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WEAKNESSES OF THE UCR
An obvious shortcoming of the UCR Crime Index is its emphasis upon conven- tional street crimes and its exclusion of other serious crime. The UCR definition of serious crime deflects attention from such illegal acts as corporate violence, political crime, and computer fraud. People may be misled into believing that they are most endangered by murderers or robbers, when in fact the personal and financial costs of corporate and political crime far exceed those of conventional street crimes. Among the figures they cite are: each year 10,000 lives are lost due to unnecessary surgery and 20,000 persons are killed because of errors in prescribing drugs. The authors point out that numerous birth defects were caused by the premature marketing of Thalidomide by the Rich- ardson-Merrell Company in the 1960s. Chapters 11 and 12 examine more closely the issues of such forms of white- collar crime. The health care debate in 2009 brought attention to the fact that thousands of Americans die each year due to “errors” made by medical professionals. The UCR also can be a tool for political manipulation. Police administrators sometimes rely upon these data to justify requests for additional money for person- nel, equipment, and training. At other times, the Crime Index can be manipulated by a department to indicate exemplary performance (i.e., reducing crime rates or increasing clearance rates). This can be achieved by failing to record some crime reports or by negotiating with offenders to plead guilty to a number of offenses, some of which they may not have committed, in return for a reduced sentence. This most frequently occurs with property offenses, which traditionally have low clear- ance rates. The police can sometimes solve or “clear” as many as 200 burglaries by bargaining with one suspect. These data become an in-house self-evaluation of police performance.
Several problems also arise from recording practices. While the Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook specifies definitions and procedures to be followed, different departments and regions of the country may still adhere to idiosyncratic standards. While it may be accurate to state that “a rose is a rose is a rose,” it is not necessar- ily the case that a rape is a rape is a rape. See, for example, the analysis by Duncan Chappell and his colleagues (1971) of how Boston police reports of rape differ in both vocabulary and style (and particularly in terms of the kinds of acts that are defined as rape) from the reports of Los Angeles police. Cultural standards, level of police professionalism, and staffing patterns can lead to the same behavior being recorded differently in different jurisdictions. Take the case of a 19- year-old female college student who claims that she was raped, beaten, and robbed while hitchhiking home from a fraternity party. Does the officer record this as a rape, a robbery, or an assault? The answer is, it all depends. A chauvinist officer might believe that a woman hitch- hiking alone at night is “asking for it,” and therefore, the officer might ignore the rape allegation. A different officer may record the event as a rape. (See Chapter 11 for more discussion of rape.) UCR instructions mandate that the crime be tabulated in the most serious category, known as the Hierarchical Rule. If the student was robbed and raped, the crimes would appear only as a rape (and not as a robbery), but if she were killed, the crimes would be classified as a homicide (and not as a rape). Another problem concerns the manner in which crimes are counted. Instructions direct law enforcement agencies to tally each distinct property crime as one offense. If, for example, 10 rooms in a hotel were burglarized, these offenses should be recorded as one burglary, but if 10 apartments in an apartment complex were burglarized, the crimes should be recorded as 10 burglaries. For personal offenses, such as robber- ies, the number of victims is immaterial for tabulating purposes, as is the number of offenders. If two robbers confront five patrons in a bank, only one robbery is said to have occurred. These definitional rules tend to underestimate the extent of certain offense types and clearly make direct comparison with victimization and self-report surveys inappropriate. For instance, while the UCR procedures would classify the above bank robbery as one offense , victimization surveys would identify five victims while a self report survey would produce two offenders. Crime rates also can be misleading. Take, for instance, the city of Las Vegas, or any other resort community. These places are inundated by visitors, some of whom inevitably commit crimes. Yet, the crime rate is calculated in terms only of the number of people in the resident population, not in terms of the true total of people that might become either offenders or victims. And because rates are calculated in terms of a jurisdiction’s population, serious errors in determining the number of people living in an area—not an uncommon problem—can affect the accuracy of crime rates. Whereas the traditional UCR system required tallying the number of occurrences of Part I offenses as well as arrest data for Part I and Part II offenses, NIBRS requires more detailed reports and allows for recording of multiple offenses, thus eliminating the Hierarchical Rule which led to recording of only the most serious offense. Agencies using NIBRS collect data regarding individual crime incidents and arrests and submit them in “reports” detailing each incident. This procedure provides much more thorough informa- tion about crimes than did the summary statistics of the traditional
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South Carolina was the first state to “pilot” this new program and by 1988, NIBRS was approved for general use (U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, 2006). In 2004, 5,741 agencies (representing 20 percent of the U.S. population and 16 percent of crime statistics collected by the UCR) were represented, and as of 2006, 26 states were NIBRS “certified,” 12 were in various stages of testing, and an additional 8 were in various stages of planning and development (FBI, 2006). While the NIBRS data are not a nationally-representative sample of law enforcement agencies or criminal incidents, they are one of the few multi-jurisdictional data sources available for examining offenders, victims, situational characteristics, and police arrest/clearance status in crime incidents.
Strengths of NIBRS
NIBRS provides a number of improvements over existing measures such as the UCR, NCVS, and self-reports. A thorough critique by Maxfield (1999:145) sug- gests the following benefits of NIBRS over existing alternatives: (1) incident- and victim-level analysis can be disaggregated to local jurisdictions and aggregated to intermediate levels of analysis; (2) incident details supporting analysis of ancil- lary offenses (drugs, weapons) and crime situations are available;(3) separable individual, household, commercial, and business victimizations are included; (4) data on incidents targeting victims under age 12 are available; (5) a broader range of offense categories, including those affecting abstract victims, are avail- able; (6) allowance for examination of non-household-based individual victims and other incidents that are difficult to measure with household-based surveys; (7) individual-level information about offenders from arrest records and victim reports are available; and, (8) information about the residual status of victims and offenders is included. These advances have a number of practical implications for communities and law enforcement agencies. Faggiani and McLaughlin (1999), for example, demonstrate how local law enforcement agencies can engage in “tactical crime analysis” using NIBRS data by examining local crime patterns and then using this information to strategically target crimes and areas. They also have important implications for researchers who seek to better understand the nature and scope of criminal incidents.
Weaknesses of NIBRS
Maxfield (1999:145-146) also summarizes a number of limitations of NIBRS relative to existing sources of crime data. First, like the UCR, NIBRS data include only crimes reported to police and retained by police recordkeeping systems, thus
average the violent crime rate was less than one percent higher and the property crime rate slightly more than two percent higher under NIBRS guidelines compared to the traditional UCR system.
