Sources of Crime Data

Abstract

Crime is a complex phenomenon not easily measured. Yet systematic data are fundamental to developing and evaluating effective crime prevention strategies. Official criminal justice data are valuable because they have long been uniformly collected in the USA. However, official data sources cannot capture the sizeable amount of crime unreported to police or undetected. Victim- and self-report data address underreporting of crimes by citizens and victims to law enforcement, although these data under-represent certain types of crimes and have some sampling issues, respondent error, and interviewer bias. Just as there is not a “silver bullet” for preventing crime, there is not one solution to best measuring crime. Existing crime data are perhaps most useful to prevention researchers interested in etiological and epidemiological aspects of social problems because these data may be used to detail the prevalence and distribution of crime, delinquency, and substance abuse across time, place, and population subgroups such as race-ethnicity, sex, and age. Crime data based on survey research methods (e.g., victimization, self-report data) offer measures of commonly theorized risk and protective factors for crime. Another advantage for prevention researchers, some existing datasets support techniques to address contextual effects (individual and neighborhood influences) on crime. Although there are noteworthy caveats to using official or survey data, these crime data sources continue to provide much valuable information on prevalence, distribution, and etiology of substance abuse, deviance, and crime and are useful in evaluating promising paths to prevention.