CJA 204
January 30, 2014
Measuring Crime
What instruments are used to measure crime in the United States?
There are so many different police agencies and levels here in the United States. Here are a few of the Federal policing agencies: Department of agriculture, commerce, Defense, FBI, and justice, but there are 15 Federal departments. The State level agencies consist of highway patrols, port authorities, state police, fish and wild life police which are only a few of the state levels agencies. At the local level agencies, there are campus, constables, transit police, and sheriff’s department, which also are just a small portion of the local level agencies.
With so many policing agencies, we measure the crime level here in the United States with three main tools. “They are uniform crime report, National crime victimization survey, and the National incident based reporting system. The uniform crime report: Law enforcement agencies voluntarily report crime statistics on a monthly basis to the FBI. Areas of interest are murder, burglary, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, larceny/theft, auto theft and arson. The National victimization survey is conducted by the Bureau of Justice statistics; the survey is conducted every …show more content…
The data has many purposes to many people like city officials who use the data to place emphasis on certain crimes. The data is also important to media and public citizens who use the information to conduct research or shop for homes. Though the information is mostly accurate, the Federal Bureau of Investigations discourages negatively using the information to depict a region, state, county, or city. There are numerous factors that influence the fluctuation of certain crimes in different areas so using common sense to decipher the sociological factors is