Uniform Crime Reports: A Primer
The UCR covers the entire United States, and police officers and other members of the criminal justice system gladly cooperate with the collection efforts. The UCR has an index which specifically defines different types of crimes, and this allows us to easily compare crimes throughout the United States. An enormous amount of information is collected for the UCR, and it can be very useful for those in the criminal justice system to study. However, the UCR has one fatal flaw; it does not take into account the "dark figure of crime".
The "dark figure of crime" refers to the total number of crimes that are committed, because many crimes are never reported to the police. The UCR measures only the crimes that are reported, so it is essentially not giving a real report of crime rates, it is providing information pertaining to the crimes that are reported to police. This is a serious problem because it is obvious that the UCR grossly underestimates the magnitude of crime in our country. If we only use this data collection to make efforts to help victims, a huge proportion of victims will be left out. As a result, the UCR can only be used to gather very rough estimates of crime, and it is not especially useful in the study of victimology.
Despite it's flaws, the UCR is the best we have in the field of victimology, so researchers have no choice but to try to use the data in as many ways as possible. Some changes have been made recently, such as the NIBRS data and the SHR data, which provide more information on crimes. These changes have helped the usefulness of the UCR, but many more changes need to be made to this data collection before it will truly be useful in aiding victims.
Published by Cecilia Phenix
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