Uniform Crime Reports as Organizational Outcomes: Three Time Series Experiments

Abstract

John Kitsuse and Aaron Cicourel have suggested that official crime are a function of the organizational structures of police departments. In three natural experiments, we examine this hypothesis with time series analyses of Uniform Crime Reports. Our findings suggest that official crime are a function of organizational structures related to (1) formal complaint investigation; (2) hierarchial control of crime processing; and (3) dispatching routines. We propose a minimal theory of official crime as organizational outcomes. The oldest, most comprehensive source of crime statistics in the United States is the Uniform Crime Reports (UCRs), published annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. UCRs are not the only source of crime statistics, nor are they more valid or reliable than alternative statistics. The shortcomings of UCRs as measures of real crime have been widely noted. UCRs ignore crimes which do not fit neatly into established index categories, for example, as well as crimes which are not reported to local police agencies (Hindelang, 1976; Skogan, 1974, 1976). Federal, state, and local governments nevertheless rely heavily on UCRs to monitor crime control programs; when politicians complain that crime are up or brag that crime are down, they invariably mean that UCR crime are up or down. UCRs in this most important sense represent the status quo: they provide the official crime statistics for most U.S. cities and states. This paper examines organizational structures which threaten the validity of UCRs, a problem which has been referred to as the production of crime rates (Black, 1970; Maxfield et al., 1980). Kitsuse and Cicourel provide the best general statement of this problem: