Measuring Crime

INTRODUCTION TO
CRIMINOLOGY AND
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
MEASURING CRIME

The crime is denoted as the act or omission that falls in the category of the prohibition
under a law. The understanding of the prevalence of the crime enables the understanding of
the criminal trends, crime and the criminal justice system (Hardyns & Pauwels, 2010).
Measurement of crime is an important concept in criminology and is often overlooked in
context of the significance. However, it is essential to note that the efficient measurement of
crime forms the base for the adequate application of the test theories related to victimization
and offending, and the evaluation of the effectiveness of the public policies. The efficient
measurement of crime would facilitate the intelligent allocation of the resources by the
agencies and the maximization of efforts of the prevention and the suppression of the crime.
The following work is focussed at analysis of the various aspect of the measurement of the
crimes. The analysis would include the various methods by which the crime is measured, the
challenges faced by the authorities during the said exercise and the means to address the said
challenges.
There have been stated three main sources of data of the crime. These are namely the
surveys of the victims, official reports from the police and the offenders providing self-
reports. The official records are further derived from various sources such as police, police
arrests, and appearances in the court, data obtained from the prison, data of the convictions
and the data obtained from the national survey agency (Reid, 2015). In context of UK, the
British Crime Survey or the Crime Survey for England and Wales enquires people that are
age 16 years or more about the instances of crimes experienced in the past 12 months. The
survey covers the households of the areas of the England and the Wales (Brunton‐Smith &
Sturgis, 2011). The survey has an edge over the crimes recorded in the police records. This is
because often the crimes are not reported and hence not reflected in the police records.
Instead the survey ask the people about the crime that have went unrecorded. The agency that
is chiefly responsible for the conduct of the survey is the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
It is significant to note that the results of the said survey are collectively referred to as the
National Statistics. The survey involves the sampling method as the inclusion of every
resident would be complex in terms of the cost and time constraints. The sampling technique
employed is the random sampling so as to enable efficient representation of the population in
context of population of every age and comprising of both men and women. The steps
involve the selection of the addresses by the authorities and the sending of the letters to the
residents along with a leaflet containing the notifications that selection has been made for the
purpose of the survey. This is followed by the survey based interviews as conducted by the

company namely the Kantar Public. The information collected is confidential and is
processed to generate the insights about identification of the section of population which is at
the most risk, evaluation of the crime trends and the development of the policies for the
reduction of the crime.
The next method that is involved in the measurement of the crime is the self-reported
crime measures. The self-reported surveys are popular in a range of research domains
including that of health, education, public attitudes and opinions, leisure and the family
relationships (Klein, 2012). The introduction of the self-reported crime measures was done in
the mid-1940s. However, the same was not viewed as the alternative measure of the crime
until the year 1967. This was when the United States had used the self-report crime survey in
the study of juvenile crime which was being epidemic in the region at that time. The
development of the method is based on the fact that the police records and the known crimes
are representation of the only the tip of the iceberg of illegal activity. Thus, the criminal
justice system is comprised of the successive funnelling process. By the process, it is meant
that of all the total crimes committed, only some reach to the police in the forms of reports,
out of the reported, only some of the crimes are recorded by the police, resulting only a
section of the offenders being convicted. Further, a section of the convicted offenders are
sentenced to the custody. The research of the various aspects of self-reports led to the one of
the most popular works of Hindelang, Hirschi, and Weis (1981), namely the ‘Measuring
delinquency.’ Today self-reported crimes measure are viewed as a more direct measure of
criminal behaviour, and the one that is efficient at capturing the concept of the crime. The
chief reason that led to the development of such an alternative measure of crime was the
dissatisfaction among the authorities with the official crime statistics.
The following section is descriptive of the challenges faced by the authorities in the
measurement methodologies of the crime as stated in the previous section. In context of the
first method of the measurement of crime that is the survey of the victims, the following
challenges are noteworthy. The prime issue is that the researcher work around explanatory or
predictive models, for the study and the evaluation of the data of the crime (Krohn,
Thornberry, Gibson & Baldwin, 2010). The important thing to be noted here is that while the
behaviour and the attitudes of the victims of a crime are studied at the current point of time at
the time of making survey, the assumed victimization has already occurred prior to the
interview. Further, it is important to note that the data for the survey of the victims is still
collected by the local authorities, and it is not mandatory for the victims to be part of the