This chapter covers common crimes, their victims, and the criminals who commit them. International and politically motivated crimes are not covered here, except to the extent that, for example, a politically motivated assassination would be counted as a murder in the murder statistics. Sources for data about both domestic and international terrorism are listed in chapter 22; some sources for data about human rights violations and other such international crimes are also listed in that chapter. Additionally, a small amount of data about political corruption is available from some of the sources listed in chapters 21 and 23.
For the purposes of this book, substance abuse is considered to be primarily a health issue, not a crime issue. Data on drug arrests is available from some of the sources covered in this chapter, but data on drug use generally in the United States is available from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, both covered in chapter 19.
Bureau of Justice Statistics (U.S. Department of Justice)
Federal Bureau of Investigation (U.S. Department of Justice)
The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), both contained within the Department of Justice, provide similar data—the number of crimes committed in the United States—collected through very different methods. The BJS (www.bjs.gov) gathers much of its crime data via the National Crime Victimization Survey, which interviews approximately 75,000 teenagers and adults annually about a wide range of crimes—including nonviolent crimes such as identity theft—committed against themselves or their property. The Uniform Crime Reports from the FBI, in contrast, are compiled from administrative records: local police departments provide information to the FBI about the crimes reported to each department. Data from the Uniform Crime Reports is available in online publications on the FBI site (www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/), most notably the long-running annual series Crime in the United States, and in a separate interactive database (www.ucrdatatool.gov).
The advantages of the National Crime Victimization Survey are that it captures crimes that are not reported to the police (which are a majority of crimes), and that it includes many more types of crime than the Uniform Crime Reports, which cover only homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, theft, and arson.1 The advantages of the Uniform Crime Reports are that they offer a longer time series: Uniform Crime Reports have been published since 1930 and have data online back to 1960, whereas the National Crime Victimization Survey began in 1973. They also allow for more geographic detail; data from the Uniform Crime Reports is available for geographic areas as small as cities, whereas the National Crime Victimization Survey typically provides only national estimates. Also, only Uniform Crime Reports can be used for statistics on homicides; as the BJS site drily notes, “Murder is not measured by the NCVS because of an inability to question the victim.”
In addition to the National Crime Victimization Survey, the BJS also runs a variety of censuses and surveys of persons and institutions involved in the criminal justice system: the Annual Survey of Jails, the Census of Public Defender Offices, the National Computer Security Survey, the Survey of Law Enforcement Gang Units, and many more. A full list of BJS data collection programs is available via the “Data Collections” tab of the BJS website.
Major Sources: World
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is the major source for internationally comparable crime data. Only some of its data (basic homicide statistics) is available on data.un.org; most is distributed through its own site (www.unodc.org, “Data and analysis” tab). The data goes back to 1970 but is patchy, with many countries not reporting for every year. The focus is on violent crime, drug use, and theft and burglary; there is also data on the number of people detained, prosecuted, and convicted for any crime.
Minor Sources
U.S. Border Patrol (U.S. Department of Homeland Security)
In the United States, crimes related to international borders—such as persons attempting to enter the country without the appropriate documentation, or attempts to smuggle drugs and other illegal goods—are handled by the U.S. Border Patrol. It releases its own statistics for apprehensions and seizures of people and goods related to crimes such as these (www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/border_security/, “U.S. Border Patrol” tab). Beware the confusing introductory page, which makes it appear as if statistics are available for only a few recent fiscal years. The dates given are the years in which the reports were published, not the years they cover. Historical reports with long time series—at least one as far back as 1960—are available to users if they click through and examine the titles of the reports published each year.
International Crime Victimization Survey
Although the data from the International Crime Victimization Survey (ICVS, http://web2012.unicri.it/services/library_documentation/publications/icvs/) is now somewhat dated—the surveys were conducted between 1989 and 2005—it is still one of the richest sources of internationally comparable data on crime. The survey produced statistics on the rates at which people were victims of certain crimes, including robbery, burglary, various types of thefts, consumer fraud, and sexual assaults. Information was also gathered on whether the crime was reported to the police, and the reason why not if it was not reported, as well as on people’s opinions of the police, their personal safety, and their likelihood of being victimized by crimes. The European Crime and Safety Survey (EU ICS), a related project, asked similar questions. Microdata from both projects from 1989 to 2005 are available via Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS, www.dans.knaw.nl) after free registration. The microdata from ICVS from 1989 to 2000 is freely available on the ICVS site without registration.
Local Jurisdictions
Crime is one of the subject areas in which microdata is more likely to be readily available. Many jurisdictions release data on individual crimes reported in that area (although not all of this data is available online in an easily usable format), and, for several cities, private websites collect this data and make it available in a user-friendly interface. An interactive map posted by the Philadelphia Inquirer is one good example of such an interface.2 On a larger scale, CrimeMapping.com, created by the Omega Group (a company that sells products that allow police departments to analyze crime data geographically), displays crime data from well over one hundred municipalities nationwide, including large cities such as Detroit, Los Angeles, and Miami.
Internationally, the United Kingdom illustrates what can be done when crime data is released in an easily usable format. Several official sites—including Police.uk (www.police.uk), which covers the entire country, and the Metropolitan Police website (www.met.police.uk/crimefigures/), which covers London—provide interactive mapping interfaces for a range of crime data. Police.uk provides information not only about reported crimes but about the resolution of those cases, and it also makes it easy for users to download the raw data behind the maps. Several private groups have created their own interfaces to that data; links to those interfaces can be found at www.police.uk/apps?q=.
National Archive of Criminal Justice Data
Another source for microdata related to crime and criminal justice is the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NACJD/). This site is hosted by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a major microdata archive at the University of Michigan. It distributes microdata from several government agencies with an interest in crime, including the BJS, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (www.ojjdp.gov), and the National Institute of Justice (www.nij.gov), as well as some nongovernmental data. Although the vast majority of the two-thousand-plus data sets are from the United States, a few are international. Some of the data sets in the NACJD can be analyzed online using SDA (see appendix B). Most of this data is freely available after registering, but a few of the nongovernmental data sets are available only to users at institutions with ICPSR subscriptions.
Notes
1. According to data from the 2006–2010 National Crime Victimization Surveys, 58 percent of crimes are not reported to the police; Victimizations Not Reported to the Police, 2006–2010, U.S. Department of Justice, 2012, http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf.
2. “Homicides in Philadelphia,” Philadelphia Inquirer, www.philly.com/philly/news/special_packages/inquirer/Philadelphia_Homicides_1988_2011.html.