Counting Crime

This chapter deals with the collection and interpritation of cime statistics. Over the past century, those who have tried to undertand crime have relied heavily on statistical descriptions of criminal behavior, criminals, and the criminal justice response. What we know about crime depends on the quality, coverage, reliability and validity of our measures of crime.
This chapter will describe how social scientists count crime. After discussing the problems of the validity and reliability of our measures of crime, we will introduce the long standing debate over whether crime statistics accurately reflect the amount of crime in Canada or whether they merely relfect the activity of the criminal justice system. To help you to understand the strenghts and weaknesses of Canadian crime statistics, we descibe how the administrative records of the police, courts and prisons are turned into measures describing the amount of crime and the characteristics of offenders an victims. This process involves developing clear procedures concerning units of count, levels of data aggregation definitions, deata elements and counting procedures. Particular attention will be paid to the most commonly used measure of crime: the Uniform Crime Report system(UCR). The UCR is basd on crimes reported to the police across the country. Finally, the chapter describes victimization surveys and self-report studies. These provide data that are complimentary to those produced by the UCR.