Discussion Questions - Assignment Example

Discussion Questions Discussion Questions Answer The ment s that it is the job of the police officers to put offenders behind the jail and their experience helps them in differentiating between offenders and non-offenders. This statement is completely untrue and the reality is that when police officers first contact an individual in order to arrest them on the basis of suspicion and the first arrest does not makes and individual an offender. This is because it is the duty of the courts and judges to decide who is an offender and who is not an offender.

Police has the responsibility of arresting a suspect and then gathering evidence against him/her to help the court in proving that an individual is an offender. The second part of the statement states that police have enough experience to differentiate between offenders and those who have not committed a crime. If this is true then police officers have simply become biased against certain individuals. This is because police officers have created a profile of a criminal on the basis of their race, age and gender and they follow this profile to make arrests and detail suspects.

This activity of profiling individuals has backfired and police officers are now being suspected of being biased against people belonging to certain age groups, race as well as gender. In a research conducted by Kochel et al. the researchers identified that race of an individual has a major impact on the decision of whether to arrest them or not (Kochel, 2011). The researchers prove that people belonging to the black race had a higher statistical probability of being arrested as compared to the whites.

Answer 2The UCR as well as the NCVS are two distinct procedures through which the government of United States collect and record data on crimes and criminal activity. The data collected by UCR is managed by the defense agency of FBI and this data includes information on the number of arrests for different crimes (fbi.gov, 2014). The data that is used to prepare statistical reports of UCR is provided by law enforcement agencies that operate at the local as well as the federal level. On the other hand the information that is collected for the purpose of recording data in NCVS contains data that has been collected through direct and indirect victims of crimes and it contains information on all crimes except crimes that are commercial in nature and homicide.

The data that is collected by the UCR is collected on the basis of arrests that have been made by different law enforcement agencies. The information that is collected through UCR has a very long history which can be useful in performing statistical analysis such as comparison of previous crime rate and present crime rate (fbi.gov, 2014). The problem with UCR’s methodology is that information in this survey is obtained through law enforcement agencies. This information may be biased because law enforcement agencies of different areas may not want to provide a clear picture of the crime rate in their area.

The benefit of the NCVS survey is that the methodology encourages even those to report crimes who are afraid of reporting them which helps in attaining a better picture of the rate of crime. The problem with NCVS is that it provides data on the national level so it is quite difficult to measure the rate of crime taking place at the state level and get a clear picture of rates of crime in different states.Works CitedKochel, T., Wilson, D., & Mastrofski, S. (2011). Effect Of Suspect Race On Officers’ Arrest Decisions*.

 Criminology, 49(2), 473-512. Doi:10.1111/J.1745-9125.2011.00230.XWww2.fbi.gov,. (2014). The Nations Two Crime Measures - Crime in the United States 2004. Retrieved 4 November 2014, from https://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/appendices/appendix_04.html