Analysis of Criminal Trends: Strengths and Weaknesses of UCR and NCVS

Crime Analysis
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Analysis of criminal trends
The most current UCR statistics demonstrate a decrease in property crime over the previous ten years. But during the last ten years, the rate of violent crime has risen. The date equally revealed that property crime showcased a frequent occurrence with burglary and thefts involving cars as common.
NCVS gathers data on property and violent crimes. Violent crimes include aggravated assault, rape, or simple assault. On the other hand, property crime include residential trespassing, burglary, and other types of household theft. The NCVS has gathered data on nonfatal personal crimes such rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated and simple assault, and personal theft during the last ten years. Both reported and unreported home property crimes, such as trespassing, car theft, and other thefts, were made to the police (Bureau of Justice Statistics) (2022). According to the 2022 NCVS, 16.5 victims of violent crime were reported for every 1,000 people 12 years of age or older in 2022. This means that note during the last ten years from 2011 to 2022, the rate of violent crime has decreased from 22% to 16%.
Strengths and weaknesses of UCR and NCVS
The key advantage of UCR is that it is still the most important technique for keeping track of crimes. As a result, all the flaws in crime reporting also appear as potential problems with this approach of measuring crime. Another major strength of UCR is that information provided is retrieved from data records of police departments, prisons, and courts. The information from these websites is collected and analyzed by the FBI. This means that information that is from accounts that are unverified cannot be included in the records of UCR. The reason why this is important is because Uniform Crime Report focuses much on validity and accuracy in law enforcement practices and reporting practices. It is also worth noting that of all the crimes committed every day, only one-third of these crimes are reported to law enforcement. Thus, to ensure there accuracy in reporting, police officers to provide the specifics of the crime including time, data from witnesses, and names of possible suspects among others. However, during the past few years, there were several reported cases of inaccuracies in UCR website. As a result, the website was restructured to ensure the website to capture all the information to record about any crime. Rather reporting much the crime, police officers were required to give more information about the offender.
UCR's primary flaw is that it lacks an analytical mindset. Instead, it exclusively depends on compiling extensive crime data. Additionally, while using this strategy, many crimes go unreported and unrecorded. As a result, the technique only provides limited information about crime. The UCR does not take into account the problem of the police to civilian ratio in crime zones, which is another weakness of this system. Its flaw is that not all crimes are recorded in the UCR data source. There have been no federal crimes recorded due to certain changes in law enforcement procedures. The UCR reports crimes that have only been recorded in police records, which is an...