The Nature and Extent of Crime

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Chapter 3

• The Nature and Extent of Crime

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Factors which effect crime rates?

• Reporting-sensitive
• Is the public willing to call police?
• Policing-sensitive
• What are police looking for?
• Definition-sensitive
• Has the law changed?
• Media-sensitive
• What are the media publicizing? Eg. Table 3.2
• Real change
• Is behaviour changing?

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Uniform Crime Reports (UCR)

• Collected by the Canadian Centre for Justice
  Statistics
• 1962 aggregate (summary) data collected each
  month from all police forces
• Incidence of crime
• actual (reported) and founded (through
  investigation)
• Percentage change
• from year to year
• Crime rate
• of crimes / population x 100,000
• Clearance rate (by charge or otherwise)
• Can the police identify a suspect?

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Crime Funnel Attrition through the Justice System
Update out of a hundred crimes committed in
2004, 34 were reported, 15 were solved, 5 went to
court, 3 resulted in a conviction, and 1 resulted
in a prison sentence
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Accuracy of the UCR

• Reporting practices
• Are people willing/able to call the police?
• e.g. sexual assault
• Law enforcement practices
• Are police cracking down on some crimes and not
  others?
• e.g. zero tolerance policies
• Legal Definitions
• Have the laws changed?
• e.g. prostitution

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Accuracy of the UCR

• Media practices
• Do news stories encourage citizens to report more
  incidents?
• Do news reports encourage police to crack down?
• Methodological practices
• How are the crimes counted?
• How do police decide if a crime is founded?

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Self-report Surveys

• People report their criminal activities
  anonymously
• Used with captive audience
• e.g. students, prisoners.

• Problems with accuracy
• Lying, forgetting, bragging
• Emphasis is on minor offences
• e.g. drug and alcohol use
• Are the most deviant least likely to respond?
• e.g. truants
• Self-reports seem to be surprisingly accurate

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Victim Surveys

• US since 1966 Canada since 1988
• Mainly through telephone interviews
• Canadian Urban Victimization Survey (CUVS)
• General Social Survey (GSS)
• Violence Against Women Survey (VAWS)
• Includes questions about fear of crime
• Survey findings

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Problems with Victim Surveys

• Overreporting
• Loss is reported as theft
• Telescoping
• Identifying past victimization as recent
• Underreporting
• Forgetting, embarrassment, fear

• Doesnt include personal criminal activity
• Sampling problems
• Excludes people without phones, underage victims
• Question format
• Poor format may invalidate answers

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Are Crime Statistics Sources Compatible?

• No
• Measure different things
• Survey rates are higher than reported rates
• Self-report depends on honesty, accuracy, and
  integrity of criminals

• Yes
• Are complementary
• Often show similar trends and patterns
• Agree on personal characteristics of serious
  crime and criminals
• Agree on location and time of crime

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Alternative Sources of Information

• Commissions of Inquiry
• Both federal and provincial
• e.g.
• Native justice
• Sexual abuse in religious and government
  institutions
• Doping in sports
• The federal sponsorship program

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Official Crime Trends in Canada

• General trends and patterns
• Increases in property and violent crime from 1960
  to 1990
• Decreases in violent and property crime since
  early 1990 to 2003
• See Figure 3.6, with homicide decreasing
• Disguises interprovincial differences

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Explaining Crime Trendsas they change over time
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1 Age

• Aging of the population
• The greying of society
• Proportionately smaller youth population
• --small absolute changes create large relative
  variations (p.66)
• Fluctuations may reflect changing procedures

Source Statistics Canada.
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2 Race

• Blacks and aboriginals are over-represented in
  the criminal justice system.
• Self-report surveys show less difference.
• Ethnic and racial minorities are underrepresented
  in white-collar crimes.
• See Comparative Criminology exhibit 3.1

• Minorities are also more likely to be victims
• Have less confidence in police and justice system
• e.g. Racial profiling

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The Politics of Race Statistics

• Collecting information on race is controversial
• Crimes committed by minorities are more likely to
  be reported to police.
• How do you measure race or ethnicity in a
  multi-cultural society?
• Statistics on race and ethnicity may be used to
  justify further discrimination.

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3 Economy

• Economic cycle mixed effects of unemployment
• May lower crime rates due to more supervision,
  fewer consumer goods worth stealing, etc.
• Sustained economic weakness affects violence,
  arson, insurance fraud
• Economic disparity
• Increased number of poor, youth without
  opportunities for jobs

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4 Social Malaise

• Family problems
• Teen pregnancy and illegitimacy
• Divorce
• Single-parent families
• Dropout rates
• Drug abuse
• Invest in social capital?

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5 Culture

• Individualism vs. collectivism
• Materialism vs. honour
• Achievement vs. tradition
• Cooperation vs. competition
• Homogenous vs. heterogeneous society
• e.g. Japan.
• Crime is more likely to be organized

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6 Guns

• Bill C-68 for registration of firearms
• Firearms are used in
• 26 of homicides, 28 of attempted murders, 13
  of robberies, 2 of crimes against the person.
• See figure 3.8 for interprovincial differences

Source Environics Research Group, Press release,
February 21, 2003.
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7 Drugs

• Table 3.3 on relationship between drugs and
  crime
• Urban drug trade recruits juveniles
• Cheap labour
• Immune from heavy penalties
• Willing to take risks
• Increased use of weapons and violence
• Particularly in large US cities
• Canada, 1 in 13 homicides is gang-related
• One-third of which are drug-related

See Table 3.4
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8 Justice Policy

• Broken windows approach
• Get tough on minor offences (e.g. panhandling) to
  deter more serious offences
• May encourage reporting of crime
• May reduce overall criminal behaviour

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Future Prospects

• Predictions are primarily based on age structure
  of the population
• Increase in youth gangs and youth violence
• Canadian Police Survey of Youth Gangs, 2002
  --youth gang problem growing
• Predictions for increased drug offences in 2003
  were not realized (8 decline)Continued crime
  rate declines predicted for the first half of the
  21st century
• Carrington, 2001

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Explaining Crime Patternsat any point in
time,by looking at in/dependent variables
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1 Ecology

• Time, weather, season affect opportunity and
  motivation for crime
• Population density affects violent crime and
  deviance
• Region-crime increases from east to west
• And north to south in US

Source Statistics Canada. The Daily. July 21,
2005.
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2 Social Class

• Higher official rates among lower class
• Both instrumental (property) and expressive
  (violent) crimes
• Behaviour differences or police practices?
• Street crimes or white-collar crimes?
• Minor or serious offences?
• How do we measure social class?

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3 Age

• Youth is consistently related to higher crime
  rates
• Desistance (aging out)
• Crime decreases with age
• Chronic offending
• Is related to early onset, criminal specialties

Source Statistics Canada
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Why Does Aging Out Occur?

• Function of natural history of human life cycle
• Teens
• Need money, get peer support, have less
  supervision, more opportunity for crime
• Adults
• More able to delay gratification, more ties to
  conventional society
• Other influences
• Interpersonal relationships, crime is just too
  hard

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4 Gender

• Females have lower crime rates in most crimes
• males have higher rates why?
• Biosocial explanations
• Masculinity hypothesis (Lombroso)
• Chivalry hypothesis (Pollack)

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Gender

• Socialization
• --females are more supervised, protected from
  competition. Socialized to internalize anger
• Liberal feminist approach
• --convergence theory
• --as social status changes, womens crime rates
  will catch up
• Radical feminist theory
• --violence part of masculine repertoire

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Criminal Careers

• Chronic offender research

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Chronic Offender.

• Birth cohort studies (Wolfgang et al.)
• Definition
• Arrested 5 or more times
• About 6 of the boys
• Responsible for the vast majority of offences,
  particularly serious offences
• Early onset (age 5 or 6)
• Continuity of crime
• Little response to punishment

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Background Characteristics.

• History of troublesomeness
• Admiration of daring behaviour
• Delinquent siblings
• Convicted parent
• Behavioural and learning problems
• Can be identified by age 10

• As adults
• Alcohol abuse
• Divorce, unemployment
• Problems in military service
• Similar findings in U.S., Canada, Sweden, Great
  Britain