Crime Data and Trends

Crime Data and Trends

Name

Institution

Crime Data and Trends

One of the commonly used methods of recording crime in the use is Uniform Crime Records. The approach is founded on the offences reported to the law enforcement officers and the crimes cleared through arrest on a monthly basis. The major strength associated with this method is that it is facilitated by improved technologies (Siegel, 2015). While this is the case, the method has been criticized for issues such as underreporting, varying and confusing definition of the types of crimes, and methodological concerns such as inaccuracy and incompleteness since reporting is voluntary (Siegel, 2015).

Another method of recording crime used in the American society is the self-report survey. Wirth this, the participants tend to reveal information regarding their violation of the law. The primary advantages are that the method assists in getting at the dark figure of crime (Siegel, 2015). Also, it not only supplements but also expands the official data. However, it has different methodological issues. For instance, people might exaggerate or even forget their instances in which they have violated the law. Also, there are usually reporting differences existing between gender, racial and ethnic groups (Siegel, 2015).

Employing different ways of recording crime can be of central importance in addressing results found in the theoretical study of crime and crime causation. This is especially so given that the strength of one method can potentially fill the gap presented by the weakness of another method (Currie, 2013). In this light, like Cole, Smith and DeJong (2015) clarified, relative to the use of a single method, implementing diverse crime recording approaches is likely to deliver optimized and robust results, a thing that allows for better decision making or improves the knowledge and understanding of crime and crime causation.