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Crime Statistics

Crime statistics—numerical data on crime and the judicial reactions to it, calculated at regular intervals—constitute an essential counterbalance to normative approaches to criminal justice issues. There is no single measure of crime, but several different ones, each with its advantages and shortcomings. Measurement of crime depends entirely on the sources utilized. Results depend on the viewpoint upon which these measurements are predicated, that is, looking at data on victims, offenders, or the public or private agencies possibly involved once an offense has been discovered.

History

Crime statistics originated from counts of a criminal justice agency's activity. Historically, European governments introduced them at the beginning of the 19th century and they first covered criminal courts. Statistics on prosecutorial entities followed, meaning the public prosecutor for civil law countries on the Continent and the police for those countries governed by English law. Statistics on prisons soon completed the picture. Surveys of the public, leading to victimization studies, have considerably enriched this picture, but date only to the 1970s.

Adolphe Quételet (1796–1874) formulated the first quantitative studies on crime and criminals, which he predicated on the ratio between the number of crimes judged and the number of those actually committed. He argued that this is constant. Despite the frailty of this assumption, some European countries have enriched their statistics, for instance on sentenced individuals, and used these as a basis for quantitative criminological studies investigating the influence of individual factors on criminal behavior.

Police and Judicial Statistics

For many years, scholars confined their criticism of the use of judicial statistics as a basis for measuring crime to the opposition between people favoring recourse to police statistics and those who contended that statistics on sentencing are the relevant indicator. The former argued that being upstream in the criminal justice system, police departments provide indicators that are a better reflection of crimes actually committed, while figures on cases brought to court may tend to reflect temporal or geographic variations in the frequency of prosecution. The latter objected that since crime has a legal definition, police statistics may mistakenly count cases that the courts end up rejecting for juridical reasons.

In the United States, the government established the Uniform Crime Report, based on police statistics, in 1929. For many years, it was the main source of statistics on crime. Since it only covered a selection of relatively serious offenses, it partially avoided the reproach of exaggerated counts, but conversely it did not cover all acts legally defined as crimes. With a few exceptions (including England in particular), police departments only began to collect data after the Second World War. In Europe, these statistics usually cover most of the offenses handled by the police, sometimes excluding traffic violations.

Narrowing the Gap between Actual and Recorded Crime

The second half of the 20th century saw a more radical critique of the use of administrative statistics to measure crime. Scholars emphasized the existence of a “dark figure,” referring to cases that remain unknown to the police and the justice system. A number of factors (attitudes of victims or witnesses, intensity of police control, extent of visibility of criminal acts) may affect the magnitude of this dark figure, depending on the nature of the crime. Furthermore, police services may add an additional filter by excluding some offenses known to them but not officially recorded.

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