CCJS 105 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Uniform Crime Reports, National Crime Victimization Survey, Motor Vehicle Theft

• School: University of Maryland
• Department: Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Course: CCJS 105
• Professor: Kiminori Nakamura

Document Summary

First step in attempting to understand, predict, and control any social problem is to determine its extent (determining how much there is, when and where it occurs most often) Crime statistics are most suspect to some extent. Major data sources grouped into three broad categories: official statistics, victimization survey data, and self-reported data. Most basic category of official statistics comes from calls made to police by victims or witnesses and by the crimes officers discover on patrol. Other major categories include: information about arrests, convictions, and correctional pop. Uniform crime reports (ucr): annual report compiled by the fbi containing crimes known to the nation"s police and sheriff departments, the number of arrests made by these agencies, and other crime-related information. Reports number of each crime reported to the police as well as its rate of occurrence. Rate of a given crime is the actual number off reported crimes standardized by some unit of the population.