Uniform Crime Reports

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Uniform Crime Reports, also known as the UCR have been around for almost 75 years. This makes them one of the longest-running data collections in the social sciences. One branch of the social science, victim ology, is the study of crime victims. The UCR can definitely be useful for victim ology, but there are many flaws in the data collecting that can contaminate studies. However, as there is no other measure that gathers data from such numerous sources, the UCR is about the best that victimologists have to look at trends on the large scale. These crime reports can provide valuable information, although they are not as accurate as desired. The UCR covers the entire United States, and police officers and other members of the criminal justice system gladly cooperate with the collection efforts. The UCR has an index which specifically defines different types of crimes, and this allows us to easily compare crimes throughout the United States. An enormous amount of information is collected for the UCR, and it can be very useful for those in the criminal justice system to study. However, the UCR has one fatal flaw; it does not take into account the "dark figure of crime". The "dark figure of crime" refers to the total number of crimes that are committed, because many crimes are never reported to the police. The UCR measures only the crimes that are reported, so it is essentially not giving a real report of crime rates, it is providing information pertaining to the crimes that are reported to police. This is a serious problem because it is obvious that the UCR grossly underestimates the magnitude of crime in our country. If we only use this data collection to make efforts to help victims, a huge proportion of victims will be left out. As a result, the UCR can only be used to gather very rough estimates of crime, and it is not especially useful in the study of victim

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