Official crime statistics give us information regarding crime in society at any given time. This is referred to as the official crime rate. These are based upon criminal incidents that the police are made aware of. In England and wales, 43 police forces put together their figures and publish the data on an annual basis. Since April 2008, this data has been published under the supervision of the National Audit Office, instead of the Home Office. Police are required to record crime under the 1856 act of parliament, they appear on the ‘notifiable offence list’, but this list doesn’t included crimes like motoring offences as they are not required to be included in them by the Home Office. Restrictions like this may govern the way in which multiple
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The process by which a crime becomes an official statistic is through a reporting process, there are a couple stages involved in the translation of a crime to an official statistic. At each stage, there is a potential for the number of crimes that proceed to the next level to be reduced, so the final figure only represents a distorted proportion of the total crimes committed. This does not present an accurate portrayal of the real amount of crime that occurs within society. The gap between the volume of crime that is committed and the recorded official crime statistics, is referred to as the dark figure of crime. ‘We can speak of the dark figure of crime, or use the analogy of the official statistics as an iceberg, where what is revealed is a fraction of the actual events capable of being called crime. The actual proportion of crime the dark figure represents is difficult to calculate but it is the majority for many crimes’ (Morrison, 1995: …show more content…
Positivist criminology believe that crime statistics consist of useful facts regarding the crimes levels in society on which policy can be formulated, interactionalist criminology and left idealist approaches take a more sceptical approach of their accuracy. Interactionism put forward the argument that crime statistics are socially constructed, as in they reflect responses to social behaviour and these are constantly subject to change. The institutionalist approach regards official crime statistics not as a true portrayals of the volume of crime in society but, rather, as ‘outcomes of social and institutional processes’ (Coleman and Moynihan, 1996:
The process by which a crime becomes an official statistic is through a reporting process, there are a couple stages involved in the translation of a crime to an official statistic. At each stage, there is a potential for the number of crimes that proceed to the next level to be reduced, so the final figure only represents a distorted proportion of the total crimes committed. This does not present an accurate portrayal of the real amount of crime that occurs within society. The gap between the volume of crime that is committed and the recorded official crime statistics, is referred to as the dark figure of crime. ‘We can speak of the dark figure of crime, or use the analogy of the official statistics as an iceberg, where what is revealed is a fraction of the actual events capable of being called crime. The actual proportion of crime the dark figure represents is difficult to calculate but it is the majority for many crimes’ (Morrison, 1995: …show more content…
Positivist criminology believe that crime statistics consist of useful facts regarding the crimes levels in society on which policy can be formulated, interactionalist criminology and left idealist approaches take a more sceptical approach of their accuracy. Interactionism put forward the argument that crime statistics are socially constructed, as in they reflect responses to social behaviour and these are constantly subject to change. The institutionalist approach regards official crime statistics not as a true portrayals of the volume of crime in society but, rather, as ‘outcomes of social and institutional processes’ (Coleman and Moynihan, 1996: