How help does or does not help in the understanding crime.

How help does or does not help in the understanding crime.

The well-being of a population should be a significant concern to the government. Anti-crime programs are often used by the government to ensure that the criminal justice system is active. Effects of policies are evaluated by the collection and analysis of the statistical data collected. For the maintenance of the security system, the government is required to undertake either qualitative or quantitative data analysis. Statistical analysis involves the use of numerical figures and information to describe a situation.

Statistical analysis helps the government in the implementation of the anti-crime plans. The collection of crime data involves the collection of information within a wide range of geographical, cultural, economic and political location. The data taken from the different areas represent how the areas government rules affect how the criminal justice system works, collection of such information is essential in the evaluation of how a particular law affects the entire community in a given area..

Research of policies and their analysis is key to the findings the effects that an introduced system has to the government and the entire community. A good example is a study of how declining the age group in criminal acts affects the number of cases in courts. The response and data collected after such a policy are applied could likely suggest how the age bracket is affected by criminal justice. Either the external and the internal analysis can be used in the study of policies; this involves self-initiated procedures and effects of an agency from another agency, respectively.

Statistics collected from crimes may, however, not help us understand the nature of crimes. This is because criminals’ social-economic background is not recorded, the motive and the intention of the criminal is not recorded, and this may not give a clear picture of the crime pattern. The society is the organ that decided what is criminal and what is not, therefore the needs of and individual and the minority, in particular, are not considered. Most of the criminals are not given a chance to explain the logic behind the criminal offence that they did, and this fails to consider their opinion in the criminal justice system.

Statistics may not help in the understanding of crime as the rules that are implemented to determine crimes change over time, and this makes it difficult to compare and contrast crimes that took place within different times. There is also no clear definition of what should be measured, and this makes it difficult to differentiate and record various crimes that were committed differently. For example, when a person kills another by burning him and another by stabbing it may be challenging to differentiate the crimes. Hence, both are recorded as murders regardless of their differences in the scopes.

Why it is challenging to measure crime accurately?.

Different data collection systems use a variety of criminal behaviour measurements. Some of these agencies rely on data that has been collected from the law enforcement agencies, while others are usually relying on a wide-scale data/information that is often obtained from the public, offended and victimized groups such as the disabled, women and albinos. Both of this data collections method is not able to measure crime statistically as most of the information provided may be biased or may be wrong.

Systematic underreporting, this includes forgetting how a crime took place or lack of putting efforts in telling of a crime. The types of reports that require the data to be retrieved through an individual remembrance make the collection of data difficult. This includes statements such as rape and the use of guns. The victims may tend to overreport on crimes that involved rape or gun use.

There are differences in the definition of crimes and reporting protocols. Voluntary agencies are ere responsible for the compiling of data; this has led to data about rape being underreported. The government has also shown no or less interest in the solving of such problems. The government does not fund such agencies then, and this makes them not collect information from a full area and to make the information collected from a smaller area based on a particular religious culture, political and social norms.

 Pitfalls in data collection procedures that lead to ‘dark figure of crime’.

The dark figure of crime is used to describe the total amount of unreported crimes. To some degrees, all crimes have some dark data, as crime statistics are less reliable. The dark figure of crime is also, however, less for less severe offences. There are agencies such as the national crime victimization survey which works on the number and provides a report on the number of crimes that are not reported in the country. The comparison in self-report studies and official statistics is also an essential tool in the determination of the dark figure of crime. Some difficulties in data collection also contribute to the dark figure of crime; such factors include:

1. Estimation of victimization, the data collection procedure involves the evaluation of data in the area through the study in a small space. Crimes that are collected include, those affecting the elderly, the youth, children and the disadvantaged. Methodological problems, however, accompany the evaluation of these small groups. The drawing of precise conclusions on such groups requires careful sampling, which is not always provided as most of the findings made are based on assumptions. The assumptions made concerning the minority groups create dark figure crime when such information is recorded.
2. Screening biases, this involves the identification of cases of interest. When screening is done for low-incident events, this leads to reporting errors. This mostly seen in the defensive gun uses; another example is the people with cognitive development problems; most people give false positive reports and claim that they suffer the disease whereas they don’t. The pitfall can be avoided by developing state-of-the-art in place of the sampling frame.

• ii) Trusting in prediction from experts too much. Thirty years ago, in the medical field, we saw Stanford doctors develop a computer system that could predict the medical condition of the patient. The system is, however, not being used by the medical experts in fear that it might overtake human power, and this may lender them jobless. The same case happens in the justice system; the fear of competing with machines makes the system believe in human power which has a lot of flaws. The flaws that are made by the experts increase the dark figure crime.