. OK, there's a lot of law and order politics which comes up, and we're going to discuss this in more depth in our lecture on politics and the media, crime in the media. It helps us evaluate crime prevention programmes. So if we are undertaking crime prevention programmes within a particular area, if we have those statistics, those before and after statistics, it makes us understand. Yes, it's worth pursuing this or no, it isn't. This is a very simplistic way of looking at it. But if you're going to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to ensure that, you know, drug-related crime goes down within a particular area of the CBD, then you have to know that it's actually going down or else it's not really worth pursuing it. We also need that information to provide resources to police officers, provide resources to police policing agencies, even prisons. So building on that crime prevention effort, we think about rehabilitation efforts. If we want to reduce the number of people committing crimes after they go to prison. So you've committed a crime, your punishment is going to jail. The idea is that you're gonna be rehabilitated, and there's gonna be deterrence when you're going to jail, when you're imprisoned, incarcerated and you come out and you don't commit crimes. So if your statistics, what's happening in prison, if you're providing services that reduces the likelihood of future reoffending, then of course you're gonna spend more money on it. So we need that measurement metric in that sphere, too. It helps us shape new legislation. I talked about image-based sexual abuse. It really is activists and researchers who started collating information, who started recognising that a lot thousands of women, particularly, are being impacted by the sharing of intimate images. Something needs to be done about this. And so that's when different states started introducing legislation. That's when the government introduced legislation, and now we actually have collate. The policing agencies themselves collate statistics, so measurement is important whether it's coming from official statistics or researchers and activists. It helps us identify the likelihood of becoming a victim or an offender. Again, we can have very, you know, if there are some things going on within a particular family if we can. And I - this is the first year, you know, introductory lecture in a way, so I can't really go into a lot of depth. But there are ethical considerations when we think about labelling families or considering child neglect. But they - it is certainly helpful to have those measurements in place to identify who falls out of, who's likely to become a victim of child abuse. Then we need we can set up things to provide protection for the, sorry I've lost myself a little bit there. I hope I've been able to put my point across like if we can identify the likelihood of someone becoming a victim, then we can provide services to prevent that. If we can identify certain characteristics of people who may become an offender, then we can provide support services or digressing. Sorry. Diversion programmes, not programmes but to ensure that that doesn't happen. So the last point I want to make and there are some people talking outside my office. But the last point that I want to make over here is that it also helps us develop theories about crime. It helps us evaluate whether they're accurate or not, evaluate them or check them for accuracy. Criminologists were saying, these are the conditions that create crime. Therefore, let's do something else, and I'm talking very broadly over here. We're gonna do criminological theories in the next few weeks, so you'll get a taste of this. But the idea is, unless we have raw data, we can't really prove our theories either way. Now that we've established that it's important to measure crime, let's take a step back and actually recognise that it's very difficult to measure crime. The vast majority of crime is not recorded officially. It doesn't come through in official statistics. We're gonna go through a number of reasons for why this happens. But if you look at this diagram over here, whether it's the UK, United States, Australia, you have a similar kind of pie chart, which is the red portion of that circle. That's the proportion which never gets reported. OK, it doesn't. We can't, we don't know about it at all. And the blue portion is reported crime. So the dark figure of crime is actually that red circle over there and in your textbook, the definition from that is, it's a criminological term used to describe criminal acts and omissions that are not detected and or reported to police. So basically, it's not recorded in crime statistics. This is also known as the hidden figure of crime. So let's unpack reasons for the dark figure of crime. I think most of you would already have an understanding of why there might be so much unreported crime at any given time at any given society. So there's a lot of under reporting, you know, a classic example of this might be stigma. It might be trauma. If we think about certain victim groups, such as victims of sexual violence or family violence, domestic violence, we know that traditionally there's stigma associated with it, so people aren't willing to discuss it. They're not willing to report it. Simultaneously, there are issues of genuine concerns around whether you would be believed or not. Will I be taken seriously? So a victim of rape or sexual assault, living in the times that we live in, which is definitely a lot better than before. But we still live in a culture where they're not necessarily, they might not be believed, and it's really sad, but they make that decision that it's not worth going to the police because I won't be taken seriously. There might also be a lack of knowledge or literacy when it comes to crimes. And, you know, if we can think about it in terms of child victims, child abuse victims, If you don't know that something that is being done to you is wrong, that it's a criminal act, then how can you actually go and report it? So it really stays invisible. There are lots of crimes which are not worth reporting or might be an inconvenience, and I'm gonna flesh these out as we go through different examples of ways of measuring crime. But I just wanna highlight them over here. There could be fear of reprisals. So from the end of victims and public not reporting, these are the kinds of reasons which come up. On the other end of the spectrum you also have under-recording. So it could be that victims are coming forward and reporting. But police officers themselves or people, law enforcement agencies are not taking them seriously. So, we know that there is police bias. We know there's - as criminologists, there's a lot of research which has established that victim status determines how you are, how seriously you're taken by a police officer when you're reporting a crime or how seriously your case is pursued. So if you're from a minority group, if you're a woman, if you are from a lower socio-economic background, it's really sad but you're not taken as seriously. Your case might not proceed further, so police bias makes a difference. Even bias in terms of understanding who we consider to be a victim or not, those shape how much recording they, if they decide to record or not. Police discretion, they are. We're going to talk about this concept and if you study criminology in the next few semesters. You would realise that there's a lot of police discretion involved. So if a police officer pulls you over for speeding, they do have discretion on whether they want to give you a ticket or not. So you can imagine that that shapes what gets recorded and what doesn't. There are also priorities, and I'll give different examples of this. So if a police department is prioritising on certain kinds of crimes, then that might mean that, I'm sorry. There's an alarm going off somewhere in a office next to me, but I'll keep going. Sorry. We're talking about police priorities that if you're reporting something which isn't part of the priorities at that time, it doesn't get as many resources given to it. We're gonna have examples of, we'll actually talk more about this in your activities, tutorial and discussion board activities. The concept of cuffing of crime or police dishonesty. So actually manipulating statistics, that could be a reason. There are also political considerations, and we'll discuss this. You know, politics comes into play, so similar to concerns around police priorities. If the political sphere is such that there's pressure to try certain kinds of crimes. Then some of them might remain under-recorded because you're not prioritising it. Anyways, so these are various reasons for the dark figure of crime. And I wanted to underpin our whole lecture on these issues because while we go through different ways of collecting and measuring data about crime and measuring crime, we come back to these issues over and over again. OK? So just bear them in mind as we go through this. Let's dive into discussing quantitative methods of measuring crime. Quantity. Quantitative. So quantitative methods of collecting data essentially involve numbers. It's about measuring with numbers. You can consider the definition to be data or information that's expressed in terms of numerical terms. So this morning I bought a dozen eggs. I bought 12 eggs. So that's the number of eggs I'm interested in collecting information about the number of eggs I've collected it. I'm not looking at the colour of the eggs. I'm not looking at the shape of the eggs, so those are more about the quality or I, I don't know how clean the eggs are, so that kind of information. The information I'm interested in is simply the number, similarly quantitative. I don't know why I'm discussing eggs. I just came up with eggs over here, but to give you an idea of what it actually means is, you know, you can weigh the eggs, so they're 200 grammes. So that's the -- there's a numerical discussion about, You know, the egg is 200 grammes. It's a huge egg. So that gives you a number. But I'm not having a discussion about you know what the quality of that 200 gramme egg is. So there are different things that you would measure but you can imagine where quantitative data comes from in criminology. When it comes to measuring crime, it comes from arrest data. It comes from, let's take a step back. But from the 18th and 19th centuries, all across Australia, Europe, Canada, there was a push to quantify how many people were being arrested. How many people were being charged, tried, convicted, How many people are in prisons? How many people are being executed? I think the first statistics actually published in a national setting was in France in 1827. So this has, this isn't a very long time ago, OK? And there is this idea that quantitative methods or quantitative data is more reliable. You can imagine where that comes through, why that happens if we're discussing the quality of the egg, what you and I can talk about, our beliefs on what makes a quality egg is certainly different. It could be different. I could say I like a yellow yolk. You could say you like more of an orangish yolk. So the quality, there are issues with that or complications, whereas quantitative data is there are 12 eggs. The egg is 200 grammes. It's simple. It's there. It's amazing and it's reliable. I have no idea why I have come up with this egg example, but we're going with it, OK, so bear with me, just to get the concepts right. Let's look at some kinds of quantitative evidence when it comes to recording crime. You know, the number one thing that comes to mind is police records, so arrests, cautions and call outs, all of them are important. Back in the day, there was a focus on really looking at arrest numbers, but we realised that that leaves out a lot of information. There might be a lot of people who make calls who are, you know, if a crime has occurred, there are emergency calls. Police show up to a place, but they don't know who the offender is. The offender never gets caught and never gets arrested. But the crime has occurred, or even if it's not reported officially or even if somebody is in charge, that call out information is still important. OK, it still lets us know it's important to capture those numbers. We can do victim surveys where we go and ask people, have you been a victim of crime? We're gonna discuss this in more detail, hospital admittance data. So there might be people. And there are indeed a lot of people who are victims of crime who do not report them to the police. But if they show up in a hospital because they've been injured, then you can imagine that it will allow, that data gives us information of where crime is happening. Court records, convictions, acquittals, all of it is important. Even people who are incarcerated. It really gives us good information about what kinds of crimes are popular. What kinds of crimes are people are more likely to be convicted of et cetera, et cetera. And then we also have self-report surveys where we go and ask offenders what kind of crimes they have committed. So it's similar to victim surveys, but we're actually asking offenders because that also gives us important information. And in today's lectures, I want to talk about, put a spotlight on two different areas of quantitative sources, official statistics and crime victimisation surveys. Official statistics are - is basically data collected by law enforcement agencies and other government agencies. They come from people like you or me. We report crime and it gets reported, recorded. They also come to the attention of these agencies in some other way, shape or form. They might not be officially reported, but you might be doing audits. You might be, for whatever reason, capturing a certain kind of crime it comes to your attention, comes to the government's attention. This is, you know, statistical information from police, courts, correctional services, and they really help us in lots of different ways. I wanted to provide a quick example of how we can use official statistics and what their purposes are. This is an example. Look at the graph over here. It shows non-domestic assault rates, assault incidents and they're spread across different days of the week. OK, so and it makes a distinction between alcohol-related and not alcohol-related. Have a look at the graph. What are we seeing over here? Pause the screen if you need to. But essentially, it shows us that the crime rates, the domestic assault rates increase on certain days of the week and decrease on certain days of the week. Now we have information about alcohol, and you can see that when alcohol consumption increases over the weekend. So from Thursday, particularly from Thursday night to Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday. That's when people drink, up to Sunday. The incidence of violence, you know, assaults, increases during that time, and so does the alcohol-related number of incidents. So that tells you something as a criminologist, as a politician, it should tell you something as a politician. Sometimes it doesn't, that alcohol is a problem. Alcohol is - there's a correlation between alcohol consumption and the number of people who are becoming victimised by, who who are becoming victims of assault. So this is - this really provides us with an indication of trends in crimes. Right? If I want to do something about this, if I want to propose a solution to this, I've identified something very important. This trend for me is very important, and breaking that trend would be even more important. OK, so official statistics provide us information like this. We can compare, so this is in New South Wales. We can compare it with Tasmania data, and then we can learn from each other that actually, in Tasmania, it doesn't happen this much. I'm just saying, suppose, it doesn't happen as much. So maybe they're doing something better that we can learn from. So it shows us an overall measure of communal well being more broadly, like, how well is a society doing if there's more crime, if there's more alcohol-related incidents, that means that there are problems within that community, and we need to deal with them. But there are various problems with official statistics. And as criminology students, I really want you guys to gain an appreciation of this and really kind of be aware of this when you're reading a newspaper article or whenever somebody's citing statistics. We have to remember that the number of particular crimes or the overall level of crime recorded can be profoundly affected by changes outside of the crime. It might be, so what is being recorded is shaped by things other than the crimes being committed. OK, the acts being committed. So we can think about decisions of about which offences to include. So we had alcohol-related and non alcohol-related incidents of assaults before that one. You can just imagine, you know, the definition of assault. What we include and what we don't include has changed over time. So the statistics, if we were comparing something from, let's say 1978 to what's happening now, if you collected data, it wouldn't show up as much because possibly the police weren't picking up on those or recording those assaults. People were not reporting them, so decisions about what to include or decisions about reporting. They also change over time so they shape the statistics. Let's talk a little bit about public changing, public attitudes towards reporting particular offences. A very good example of this is our knowledge about sexual abuse. OK, whether it's institutional, sexual abuse, child sexual abuse, people are coming forward and disclosing this. And this is not just historical cases where people are disclosing victimisation, but also we now have tools and language and enough awareness for parents and carers of children today to recognise when a crime is being committed and to seek help and to report it. So that definitely is shaping the number of statistics when it comes to childhood sexual abuse. It's increasing in Australia. We have seen that as, across the board in different states. But that doesn't mean that the number of incidences, the crimes themselves have suddenly increased. What it does mean is that more people are reporting it. So if we're comparing statistics from 1990 to 2024, there is gonna be a difference. OK, because more - that doesn't, it doesn't give us a realistic notion of what the statistics. We can't compare those statistics essentially. There are also changes in police practises towards particular offences. So we know this is upgrading and downgrading, and we're gonna look at examples of this in our activities over the next two weeks. But essentially, traditionally sexual violence, rape was often downgraded, so it wouldn't be counted as rape. But, you know, police officers might come up with something, something like menacing behaviour or harassment rather than it being recorded as rape. So this really, even in arrest records or even in just taking the report of a particular crime, how that individual police officer decides to frame, it affects our statistics. So this is something very important to recognise. There are changes in counting rules. There are. There's another example that I wanted to, I wanted to share. So we talked about childhood sexual abuse, but also, public attitudes, when it comes to reporting, are shaped by other factors, too. So a classic example that comes up in this setting are mobile phones. Back in the day when you had nice dumb phones which just made you know phone calls and you can make text messages. They weren't that expensive. They felt expensive at the time. But compared to iPhones and different smartphones that we have now, they really weren't that expensive. So if you lost your phone, you would consider, do I really need to report this? I'm just gonna buy a new phone. But now, if you lose your iPhone, you will probably be looking into claiming insurance, OK? And if you're going to be claiming insurance, that means that you have to have report it stolen to the police. So factors like that also shape what gets reported and what doesn't get reported. So whether you're going to claim insurance or not, motor vehicle theft gets reported. Whereas you know, other things might not. So all of these factors shape statistics, and they they show various limitations of relying on official statistics. Let's move on to another example of measuring crime through crime victimisation surveys. In Australia, crime victimisation surveys are conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and it's a national survey conducted each financial year. It basically involves asking respondents about their experiences of personal and household victimisation in the past 12 months. OK, it's conducted throughout the year, and it actually results in a lot of rich data. Let's talk about the advantages of a crime victimisation survey. Now one of the main advantages or one of the main benefits of running crime victimisation surveys is that it allows us to capture that dark figure of crime that we discussed, that unreported crime. So systematically, whether it's in the UK, Australia, Canada, United States of America, places where we have this kind of research done systematically, crime victimisation surveys show significantly more rates of crime, reflect on significantly more rates of crime than what the recorded data does. OK, so sometimes it's often double of what is recorded. So this is, it really so in a way, researchers basically say that it allows us to get an accurate measure of crime rates, and it allows us to use it as a social barometer because if we're relying on official statistics, all of these different crimes are not recorded. It doesn't really give us a realistic notion of when, where and how crime is happening. Whereas this survey allows us to do that. It allows us to get a lot of other information, too. So public attitudes towards reporting. So for example, you know, in these surveys, they not only collect data on what kind of you know, the crime that has been experienced, but also whether it's been reported or not. So that is, that gives us a lot of information. And as a criminologist, as a social worker that there's something going on over there if it's not being reported. OK, it allows us to assess those crime prevention effects of particular initiatives. We talked about this. Why we need to measure crimes If the reported data isn't getting us that information, we don't have enough to rely on to decide whether it's good or bad. This actually provides a better metric. So all of this is very important. OK, something to remember about this is that it's, we're not talking to all Australians. It's not like the census data where everybody's information is being collected. Statisticians go in and they find a sample of people. And the idea is that if we get information from them, if you've, if we've done it properly, we make certain assumptions. Then we can apply that to the whole population. So this is what demographers and statisticians do. This is how you get quantitative data. There are some problems with that. If your assumptions are wrong, obviously they could result in bad data or under-reporting or over-reporting of stuff. But yes, let's move on to the next slide to discuss that in more detail. So there might be sampling errors which result in problematic data. But also, there might be very practical problems in this arena. So, for example, if you're only interviewing one person of the household, they might not know what kind of victimisation has been experienced by their other family members or other people, members of the household. So we know that people keep secrets within families. We know that, just because, you know, someone calls my family, my father up, let's suppose, my father would not know my experiences. I might not have disclosed them to him, so that results in kind of a form of under-reporting even within the victimisation surveys. There could be a number of reasons why people don't want to talk about their victimisation experiences. All those factors that we talked about in terms of the dark figure of crime and under reporting stigma feeling traumatised, not being comfortable, sharing that information, even, even factors like if you're being called and your partner who is the person? You know, committing domestic violence within your household is right next to you. Of course, you're not going to disclose that to the interviewer. There are also issues of memory decay, so respondents may simply forget what has happened to them. Ok, we know that telescopic, telescoping happens. This is this tendency where certain events, especially if they're very serious, we tend to recall them more. So even if something happened a year before or two years before we tend to disclose them in this setting. So that might mean that it's been reported in the wrong year. We know that factors such as education shapes how people, how willing they are to talk to you or what kind of knowledge we talked about this. If you don't have knowledge that a crime has been committed against you, how will you actually report that? How can you say that? And something very important to recognise over here as critical criminologists point out that these kinds of surveys they tend to think of a crime as a one-off or something discreet. So let's just think about theft of a bag in a public street. So somebody steals your bag. Somebody mugs you essentially. That's one incident. But it leaves out incidents such as sexual harassment and racism, which are not usually one-off but happen over a long period of time. And so these kinds of surveys are not really capable of capturing those continuous forms of victimisation. So if you're in a workplace and your coworker is racist or is sexually harassing you over time, these kinds of surveys even though efforts are made to include these, they don't really. It's not really captured appropriately, so yeah. These are some of the problems of victimisation surveys, but at the end of the day, it gives us a lot more quantitative data than the recorded statistics. So it's still an important metric, but we need to be aware of various problems surrounding it, too. Now, if you want to have a little read over areas of crime statistics, you can look at these sites. They're actually really good sources. And they - if you go through a couple of their reports, they give you information about how those statistics, how they are reached, what are the problems with it, what they mean, all kinds of different things. So you can have a look at these if you want to. Before moving on from our discussion around quantitative evidence, I want you to take home two key themes. OK, I want you to think about crime statistics as a social reality rather than a fixed reality. Crime statistics reflect social variables more than a fixed reality. We've talked about these issues already. It's shaped. The statistics are shaped by a willingness to report, by police discretion, by targeted operations undertaken by police in a particular area when there is a public outcry about a particular problem would of course, lead to more statistics or more data being collected on crimes being committed within that setting. Politics and media. If there's more focus on particular issues and more, you know, we talked about institutional child abuse, historical, institutional, child abuse. There is media attention paid to it. Politicians have taken it up as a cause. More resources are being spent in that area. So of course, that's going to lead to more, when you have more boots on the ground which are actually engaging with this thing, it's not just that more people are reporting it now. It's also there is more bodies within these law enforcement agencies which have the capacity to investigate, which have the capacity to take on those reports. Of course, it's going to shape the statistics. So we really have to remember this. It's a social reality rather than a fixed one. And I want you to remember that official data is never quite complete. We've talked about this, but to add to that, it can be put to political ends, and we're gonna look at different examples of this. I don't want to spend time in the lecture discussing this, but it can be manipulated by politicians. It can be [incoherent] related by dishonest policing policing departments, police departments, and we're gonna look at different examples of this. Another key theme that we must remember is that crime statistics must be critically examined. They must. You must think about them. You must critically analyse them, whether you're a private citizen going about your day and reading an article on the Mercury, which says that there has been a 50% increase in property crimes in your neighbourhood. Or if it's a politician saying that look at us. We've done an amazing job. There's a 30% reduction in petty theft in Sandy Bay, and you must be critical of these kinds of of the use of statistics. OK, I'm not saying that they're always used badly, but they can be used especially, you know, when you're trying to sell something or when you're trying to get yourself voted into Parliament or whatever it is, gain support for something. It is very easy to misuse statistics. Let's look at two very simple examples, and I'm not saying that there's something there was any bad intent in the presentation of these statistics, but I want to unpack this a little bit. So according to the crime statistics supplement of 2020, robbery, both armed and armed armed robbery fell by 4% in Tasmania. This is great news, right? You would be happy if you heard this. Except the 4% drop was just a drop in four incidents. Essentially. So the number fell from 108 to 104 incidents. And that's being framed as a 4% drop. What do you think about that? A change in four incidents. Does that really seem like a lot? Now, if it was, you know, I don't know, 10,000 cases and a 4% drop, that would be a huge drop. OK? And that would be something worthy of recognising, but a drop of four. I don't know. Tell me what you think about that. Let's consider another example. Here's the statement. Sexual assaults fell by 14% from 240 to 206 incidents. Again, that's great news. OK, that seems like it's great news. It fell by 14%, except 38% of the reported sexual assaults are historic cases. So they happened over a year ago with many which are several decades old, so cases occurring in 2019 to 2020 may not be reported until 2030 or later. So this really tells you something. If we're using these statistics in this particular way, you know, it gives you an impression that it's inflated or deflated. It can be used in, it can be used and misused essentially. So overall, what we need to remember over here when it comes to quantitative statistics is that we can only make broad comparisons about crime rates across jurisdictions using official statistics. We need various measures put together to tell us useful things about crime rates in different places. So you can't just use statistics from Tasmania and New South Wales and compare them very easily. We really need to use different data sources to get a clearer picture between states. But it's also within the states. We need to, we need information from crime victimisation surveys. I haven't talked about self-report surveys from offenders but that also is gives you a useful source of information. You know, you need the official statistics too. So all of this comes together and gives us important information. Moving on, we're gonna have a very quick discussion on qualitative methods. I am a massive Futurama fan. So, there will be a lot of Futurama memes in our lectures. You can use them everywhere, but this is basically, you know. So you're telling me that quantitative data uses numerical data and qualitative data uses descriptive data? Remember those eggs that I was discussing? The number of eggs versus qualitative data is descriptive. So how yellow is the yolk? How? I don't know. Egg shells, texture of egg shells. What? What is the quality that you can get, the information that you can get? You know, we can talk about caged eggs, non- caged eggs, free range eggs. I don't know. All of these different things can give us important descriptive information about the eggs that we are consuming. So from that, qualitative methods are you know, it's about the quality of information, you're really getting into the nitty gritties. It's about gathering information, gathering data or evidence about the meaning of facts rather than the number or quantity of facts. OK, so methods include interviews with victims, offenders, police officers. So instead of just relying on the data of, let's suppose a particular crime. Rather than just relying on data of what is recorded as a robbery, you're talking to victims about their experience. You're talking to offenders about the reasons for it. Police officers, about their observations. You can also have direct observations of offending. You can conduct surveys with hidden offenders like self-report surveys, but they go into a lot more depth. Focus groups. You can do case studies and life history. So all of this is rich qualitative information that can be used to measure crime. There is a lot of stigma associated with qualitative methods. I'm a qualitative researcher, so I know the stigma very, very well. While I'm not talking about it in this particular lecture in a lot of depth, we will be looking at a lot of qualitative research, especially in the second half of the semester. So I'm not really worried that I haven't covered this in a lot of depth in this introductory lecture. The key points to take away from this is that there is a tension. You can imagine that politicians and the media, they want hard numbers. It's easier to sell hard numbers. But when it comes to, you know, research and academia, we know that we can get a lot more useful information if we dig in and find, you know, unpack those stories behind crime rather than just the numbers. Ok, since the 1970s, especially with the feminist movement, there has been a critical turn in criminology. It is important. It has given us a lot of valuable, valuable information. So within this lecture, overall, we've looked at why we should measure crime and then looked at different ways of measuring crime. Now, I want to bring all of that together and then ask a key question. Can we actually measure crime? And, well, have a little moment to think about it yourselves. But I would say yes and no. Data is more accurate for some crimes than others. So we talked about the dark figure of crime. People would be more willing to, you know, report a car theft than they would family violence. OK, we know that data regarding homicide rates is much more accurate than sexual violence and the reasons for that are self-evident. So homicide, somebody has been killed. It's obvious when you find the body or someone goes missing, it would be reported they would be found missing. And most of the time, the statistics around homicides are definitely accurate. But when it comes to sexual violence, it isn't as much. Overall, what we must be aware of is that there are limitations of each and every approach. OK, there are some strengths, and there are some limitations. So when we're doing research as criminologists, we need to be aware of those. We make claims which have enormous implications in terms of people's lives. So, you know, our findings can be used for crime prevention initiatives. And if we're using statistics the wrong way, then they might not actually be accurate, and they might not actually be doing the job. So these are very - using the statistics has very real consequences for people. Triangulated data is the best to use. So in most studies, whether it's by the Australian Institute of Criminology, whether it's [incoherent], even in scholarly material, it's usually triangulated data, so we don't just rely on arrest records. We don't just rely on police records. We rely on the qualitative and the quantitative data. We rely on the interviews and the survey data. But, and this is something that you're gonna learn in this unit. Sometimes measuring crime in a useful way is practically impossible. So think about digital crimes, transnational crimes, think about pollution, you know, crimes against the environment. It really is impossible to measure these kinds of crimes. So there's that dark figure of crime that we were talking about. We're going to return to that concept, especially in the second half a semester when we look at all of these different examples.

Measuring crime is crucial for several reasons: it provides the public with necessary information about safety and risks, evaluates the performance of the criminal justice system, helps ascertain the effectiveness of crime prevention programs, informs resource allocation for policing and rehabilitation, shapes legislation, and aids in developing theories about crime.

We measure crime through various methods:

1. Quantitative Methods: These involve numerical data derived from police records, arrest data, court statistics, victim surveys, and self-report surveys from offenders. They focus on official statistics and aggregate information to understand trends and patterns in crime.

2. Qualitative Methods: These emphasize descriptive data, gathered through interviews with victims, offenders, and police officers, along with direct observations and case studies. This approach delves into the experiences and meanings behind crime, providing a deeper insight beyond mere numbers.

Despite challenges like under-reporting, variations in definitions of crime, and issues of police discretion, both methods are integral for providing a comprehensive view of crime in society.