Chapter 4: Counting Crime Flashcards
Methodology
Refers to the study or critique of methods
Reliability
Consistency of results over time
Validity
What you’re intending to measure is what you’re actually measuring. (Accuracy, truthfulness)
How do criminologist calculate crime rates?
dividing the amount of crime by the pop. size and multiplying by 100,000
What does UCR stand for?
Uniform Crime Report
What is a spurious correlation?
Correlation that doesn’t exist in time or space.
Ex. most rape occurs in the summer months, ice cream is eaten the most in summer months therefore, ice cream causes rape.
Population
Refers to all member of a given class or set. Ex. adult Canadians, teenagers, Canadian inmates and criminal offenders.
Kaplan’s “Law of Hammer”
When you give a small child a hammer, he or she discovers that everything needs pounding.
Crime rates have been ________ steadily since 1990.
Decreasing
The dark figure of crime.
All crime that goes unreported or unknown to police
Ex. Sexual Assault
Why do some crimes go unreported or unrecorded? (2 reasons)
- We don’t think the police will do anything about it (why bother).
- The police are busy enough with bigger crimes.
The criminal justice system works as a funnel, how?
only a portion of incidence make it to each level. (“crime”, “reported”, “convicted”)
There are built in ______ because some crimes are more likely than others to be reported to result in arrest, charge, conviction, and incarceration.
Biases
What is the seriousness Rule?
If there are several crimes committed in one incident, only the most serious crime is counted
What are 3 issues with the seriousness rule?
- How does one determine what is most serious?
- Deflates the total crime count.
- Inflates serious crime as a proportion of the total.
Reclassification (policing problem)
If police do not classify the information correctly then statistics Canada will not get the right information.
Unit of count
Consensus about what it is we are counting.
Theories
A set of concepts and their nominal definitions or assertions about the relationships between these concepts, assumptions, and knowledge claims
Ideology
a linked set of ideas and beliefs that act to uphold and justify an existing or desired situation in society
He argued that our understanding of crime would never be significantly advanced if we relied on statistical data
Ned Polsky (1967)
Ned Polsky was concerned about what?
Concerned that sociologists and criminologists were relying too heavily on remote sources of information.
3 broad types of criminal justice statistics
- Stats about crime and criminals.
- Stats about the criminal justice system and its response to crime.
- stats about perceptions of crime and criminal justice.
Administrative Record
A collection of information about individual cases.
Are administrative records statistics?
No
