Different sociologists have presented different theories and concepts to explain what drives a person to commit a crime, and research and statistics give us an idea of the type of crimes committed and the places that they’re most likely to occur. However, these statistics can prove to be misleading as not all crime is reported to or recorded by the police. This can be referred to as the ‘hidden figure’, and it differentiates between the official crime rate and the real rate. Despite this, they do prove to be worthwhile in the fact that they display trends and patterns of crime. Sociologists use three different methods to measure crime; each method provides us with particular information and as in all systems of data collecting, there are strengths and weaknesses to the method.
Throughout many years, crime scholars have pointed to the potential benefits of focusing crime prevention efforts on crime places. A number of studies suggest that crime is not spread evenly across city landscapes. Rather, there is significant clustering of crime in small places, or hot spots, that generate a vastly disproportionate number of criminal events. Even within the most crime-ridden neighborhoods, crime clusters at a few discrete locations and other areas are relatively crime free. A number of researchers have argued that many crime problems can be addressed more efficiently if police officers focus their attention on these deviant places.
The “Dark Figure of Crime” is the amount of underreported as well as unreported criminal crimes that society does not report to authority. In this case, unreported crimes do not make it to the statistics of official crime. One believes that some people in society are hesitant to report a crime to police for numerous reasons. These reasons can be because of the act of negative criminal behavior from one individual to another. A few common unreported crimes that deal with negative sexual related criminal behavior toward another individual are visible.
FBI Expenditures and Revenue Summary John Sweeny University of Phoenix Abstract The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is a government agency that is both an intelligence agency as well as a federal criminal investigation unit. The FBI is investigation jurisdiction of more than 200 categories of possible federal crimes. The main goal for the FBI is to protect and defend the United States and to enforce and uphold the criminal laws within the US. They also provide assistances to local authorities when needed. A few of the agencies top investigative priorities are, protecting the US from terrorist attacks, protect the US from cyber-based attacks and technological crimes and protect civil right.
In other crime types once the intent is created it is followed by the execution of the act. The intent and act is not misinterpreted. In contrast, due to the element of disguise in white-collar crime the intent is blurred and frequently can only be obtained by interpretation. (Stephen Rosoff, 2010) White-collar criminals can only be successful if the victim is ignorant and negligent. Key differences between white-collar crime and other types of crime is that white-collar crime generally requires the victim to comply in being victimized in contrast to murder, robbery, assault or rape.
He does not present enough proof to believe that less enforcement will in fact lower violence in gangs. Gangs are a complex and fairly intelligent corporation that will try and stop at nothing to get what they want with any means possible. Drugs do have a major role in gang violence, like Gardner says, but stopping the drug trade in my eyes won’t in fact end their
the manner in which the court system is structure and run affects the extent to which members of the public obtain access to the justice system. When a court is structured so that criminal cases, no matter how minor or serious, must be handle by a lower-level court with an otherwise excessively large caseload and few resources or services. For example, the negative effecton the quality of justice may be good that citizens do not even bother to report crimes. Proper structuring of the jurisdiction of courts which is the legal authority to hear cases, and providing adequate resources to handle the resulting caseload fairly, promptly, and effectively is only part of a well-run court system. Much can be done to make courts more user-friendly to the public and to improve public access to justice.
Classification also presents difficulties. Less focused surveys shift responsibility for the definition of the events to the respondent, and without the equivalent of police procedures the resulting reports are far from uniform. In addition victims determine whether the incident was a crime, not the law. The survey only provides information about the experience of victims, not information about the crime. There is no way to validate whether an individual’s account is true or false.
The most methodologically sophisticated individual-level studies offer evidence supporting the link between race and police brutality suggested by both perspectives (Smith, 1986; Worden, 1996). It remains unclear whether inclusion of community accountability variables in the statistical models would attenuate that relationship. Even so, individual-level research on community accountability variables provides little evidence supporting the assumptions of the proposed policies. Beyond indicating a link between race and police brutality, research with individual-level data cannot test the predictions of the threat hypothesis, which requires aggregate-level
The goal of any law enforcement philosophy is to limit crime whenever possible, and it is rather apparent that whatever the statistics may show, sex offenders have a recidivism rate that borders on a pathological need to commit additional crimes. Merely brushing this aside by saying after their prison term that they have paid their debt is insufficient in light of the emerging research; it must be studied further in order to determine what the most effective way to curtail sex offender recidivism is. The research problem I will examining is why sex offenders have a recidivism rate that is so much higher than other crimes. I will focus on scouring the published material to find out if there is some sort of hormone imbalance in the average sex offender, or if there is a commonality in their upbringing that pushed them to commit such horrible crimes. The goal will be to look for links between sex offenders that commit the crime once again after their prison term is over.