CRIM 131 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Suicide Of Rehtaeh Parsons, Property Crime, Mothers Against Drunk Driving
7 Jun 2018
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Chapter 3: Crime, Victims, and the Community
Lecture 4: Issues of Media and Crime Rates, Introduction to Policing Monday February 5th, 2018
Crime Rates
What is it? The number of incidents known to the police, usually recorded per 100,000 of the
population
●People tend to quantify things, seen as easier (statistics, rates, etc.)
●Makes us see if we are at risk of something
PROBLEMS: no statistics is without bias (statistics is framed, manipulated)
●Rates can be viewed as inaccurate (many crime categories may not be declining)
○Only the most serious offence from multiple offences, by the same person, is
counted
○Rates are reported rather than the actual volume
○The variations within police reporting
○Dark figure of crime- true amount of crime that goes unreported to the police vs
crime reported (≈50% of incidents with victims are not reported)
●Strategies to improve this: self-report surveys and victimization surveys
●Recorded and reporting practice varies across the country, collected data is a forced fit
●Very small % of crime is actually discovered by the police alone
●Consider Justice Without Trial
●Does not reflect all the risk, loose representation (more represents official decisions made
by the police)
○Who compiled it? Police and Stats Canada
○Purpose: fundings, etc.
○Omitted: everything else apart from recorded and recorded data
○How accurate: What are the statistics missing, in this case DARK FIGURE OF CRIME
Sources of Crime Data
●CSI
●UCR (big heavy hitting crimes represented, didn’t look at context)
○UCR 2 adds context (e.g. social location)
○Not everyone is arrested
○Not all arrested are guilty
●Self report and Victimization surveys
○Suggested to have a better picture
○Individuals tend to self report more than they report to police
○Some didn’t want to report, some report weren’t officially reported, others didn’t
know they were being victimized
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○Concerns with sampling (not everyone might be available, language barriers,
human error in terms of misremembering things, people might like to please
authority figures)
●Correctional facilities and court data
○Significantly less data
○Court data- appearances (details and the endpoint aka sentences, loses context
as it goes)
○Correctional facilities- intake and release (very little in the middle, unless
extraordinary situations occur)
Formula= (number of incidents reported to the police/population) x 100,000
●Manageable number is 100,000
Looking at Statistics: Questions
●How was the data compiled? (put together, sources)
●Who put the data together? (will impact what it looks like, message and purpose can be
different)
●What is included and what is omitted? (no data is ever representative of the whole
population)
●How accurate are these statistics after all is considered?
CSI
●Crime data reflected a single incident
●Only the most severe incident is actually presented
●Crime rates lower not only because of dark figure of crime but also CSI
●ONLY THING WE KNOW ABOUT CRIME IS THAT THEY HAVE BEEN GOING DOWN
○New crimes (new behaviours are criminalized, so they are being looked for it so
this might cause a spike. E.g. internet crimes) and targeted crimes (more likely to
charge, e.g. war on drugs) are increasing
Crime Trends
●Police-reported crime rates have declined and are at their lowest since 1972
●People’s knowledge of crime are based on the trends presented, we don’t really know
anything beyond that
●Crime Severity Index (CSI) has also declined
●Highest crime rates in Western regions of the country
●Violent crime declining continuously
●Property crime and police-reported youth crimes have declined
●Decline might be attributed to technological, demographic, and strategic factors
Crime in First Nations and Inuit Communities
●High rates of crime and overrepresentation in all justice processes present a challenge to
the CJS
●Also high rates of victimization within Indigenous communities
○Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut (x5 more crime than all of Canada)
●First Nations women are at higher risk of violence and have very little resources available
to prevent this
●Resources of the CJS are also very limited (e.g. lack of correctional institutions)
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●High rates of crime and victimization are also present in urban centres, mostly due to the
legacy of colonization
●Reasons:
○Discrimination
○Bias
●Historically the trends are the same
●Why?
○Assimilation
○Colonization
○Residential school legacy (cultural genocide)
●All these events have led to distrust in the CJS
●History has been rewritten over time (e.g. textbooks)
The Costs of Crime
●Annual cost of CJS≈ $31 billion
●Majority of the cost: policing
●Cost accounting other factors≈ $100 billion (e.g. victims sufferings, lost of income, quality
of life)
●Spousal Violence≈ $7.4 billion
●Domestic Violence (going down, medical practitioners can respond better to incidents)
●Cyber Crime≈ $1.4 billion (cyber bullying, child pornography, etc.)
●Some factors cannot be quantified
●Value of the service? Are we really getting what we are paying for?
●Potential solutions:
○Increase expenditures
○Develop problem-solving capacity
●The CJS has been designed to deal with “traditional” crime
○Increases to sophisticated modern crimes (e.g. cyber crime, international
organized crimes, international drug and human trafficking)
○Increased costs and threats to security
Special Offender Types
●Unique needs and special challenges
●Set beliefs are very difficult to change
○Coordinated and informed responses needed
Document Summary
Lecture (cid:627): issues of 3edia and crime ates, introduction to policing. The number of incidents known to the police, usually recorded per 100,000 of the population. People tend to quantify things, seen as easier (statistics, rates, etc. ) Makes us see if we are at risk of something. Problems: no statistics is without bias (statistics is framed, manipulated) Rates can be viewed as inaccurate (many crime categories may not be declining) Only the most serious offence from multiple offences, by the same person, is counted. Rates are reported rather than the actual volume. Dark figure of crime- true amount of crime that goes unreported to the police vs crime reported ( 50% of incidents with victims are not reported) Strategies to improve this: self-report surveys and victimization surveys. Recorded and reporting practice varies across the country, collected data is a forced fit. Very small % of crime is actually discovered by the police alone.
