Increases in Crime: The Utility of Alternative Measures

Abstract

Reported increases in offenses known to the police in the United States for the years since 1958 suggest that the United States crime rate has increased dramatically in recent years, with the rate for 1967 being double that reported for 1958.1 Interpretation of this sharp rise in the crime rate is complicated by a number of factors, but primarily by the sparseness of national data with which the trend may be compared. More complete and more comparable arrest data, for example, would provide an additional series with which trends could be compared. Periodic victim surveys might also provide independent confirmation of the trends reported by the FBI, as might systematic and reasonably complete records from the juvenile and adult courts in the United States. But for all practical purposes only offense-known data is available. The use of offenses known to the police as an official government index of crime in the United States began in 1930 when legislation was enacted permitting the Division of Identification and Information in the Department of Justice (later the FBI) to adopt a plogram developed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. In the