Pros And Cons Of Uniform Crime Report

e Uniform Crime Report is a survey that is based off of crimes that are recorded by the police. It helps keep the society informed about crime rates, and whether they have been increasing or decreasing overtime. In Canada, crime statistics have been collected, recorded, and published by the police since 1921(Cartwright, 2017, Lecture 3). The Uniform Crime Report has been put into effect since 1962 (Allen, 2016). These statistics are supposed to be the most common data used to estimate crimes. They also reveal the crime rates in the different provinces and territories across Canada. There are some flaws in the uniform crime report which results in inaccurate statistics. The Uniform crime report is an indication of the types and amounts of these

There are a couple weaknesses to how accurate these statistics are. The accuracy of these statistics would depend on how the police are responding to crimes, because the Uniform Crime Report is based on police reports only. The police could be only reporting to incidents that are brought to their attention by the public, or attend to a situation they happen to walk or drive by. This is known as reactive policing. When this type of policing occurs, a lot of crimes are not reported and are not known to the police, which results in inaccurate statistics. As well, the dark figure of crime is an example of how these statistics could be incorrect. The dark figure of crime refers to the crimes that occur, but the police aren’t aware of them, or they are aware and don’t report them. (Morden and Palys, 2015). Since these crimes aren’t brought to the attention of the police, or the police don’t respond to them, they are not reflected in the Uniform Crime report, which is only based on police reporting’s’ of crime. Throughout the past several years, many crimes have moved to behind a computer screen (Morden and Palys, 2015). Many illegal activities online are not caught by or reported to the police. This is another weakness of the Uniform Crime Report which results in inaccurate and incorrect statistics. In some matters, police officers will not record the crime due to many reasons. Sometimes they don’t want to have to go through the process of all the paper work involved. If they think the crime wasn’t too serious, they do not record it. Other times, they won’t write a report if there is a close relationship between the victim and the accused. This could be a relationship anytime of relationship including siblings, parents and grandparents (Cartwright,2017, lecture