The Uniform Crime Report And The National Crime...

From the day our government began to keep an accounting of criminal activity, there have been arguments over crime statistics. The Uniform Crime Report (UCR), Self-Report Surveys (SRS), and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) are three methods in which the government collects data, and monitors criminal activity in the United States. The Uniform Crime Reports, Self-Report Surveys, and the National Crime Victimization Survey each have both positive and negative attributes that have influenced different aspects of society. â€Å"The Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) provides official crime totals for the United States since 1929. It is a program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The UCR Program is a voluntary city, university and†¦show more content†¦While the strengths of the UCR are commendable and beneficial, they are overshadowed by its weakness. It lacks in areas such as: the UCR covers a limited scope of crimes, it gives a narrow approach or definition to crimes, and the statistics of the crimes can be misleading since it is based on arrest statistics. The major flaw with the UCR is that it relies on arrests, which rely on citizens actually reporting that a criminal offense has taken place. The total number of criminal acts that occur is unknown, but those that are reported to the police provide the first means of a count. Not all crimes come readily to the attention of the police; not all crimes are of sufficient importance to be significant statistically, and not all important crime s occur with enough regularity to be meaningful statistically. â€Å"Self-report surveys of victimization have become commonplace in discussions of crime and criminal justice policy. Changes in the rates at which residents of the country are victimized by crime have taken a place alongside the Federal Bureau of Investigation index of crimes known to the police as widely used indicators of the state of society and the efficacy of its governance† (Cantor Lynch, 2000). Self-report methods of criminal victimization have become a more commonly used tool in criminology and