Casual Process Observations and Data Set Observations - Essay Example

The purpose, focus, and method of these two programs cover different aspects of crime, whereas, the information they produce gives a comprehensive picture of the Nation’s crime problem. The UCR Program, directly under the FBI, compiles data from monthly law enforcement reports or individual crime incident records received by the FBI, which is further scrutinized and compared with previous monthly submissions for discrepancy.

National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) has been formulated after intensive research by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the crime data collected from the nationally representative samples by the U.S. Bureau of Census, through personnel household interviews. The data is individualized, covers individual information as well as feed-back on the performance of criminal justice system, and generally projects those crimes that were not reported to law enforcement. Though NCVS is designed to complement the UCR program there are Major differences between UCR and NCVS.

UCR provides reliable quantitative statistics for law enforcement, whereas NCVS projects qualitative statistics on previously unavailable information about crime, as the two programs measure non-identical sets of crimes. In addition, crime definitions and scales adopted to calculate crime rates differ from each other, resulting in statistical discrepancies and estimation. Major sources for Crime data collection in the United States are (1) Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

The National Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program is a nationwide statistical collaboration in the United States to collect accurate crime data from all law enforcement agencies in a uniform manner. The primary objective of the program is to provide a reliable set of criminal information which can be used by law enforcement administrators for operational use, such as determining manpower and training needs, properly focusing on enforcement efforts, and formulating budget and grant proposals. It is also used to throw light on juvenile crime activity, domestic violence, child abuse, property crime, and substance abuse, which adversely affect society as a whole.

Its secondary objective is to inform the government machinery and the public about the nature, trend, and magnitude of the problem in a particular area, and the data is a vital resource for all the stakeholders. The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) developed standardized offense definitions and published Uniform Crime Reporting, a manual for police records and statistics, in 1929. (James & Richard 2008) Based on the seriousness, frequency of occurrence, pervasiveness, and the likelihood of being reported to police the crimes were identified and classified as Part I and Part II offenses, for compiling data by law enforcement agencies participating in the UCR, and submitted to the FBI as the nodal agency for publishing data and Quality Assurance Reviews (QARs).

Law enforcing agencies have to classify and score offence data, and due to inherent problems in data scoring it is found that “because UCR is a summary system, there is no way to determine whether a particular offence was cleared by an arrest, or whether an arrest was made pursuant to a certain offence” (James & Richard 2008). This erroneous data scoring system and duplication of data made UCR an inefficient system of reporting. As there was demand for updating UCR to provide more in-depth data to meet the future needs of law enforcement, the Federal Bureau of Investigation developed National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which collects data on offense(s), offender(s), the victim(s), arrestee(s), and the property involved in an offense.

This initiative also had many constraints in nationwide implementation, which necessitated the creation of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The Major objectives of NCVS are (1) to develop detailed information about the victims and consequences of crime; (2) to estimate the number and types of crimes not reported to police; (3) to provide uniform measures of selected types of crimes; and (4) to permit comparisons over time and population type, making NCVS the primary source of information on the characteristics of criminal victimization.