Crime Reporting What Do You Think?

Crime Reporting: UCR and NCVS

The Uniform Crime Report is a compilation of offensives collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from all police stations in the United States. Data collected is divided into two groups, Part I and Part II. Part I data includes violent and property crimes such as aggravated assault, forcible rape, murder, robbery, arson, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Part II offenses include simple assault, curfew offenses and loitering, embezzlement, forgery and counterfeiting, disorderly conduct, driving under the influence, drug offenses, fraud, gambling, liquor offenses, offenses against the family, prostitution, public drunkenness, runaways, sex offenses, stolen property, vandalism, vagrancy, and weapons offenses ("Uniform Crime Reports.," 2012).

The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is conducted by telephone and collects information on nonfatal crimes reported and not reported to the police against persons age twelve and older from a nationally representative sample of U.S. households. Since this...

The report measures national rates and levels of violent and property victimization and includes data on rape, aggravated assault, simple assault, household burglary, motor vehicle theft, theft, and personal larceny such as pick pocketing and purse snatching (Truman & Planty, 2012).
Discussion

According to the most recent UCR the estimated number of violent crimes reported to law enforcement decreased for the fifth year in arrow while the estimated number of property crimes reported decreased for the ninth consecutive year. However, the NCVS reports that between 2010 and 2011 the number of violent victimizations increased 18%, from 4.9 million to 5.8 million. Moreover, during the same period the number of property victimizations increased from by 11% from 15.4 million to 17.1 million ("Uniform Crime Reports," 2012).

Specifically, the UCR reported murder was down 1.9%, Robbery was down 4%, motor vehicle theft was down 3.3%, forcible rape was down 4%, aggravated assault was down 4%, larceny/theft was down0.9% and arson was down…