SOC209H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: General Social Survey, Uniform Crime Reports, Official Statistics
Document Summary
Crime data and social policy is a statistical picture of crime can be a powerful tool for creating social policy. Officials rely on crime data to do the following: Objectivity of crime data has been questioned due to public opinions of crime greatly influencing the media and can cause public demand for get tough crime policies (i. e. your mind on drugs commercial) Official statistics do not represent crime that has not been reported. Calculating violent crime rates = (criminal incidents/total population) x 100,000. Crime rate - the number of incidents known to the police expressed in terms of the number of people in the population. Ucr - standardized counts of crime known to police. Ucr data reflects reported crime that has been substantiated by police. 1988 introduced the ucr2 incident based survey, including microdata on characteristics of incidents, victims, and accused. Might not be accurate due to government interjection.
