Jacob Zucker
CJ102
Dr. Wenger
National Crime Victimization Survey vs. Uniform Crime Report The Uniform Crime Report, or UCR, is a large database, compiled by the FBI, of crimes reported and arrests made each year throughout the United States (Seigel, 2014, p. 31). In other words, the UCR is a large database of information gathered on actual reported crimes. The UCR does not produce information on crimes that go unreported. That falls onto the National Crime Victimization Survey, or NCVS. The NCVS is the ongoing victimization study conducted jointly by the Justice Department and the U.S. Census Bureau that surveys victims about their experiences with law violation (Siegel, 2014, p. 34). This gives a more realistic view into the crimes that do not get reported. Data collection can be a menacing task, especially when the data being gathered is reported crime throughout the entire United States. The FBI receives data from over 18,000 city, university/college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies voluntarily participating in the program ("FBI — Uniform Crime Reporting,"
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30). More specifically, criminologists may use the NCVS information about the offender (e.g., age, race and Hispanic origin, sex, and victim-offender relationship), characteristics of the crime (including time and place of occurrence, use of weapons, nature of injury, and economic consequences), whether the crime was reported to police, reasons the crime was or was not reported, and victim experiences with the criminal justice system to better understand crime trends ("Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) - National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)," n.d.). Criminologists can also use the UCR to build and study crime trends with reported