The uniform crime reporting program (UCR) began in the 1930s-3
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Where The Faults Lie: A Study of The Strengths & Weaknesses
Within the NCVS and UCR Data Collection Process. Marcella Demont Baity Jr
Department Of Criminal Justice, University of North Georgia
CRJU 1100: Introduction to Criminal Justice
Dr. Tae Choo
January 21, 2024. Description:
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The Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) began in the 1930s and was originally initiated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This reporting
program provides statistics regarding Type One crimes. According to our textbook, these crimes include murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, arson, and motor vehicle theft (
Siegel & Worrall, 2022
). This data is usually collected by law enforcement and tallied annually to provide a report. These reports allow
us to decipher our best analysis of how violent or non-violent offenders engage in criminal behavior based on their demographics.
The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is a survey conducted by the
Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). This data collection system operates primarily using individual omission, allowing for a better understanding of the way crimes play out due to the nature of how this data is received. The NCVS was founded in 1942 by the Department of Justice to aid in data collection with the UCR. This was largely because the UCR gathered information solely from law enforcement agencies based on the closure or finality of certain crimes without regard to whether crimes were reported or not. This foundational truth marks the inception of the NCVS, 12 years after the UCR began.
Data Collection:
The UCR gathers information both monthly and annually from law enforcement agencies nationwide at the state and local levels. This information is gathered only through the idea that a crime has been reported
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to a local or national law enforcement agency, and this means that, though it
may be relinquishing information, it is not the scope of entirety as many crimes go unreported, misreported, or underreported depending on many variable factors.
The NCVS gathers information by self-omission through individual surveys. Though this is a universally accepted form of data collection, it is notable to understand it is much less uniform than the UCR, as this data collection is typically ongoing and done through households and by anonymous individuals. The thought is that anonymity will allow an individual to speak the truth without fear of said knowledge being replicated and attached to the
individual's reputation.
Strengths:
The key strength of the UCR’s data collection process is its consistency. Since the inception of the UCR, the data reporting agency has given annual reports regarding crime-related statistics that help the national population understand the very cut-and-dry data that propels one to commit a crime. Through this consistency, the UCR has achieved things such as public awareness, easy comparison, resource allocation, data on arrest policy development, and longitudinal analysis. All these aspects remain beneficial to us due to the timely manner and consistency of the UCR’s reporting dynamic. We are nearing 100 years of reporting, and the UCR has been at the forefront of data and data analysis for all things crime-related from a factual and evidence-based perspective.
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In contrast, the strength of the NCVS data collection process revolves around
the victim instead of the prosecution. In other words, if the victim’s case does not lead to arrest, incarceration, and/or sentencing, then it is likely that the offense toward the victim will not be reported. This is where the victim can input their report, allowing the victim’s recollection of events to be heard. This is important because the UCR eliminates crimes from the data collection process that deviate from the scale of logic and reasoning. An offender commits a crime, but it may not result in any sort of punishment, which would no longer qualify it to be applicable for the UCR data collection, whereas the opposite is applicable for the NCVS data collection process. Whether the crime or criminal was sentenced, the victim may still report the crime in a manner where it will still be reported as applicable for the data collecting process.
Weaknesses:
Some key weaknesses of the UCR collection process involve, but are not limited to one, the system of reporting that relies on voluntary data, two, relies on crime discovery to be an accurate tool, and three, it uses the system of hierarchy for reporting criminal activity (Regoli, 2019). The overall idea is that the UCR’s weakness revolves around its liability and predictably missing information about crimes due to its system of hierarchy. This means that the UCR data collection process will only apply statistics based on crime if the system itself deems it worthy of note.
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Just like the UCR, the NCVS data collection process has its negatives. Amongst the largest, I believe it to be its focus on the non-institutionalized US population, starting from ages 12 and above. This poses a great threat because the large emphasis of the NCVS is placed on rape culture. With this data collection process, it is ignoring the absolute fact that over 2/3 of all victims of sexual so reported to law enforcement agencies were juveniles, and more than half of all those juvenile victims were under the age of 12 (Snyder, Ph.D., 2019). This means that 67% of all sexual victims were under the age of 18, and that another 67% of those juveniles were under the age of
12, meaning that they are not being heard or seen as applicable to the data collection process of the NCVS. This leaves a large room for error in their collection process.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, the UCR and NCVS are both imperative to the data collection process as they both provide benefits and areas that the other does not. In other words, each organization allows for the US citizen and government to analyze information given from different perspectives to form what we can consider to be an entire narrative. Gathering knowledge from the perspective of law enforcement agencies, the offenders, and the victim allows us to paint a better picture of how crime in the United States is nurtured, yet also giving us an opportunity to understand how we can disseminate it from its core.
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References:
Connect US Fund. (n.d.). 13 Major Pros and Cons of the Uniform Crime Report. Retrieved from https://connectusfund.org/13-major-pros-and-
cons-of-the-uniform-crime-report
National Center for Biotechnology Information. (n.d.). Criminal Victimization, 2016. In Understanding Crime and Victimization. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK202273/table/tab_7_1/?
report=objectonly
Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2019). Survey of Campus Law Enforcement Agencies, 2016. Retrieved from https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/saycrle.pdf
Siegel, L. J. & Worrall, J. L. (2018). Introduction to criminal justice (17
th ed.). Wadsworth.
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