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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 9:56 pm
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Results for uniform crime reports
4 results foundAuthor: LaFree, Gary Title: Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970 to 2008 Summary: While efforts are increasingly aimed at understanding and identifying “hot spots” of ordinary crime, little is known about the geographic concentration of terrorist attacks. What areas are most prone to terrorism? Does the geographic concentration of attacks change over time? Do specific ideologies motivate and concentrate terrorist attacks? Moreover, what factors increase the risk that an attack will occur in a particular area? Using recently released data from the Global Terrorism Database, we address these gaps in our knowledge by examining county-level trends in terrorist attacks in the United States from 1970 through 2008. This research was motivated by issues related to three research areas: geographic concentration of terrorist attacks, terrorism and ordinary crime, and predicting geographic concentrations of terrorist attacks. Like ordinary crime, terrorism hot spots are predominately located in large, metropolitan areas. While some locales remain targets of terrorist attacks, to a large extent hot spots of terrorist attacks demonstrate a significant amount of variability over time. Moreover, we find significant variability in the ideologies motivating terrorist attacks across decades. Terrorism and ordinary crime occur in many of the same areas. We find that while some traditional predictors of ordinary crime also predict terrorist attacks, many robust correlates of ordinary crime do not. These data were limited in some respects; much more work in this area is needed to fully understand the linkages between terrorism and ordinary crime. Details: College Park, MD: START, 2012. 36p. Source: Final Report to Human Factors/Behavioral Science Division, Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security: Internet Resource: Accessed February 4, 2012 at http://start.umd.edu/start/publications/research_briefs/LaFree_Bersani_HotSpotsOfUSTerrorism.pdf Year: 2012 Country: United States URL: http://start.umd.edu/start/publications/research_briefs/LaFree_Bersani_HotSpotsOfUSTerrorism.pdf Shelf Number: 123973 Keywords: Crime DataCrime StatisticsGeographic Distribution of CrimeGeographic StudiesHot SpotsTerrorismUniform Crime Reports |
Author: Haas, Stephen M. Title: Assessing the Validity of Hate Crime Reporting: An Analysis of NIBRS Data Summary: The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program was developed over eighty years ago to meet the need for reliable crime statistics for the nation. Today, nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies across the US participate in this voluntary program. UCR, and the modernized National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), are recognized as the primary source of information about crimes reported to the police. While the UCR Program is critical to understanding crime, there are known limitations to these data such as underreporting and misclassification. As with any large scale data collection system, errors are inevitable and occur for a variety of reasons. While it is unlikely that all error will be eliminated, it is important to understand and measure it. Classification error occurs when the facts of the crime are recorded by the police, but the crime type is identified incorrectly. These errors can occur for many reasons including inaccurate interpretation of UCR definitions, reliance on criminal rather than statistical definitions, record automation issues, and even purposive actions in an attempt to downgrade crime. Classification error is particularly important since it can ultimately impact the statistical accuracy of reported crime statistics. The purpose of the current study is to examine the misclassification of crimes as they relate to hate. That is, the degree to which classification error impacts the statistical accuracy of reported hate crimes. Such error can vary by crime type and result in both the undercounting and overcounting of crimes in official statistics. To focus this study on hate crimes is noteworthy because, by their very nature, a unique set of issues converge when seeking to properly classify these incidents. Inherently, the intention of people involved and/or their motivation for committing a crime must be taken into account by officers when determining whether a particular incident constitutes a hate crime. For this reason, and others to be discussed later in this report, it is often speculated that many hate crimes are not accurately recorded in official records. Through a systematic review of official records, this study seeks to examine the degree to which classification error impacts the statistical accuracy of hate crime, as reported in official law enforcement statistics. Utilizing a methodology previously developed by the authors (Nolan, Haas, and Napier, 2011; Nolan, Haas, Lester, Kirby, and Jira, 2006) this study assesses the amount of classification error in hate crime reporting in WV. The researchers randomly selected cases, which were included in the state’s statistical data files, from designated offense categories for a detailed review of the officer’s written narrative of the incident. Though this approach has been applied to examine error across general crime types, no study to date has systematically focused on a crime category as widely believed to be underreported as hate crimes. While the previous study examined classification error across general crime types, the current study focuses specifically on identifying sources of error (i.e., over- and undercounts) contained in hate crime statistics. Additionally, this study further builds on the quantitative method described above by further capturing the perspectives of frontline officers. Qualitative information from a focus group is used to gain insight into the thought processes officers adhere to when deciding whether a specific incident constitutes a hate crime. Equipped with narratives of cases believed to contain errors, the researchers use a focus group approach to explore the various definitional and interpretation issues that are believed to result in classification error in these cases. Thus, it is anticipated that this study will not only yield an estimate of the error contained in officially reported hate crime statistics, but shed light on the inherent difficulties officers face in interpreting these incidents. In the end, it is the hope of the authors that this study will yield useful information for training officers on the reporting of hate crimes, get us closer to understanding the true magnitude of these crimes, and serve as a precursor for adjusting crime statistics to better estimate the actual number of hate crimes in the population. Details: West Virginia: Criminal Justice Statistical Analysis Center, Department of Military Affairs & Public Safety, 2011. 23p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed March 10, 2012 at http://www.djcs.wv.gov/SAC/Documents/ORSP_WV_Hate_Crime_Report.pdf Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://www.djcs.wv.gov/SAC/Documents/ORSP_WV_Hate_Crime_Report.pdf Shelf Number: 124440 Keywords: Crime DataCrime StatisticsHate Crime (West Virginia)Uniform Crime Reports |
Author: PRI Management Group Title: Independent Audit of Milwaukee Police Crime Statistics and Reporting Procedure Summary: A. The first objective of this audit was to obtain sufficient and appropriate evidence to provide an expert opinion regarding the validity of the police department’s internal audit and its findings which focused on the assault category. It is not an objective of this audit to determine Milwaukee crime rates and increases or decreases thereof. B. The second objective is to assess the police department’s police reporting and records management processes, protocols and records management system (RMS), and provide an expert opinion regarding whether these elements have affected the Department’s compliance with NIBRS assault reporting standards and if so, how. C. The third objective is to provide an expert opinion regarding whether any intentional efforts were undertaken by the police department and its personnel to manipulate or misrepresent crime statistical information. V. SCOPE AND METHODOLOGIES The scope of this audit encompassed a thorough review of Milwaukee Police policy, protocol, data, and procedure including a review of a sampling of police incident reports from 2006-2012. In order to meet the objectives stated above a comprehensive review was conducted not only of police reports and statistics themselves, but also of the processes and systems used to produce them. This 360 degree approach, which enabled the audit to both reveal and rule out what has caused the inaccuracies, included analyzing the entire reporting process, employee’s knowledge of NIBRS standards, training levels, and the RMS system and its code tables. It is widely known there are errors in the statistics and the focus as such is to determine what caused them. It has been determined as a result of this audit that while it is correct there were inaccuracies in the crime statistics, the allegations inferring the Milwaukee Police Department had intentionally altered them are baseless. The Milwaukee Police Department is not hiding crimes, erasing statistics or undertaking other efforts to present a false picture of crime in the city. When someone reports a crime in Milwaukee the fact of the matter is, it gets recorded. While the crime category that the incident gets listed in has clearly been problematic, the record of the crime doesn’t disappear. In simplest terms, even when reports are misclassified they are still on the books. Police departments maintain and report statistics in 2 ways. One set of statistics gets reported to the FBI according to their reporting rules which include standardized definitions and methodologies specific to NIBRS. What the public needs to understand is that all of the police reports and their corresponding statistics are still present in the records management system and can be researched at any given time. With the exception of those records which are confidential according to public records law, anyone can request to see this information. This data remains independent of the FBI standards and definitions; definitions which do not coincide with state statutes in many cases. To truly lower crime artificially and successfully conceal the effort, reports of crimes to the police would have to be erased from the multiple places the information simultaneously resides including departmental databases, computer-aided dispatch systems, records management systems, back-up media, phone recordings and mobile computers. Details: Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission, 2012. 139p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed August 12, 2013 at: http://city.milwaukee.gov/ImageLibrary/Groups/cityFPC/Reports/MilwaukeeReportFinalwithAppend.pdf Year: 2012 Country: United States URL: http://city.milwaukee.gov/ImageLibrary/Groups/cityFPC/Reports/MilwaukeeReportFinalwithAppend.pdf Shelf Number: 129630 Keywords: Crime Statistics (Milwaukee, U.S.)Police Policies and ProceduresRecords ManagementUniform Crime Reports |
Author: LaValle, Christina R. Title: Testing the Validity of Demonstrated Imputation Methods on Longitudinal NIBRS Data Summary: The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) are the two major sources of crime data in the United States. The UCR is a summary reporting system while NIBRS is an incident-based reporting system which was established to modernize crime reporting. The data collected by NIBRS is much more detailed. Given that law enforcement agencies across the nation voluntarily submit data to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) using either UCR or NIBRS, the presence of irregular reporting, missing data, and noncompliance are likely to compromise data quality. For many states, crime data collected using UCR or NIBRS are used to generate state and local crime reports and statistics. These data are most often reported "as is" and are thereby assumed correct. Since victimization data are typically not collected at the state or local levels to corroborate crime reports, there is an increased need for crime data to be as reliable as possible. Given the voluntary nature and inherent limitations of crime data collection systems, however, these data come with the caveat of being incomplete, or dubbed non-representative. Previous research on state incident-based reporting (IBR) data revealed issues with completeness, resulting from partial and non- reporting agencies, and accuracy, due to irregular reporting (LaValle, Haas, Turley, & Nolan, 2013). The previous work found that imputation, particularly alternative imputation methods developed by the West Virginia Statistical Analysis Center (WVSAC), can be used to reliably estimate for missing data. In conclusion of applying imputation methods to IBR data, the study also revealed that reporting data "as is" may not be the most accurate representation of IBR data. Additional studies have been conducted on national UCR data which found similar concerns with data quality, particularly issues related to missing data (see Maltz, Roberts, & Stasny, 2006; Targonski, 2011). Tools to detect and adjust for issues that are known to exist in crime data can improve data that are used as a basis for information and research. This research seeks to test and validate data quality techniques and imputation methods which will provide evidence that reliable and stable estimates of crime data can be attained with consistency over time. The study examines the performance of alternative imputation methods in comparison to FBI methods and provides a framework for the use of techniques on state-level IBR data. We apply and simultaneously test partial and non-reporting imputation methods using longitudinal data with the goal of improving the accuracy of state NIBRS data, especially when used for state and county trend analyses over time/ Details: Charleston, WV: West Virginia Division of Justice and Community Services, 2014. 30p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed October 1, 2014 at: http://www.djcs.wv.gov/SAC/Documents/WV_Impute2ReportJan2014_Final.pdf Year: 2014 Country: United States URL: http://www.djcs.wv.gov/SAC/Documents/WV_Impute2ReportJan2014_Final.pdf Shelf Number: 133518 Keywords: Crime MeasurementCrime ReportingCrime Statistics (West Virginia)National Incident-Based Reporting SystemUniform Crime Reports |