Outline and assess whether crime statistics give an accurate measure of actual crime

Outline and assess whether crime statistics give an accurate measure of actual crime
Crime is seen as behaviour that breaks the law in a particular society. What is considered to be a crime also changes over time, often as a result of government legislation and also people’s attitudes, this may have an effect on how crime is recorded. Because the definition of ‘crime’ changes frequently, this may not paint an accurate picture of what crimes are committed and in a result of this, sociologists talk about the ‘criminal iceberg’. There are essentially 2 ways in which sociologist’s measure crime, one being that they analyse secondary data on crime gathered by the official crime statistics (OCS), which are published quarterly and include crimes recorded by the police and data from the government. The other way sociologist measure crime is collecting primary data by conducting victim surveys such as the Islington Crime Survey (ICS) carried out by the Left Realists, John Lea and Jock Young, or they might conduct self-report studies.
The official crime statistics are useful when trying to find trends in crime; it has been collected since 1857. The OCS is our main source of information about crime. Some sociologists accept the uncritically, for example, functionalists and subculturalist sociologists attempt to explain why the working class and young people are more criminal just because the statistics say they are. Following that point, the official crime statistics have certain strengths and weaknesses. The strengths being that the OCS are very easy and cheap to access which therefore involves little effort on behalf of sociologists. As well as being collective in a standardized, systematic and scientific way, it is also usually extremely contemporary, and for example, the 2009 OCS was published in 2010. The PCS similarly allows us to make comparisons between groups, for example, the OCS covers the whole UK population, which therefore makes it easy to compare things like different groups or regions.
However, that leaves the argument that the OCS does have weaknesses as well as several advantages; the OCS may not present a complete picture, for example, the government does not collect statistics relating to the socio-economic background or employment status of people arrested, prosecuted or convicted and sent to prison. The OCS is open to political abuse; therefore the crime statistics can be easily manipulated or massaged by governments for political advantage.
When crime is recorded, it must come to someone’s attention that a crime has taken place and the reported to the correct agency and lastly, the agency must be willing to accept that the law has been broken. For example, if a woman was to have their purse stolen in the street, either her or others around her would then call the police and report the crime, the police would then come and see if the crime was worth investigating. However, some crimes may not be reported for a number of reasons, them being that it may be too trivial for the police to deal with. The incident may be a private matter between families or friends, some victims may be too embarrassed to report their crime and some people may not like the police or have endured a good experience with them.
Only 40% of crimes that get reported get into the actual statistics. This is due to the fact that some crimes may not be serious enough, or police may consider their promotion prospects and have to balance out impressing their senior officers and comradeship. Sampson suggests that the police might consider the social status of the person reporting the crime. Some of the crimes that don’t appear in the statistics are known as the ‘dark figure’ of crime. Also, taking into account that those crimes dealt with by other agencies do not appear, as well as the white-collar and cybercrime trends tend to be underestimated or difficult to detect. As with icebergs, a small proportion of crime is visible, but the majority of crime gets hidden from our view.
All of the critics of official statistics have led sociologists to develop other methods to research crime. Victim surveys collect data using structured interviews, however, Left Realists and feminist victim surveys tend to use unstructured interviews to gather their data and investigate how people feel about being victims of crime. Victim surveys are when a sample of the population are asked which offences have been committed against them in the last year, the best known victim survey is the British Crime Survey, carried out by the Home Office annually since 1981. Victim surveys question the accuracy of the OCS due to the fact that only 42% reported by victims and of those only 75% recorded by police.
The British Crime Survey (BCS) sample size has grown since it started; it aims preferably to pick up the ‘dark figure’ of crime. Therefore they pick up on those crimes that are never reported to, or in fact recorded by the police, for example, in 2002/2003, the BCS estimated 9.5 million offences whereas the police recorded only 2.3 million, these statistics show that they give a good picture of the extent and patterns in victimisation. On the other hand the BCS can be seen has having several weaknesses, such as the victim’s memories may be faulty or biased. Also, the categorisation of the crime is left to the person filling in the questionnaire; this can lead to inaccuracy and the person exaggerating their answers. In the BCS fraud and corporate crime are not included in the questionnaire; this can leave out vital statistics that could make up trends in crime. Consequently, there is a major criticism of the BCS, this is because of reasons that they don’t currently take data from under 16s and of course this leads to an ethical issue because many crimes are committed against under16s and they are simply ignored. However, this issue can be addressed in the future, possible through a different type of survey call the Lifestyle Survey.
Recent BCS data indicates that since 1981 levels of crime have increased overall, although more recently there have been reductions in some types of crime. Home Office states that police officers are easily able to exaggerate the severity of crime; this can be explained as being the outcome of police decisions to take action on different offences. In conclusion of the BCS, the actual data seems to indicate that official statistics on crime do not provide a valid representation of the extent of crime and overall tend to underestimate the trend.
Self-report is a type of questionnaire, which attempts to uncover the true amount of crime in society. It lists a number of petty criminal acts and asks respondents to tick those they have successfully committed without being caught. To improve validity, the questionnaires stress confidentiality and anonymity for the respondent. Ian Marsh notes that validity is undermined by under-reporting and over-reporting. People may under-report because self-report studies are retrospective and depend on respondents remembering crimes committed 12 months before. Some people can easily exaggerate offences to create a ‘tough’ impression. Others keep quiet, fearing that the police could be informed.
Self-report studies provide understanding into the degree and nature of crime; they also indicate that crime is not limited to the lower socio-economic classes. Various studies using self-reporting indicate that anything between 50% and 90% of the population have admitted behaviour which if detected, is therefore acted upon, could see the respondent brought before a court of law. It is impossible to include all criminal acts in a questionnaire, therefore the researcher must be extremely selective with their questions, which then raises problems as to which offences to include or not. On the other hand, self-reports are distributed mainly to young people, this can be difficult to get businessmen to cooperate and admit to white-collar crime or corporate crime.
In conclusion to whether crime statistics give an accurate measure of actual crime, the official statistics does have its drawbacks, the main ones include the lack of validity and reliability. On the other hand, the other methods, such as victim surveys do have an increasing amount of validity but are seen to be unreliable which also accounts for self-report studies. However, connecting the three results of data together, from the OCS, BCS and self-report studies does provide insights into both the nature and the extent of the crime.