Criminology the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program

Criminology

The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program was set up by the International

Association of Chiefs of Police in 1929 to produce reliable and uniform crime statistics for the country (FBI 2004). The task of collecting, publishing and archiving these statistics first belonged to the FBI. At present, these data come from almost 17,000 law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S.A. There are also annual publications that gather and print specialized facets of crime, such as hate crime, murder an assaults of law enforcement officers, special studies, reports and monographs.

Uniform Crime Reports provide periodic nationwide assessments of reported crimes not available in the criminal justice system (National Archive of Criminal Justice Data) from approximately 17,000 law enforcement agencies directly r through state reporting programs. Data are classified into agency-level, incident-level, and county-level. Agency-level data consist of five types, such as offenses known and clearances by arrest; property stolen and recovered; supplementary homicide; police employee and hate crimes (NACJD). Known offenses and clearance by arrest data consist of reports of index crimes recorded monthly. Property stolen and recovered data, done monthly, consist of the nature of the crime, the monetary value and type of the stolen property. Supplementary homicide reports are incident-based, describing the victim, the offender, the relationship between them, the weapon used and the circumstances. Police employee data relay in-depth circumstances, type of call answered, weapon used and the responding patrol officers. And hate crime data include evidence of prejudice as to race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and mental or physical disabilities. FBI information on hate crimes includes the number of victims and offenders, the type of victim, bias motivation, type of offense and the place.

Incident-level Data are collected through the NIBRS component of the Uniform Crime Reports on each incident and arrest within 22 offense categories, in turn made up of Group A and Group B. offenses. And county-level files contain arrests and crimes data distributed years as arrests in all ages, juvenile and adult arrests and crimes reported. These county data emanate from files obtained from the FBI. NACJD puts in the missing data and aggregates these to the county-level.

In contrast, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) evolves from respondent reports from longitudinal survey of representative sample the U.S. population (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2001). These reflect attributes of housing units, households, individuals and crime incidents, such as assaults, larcenies, and robberies, according to seriousness of the incident; attributes of the victim and the offender; their relationship; the location; defensive reaction of the victim during the incident; witnesses; and police involvement (BJS).