Dark Figure Of Crime Research Articles

National Survey of Victimization: Another Trend-Crime Mapping Tools

The concept of the "dark figure" refers to the discrepancy between the actual occurrence of criminal activities and the quantity of reported incidents received by the criminal justice system, particularly law enforcement agencies. The term "dark figure of crime" pertains to unreported criminal incidents that are not captured inside the criminal justice system. Inclusion of these unreported crimes in official crime statistics would result in a significant amplification of the overall crime figures. To address the disparity between police records, namely police crime statistics, and the actual occurrence of crimes, many regions have initiated efforts to incorporate victims as the focal point of their investigations. In Indonesia, surveys of victims are generally carried out by private groups, and relate to certain types of crimes. The hesitancy exhibited by victims in reporting their experiences might provide challenges for law enforcement officials in their efforts to uphold societal stability. Victim surveys can extend beyond individuals who have directly experienced crime, encompassing tertiary victims (i.e., indirect victims) who harbour concerns about potential victimisation. Victim surveys can also be utilised to examine victims' perspectives within the complex framework of the criminal justice system, particularly in cases involving many victimisation incidents. Keywords: crime, survey, victims

Modelling underreported spatio-temporal crime events.

Crime observations are one of the principal inputs used by governments for designing citizens' security strategies. However, crime measurements are obscured by underreporting biases, resulting in the so-called "dark figure of crime". This work studies the possibility of recovering "true" crime and underreported incident rates over time using sequentially available daily data. For this, a novel underreporting model of spatiotemporal events based on the combinatorial multi-armed bandit framework was proposed. Through extensive simulations, the proposed methodology was validated for identifying the fundamental parameters of the proposed model: the "true" rates of incidence and underreporting of events. Once the proposed model was validated, crime data from a large city, Bogotá (Colombia), was used to estimate the "true" crime and underreporting rates. Our results suggest that this methodology could be used to rapidly estimate the underreporting rates of spatiotemporal events, which is a critical problem in public policy design.

An examination of the code of the street code and the dark figure of crime among an institutionalized sample

ABSTRACT There have been a number of studies that have examined the relationship between Anderson’s code of the street and criminogenic behavior. However, little research has been done on the potential relationship between street code adherence and the dark figure of crime. Using a sample of 299 institutionalized individuals the authors examine the relationship between street code adherence and official and unofficial records of assaults and motor vehicle theft. Results official records indicated that street code adherence was not significantly related to either offense type. However, when self-report data for assaults and motor vehicle theft was analyzed, there was strong evidence that street code adherence was a significant predictor. The results suggest that street code adherence is a better predictor of self-report offenses than those measured by official records. Thus, street code adherence may be key to shedding light on the dark figure of crime.

The dark figure of violence committed by discharged psychiatric inpatients

PurposeOfficial criminal justice statistics (e.g. arrest rates) underestimate the frequency of crime because not all crime gets reported to authorities, a phenomenon known as the “dark figure of crime.” The present study aims to examine the dark figure of violence committed by discharged psychiatric patients.Design/methodology/approachMultiple reporting modalities permitted a direct comparison between patients whose violence was officially detected to those whose violence was self-reported but not officially detected, along with differences in the nature of violent acts.FindingsOnly 5% of violent individuals were officially detected, 26% of violent individuals were both officially detected and self-reported their violent behavior, while 68% of violent individuals self-reported their violent behavior and were not officially detected. The type of violent acts did not vary as a function of whether they were officially detected or self-reported. However, differences were observed for the location of violence, the relationship to the victim and whether an injury resulted. Older individuals, those with prior arrests and those with higher psychopathy scores are some of the factors associated with an increased likelihood of officially detected violence.Research limitations/implicationsThe data were collected from three sites in the USA. Generalizing the specific findings to other locations and countries ought to be done cautiously.Practical implicationsStudies ought to include multiple methods to measure violence. Self-report seems to be especially important to the extent one is concerned with measuring actual violence rather than violence that gets detected by legal authorities.Originality/valueThis study highlights an important limitation of relying exclusively on official criminal justice statistics when studying violence or recidivism in the community.

Assessing the Spatial Concentration of Urban Crime: An Insight from Nigeria

ObjectiveResearch demonstrates that crime is concentrated. This finding is so consistent that David Weisburd refers to this as the “law of crime concentration at place”. However, most research on crime concentration has been conducted in the US or European cities and has used secondary data sources. In this study, we examine whether the law of crime concentration applies in the context of sub-Saharan Africa using primary data.MethodsA crime victimization survey was used to collect data in the city of Kaduna (Nigeria). Using these data, the concentration of crime (breaking-and-entering and domestic theft) was examined at the household, street segment, and neighborhood levels. Specifically, variants of a Lorenz curve and the Gini index (GI) were used to examine whether crime concentrates at these different spatial scales and if such concentration reflects anything beyond the spatial distribution of opportunity for these types of offenses.ResultsCrime was found to concentrate at all spatial scales, and having accounted for expectation, given the distribution of opportunity, crime was most concentrated at the household level, closely followed by street segments. It was relatively less concentrated at the neighborhood level.ConclusionThe current study extends previous research in a number of ways. It shows that the law of crime concentration at place applies in a very different context to most previous work. Unlike previous studies, we use primary data collected specifically to test the law, avoiding problems associated with the dark figure of crime. Moreover, the findings persist after accounting for crime opportunity.

Policing Violence against Women: The Indian Scenario

Abstract Policing by police is an errand difficult to be met with the rise in atrocities against the peripherals with regard to women, children, aged and minorities. Countries showing different crime statistics on violence against women cannot be spared of explanations. Whether the incidences of violence against women is showing any change is a question of concern especially taking into consideration the dark figure of crime. The present study is an attempt to analyze violence against women in India and evaluate the measures undertaken by the police in India to combat the menace in recent times.

The Dark Figure of Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean

The dark figure of crime is the gap between crimes reported in victimization surveys and crimes registered in administrative police records. This paper quantifies the dark figure of gender-based violent crimes through a systematic comparison between official crime figures and victimization surveys in Latin America and the Caribbean over 2004–2014. We find that the dark figure of gender-based violent crimes is between 92 and 95% in comparison with a dark figure of between 63 and 80% in developed countries. This means that in the region, around 5 out of every 100 crimes are found in administrative police records. The dark figure of gender-based violent crimes is similar to that of extortion and kidnapping, but it is significantly greater than the dark figure of assaults and robberies of vehicles (65 and 52%, respectively). Our results show that the perception of corruption and the low confidence in the police are positively associated with the dark figure of crime through the channel of under-reporting and that the dark figure of gender-based violent crimes is greater in rural areas. These findings provide evidence of a potential bias in administrative police data and the need for policies aimed at reducing under-reporting, in particular for gender-based violent crimes.

The dark figure of sexual recidivism.

Empirical studies of sexual offender recidivism have proliferated in recent decades. Virtually all of the studies define recidivism as a new legal charge or conviction for a sexual crime, and these studies tend to find recidivism rates of the order of 5-15% after 5years and 10-25% after 10+ years. It is uncontroversial that such a definition of recidivism underestimates the true rate of sexual recidivism because most sexual crime is not reported to legal authorities, a principle known as the "dark figure of crime." To estimate the magnitude of the dark figure of sexual recidivism, this paper uses a probabilistic simulation approach in conjunction with the following: (i) victim self-report survey data about the rate of reporting sexual crime to legal authorities; (ii) offender self-report data about the number of victims per offender; and (iii) different assumptions about the chances of being convicted of a new sexual offense given that it is reported. Under any configuration of assumptions, the dark figure is substantial, and as a consequence the disparity between recidivism defined as a new legal charge or conviction for a sex crime and recidivism defined as actually committing a new sexual crime is large. These findings call into question the utility of recidivism studies that rely exclusively on official crime statistics to define sexual recidivism, and highlight the need for additional, long-term studies that use a variety of different measures to assess whether or not sexual recidivism has occurred.

A Critical Inquiry Into the Field of Multinational Research on Women’s Offending

This paper provides a comprehensive and critical look at the current state of multinational research on women’s offending and scrutinizes how this knowledge has been derived. The importance of global research for theoretical advancement is discussed. Questions about the validity of official data estimates as proxies for women’s offending in cross-national research focus on the extent to which research findings are reflecting behavioural differences among the populations being studied or other exogenous factors, such as policing, policy and data collection. This paper carries on a tradition of inquiry into the data by presenting visual heuristics to facilitate easy interpretation of definitional differences in specified crime types across time and between country and by determining societal factors that correlate with the “dark figure of crime” when contrasting arrests and reported victimization across nations. The findings suggest cautious optimism for proceeding with rigorously compiled multinational official data sources to advance this important field of work.

The Application of Statistical Psychology to Crime and Justice: Demonstrating the Dark Figuree of Crime with Historical Example in the UK (Presentation Slides)

This lecture presents students, and professionals who are training in crime statistics reporting, with a concrete tutorial in how to critically evaluate government crime statistics with reference to public data collected from public surveys on their recounted experiences of crime. Using historical crime statistics from Home Office UK reports and statistics from what was previously known as the British Crime Survey, the tutorial demonstrates the inconsistencies in police reported crime and crime reported in the same time period by a representative sample of people from public households in England & Wales. What's more, the tutorial explores whether public fear of crime can be justified by crime's extent. The tutorial presents a worked clear example of the 'Dark Figure of Crime' phenomenon, and provides detailed coverage of the following: 1. Advantages and disadvantages of police reporting v public reporting of crime, 2. Understanding the explanatory steps to attend to when discrepancies in official policing crime statistics, and official public crime reporting statistics arise, 3. The circumstances that brought about the 'Simmons Report (2000)', 4. Explanations for the rise in crime according to societal and psychological factors, 5. The 'Social Psychological Fear of Crime Model' of explanation regarding public perception of their likelihood to be victims of crime, regardless of crime statistics reporting, 6. The psychological consequences of victimization and how it relates to lack of crime reporting to the police in the first instance, and finally the presentation closes with an evaluation. The lecture will be suitable to those working in social research and studying criminology, law, socio-legal studies, forensic psychology, critical psychology, or social statistics.

The Mobilization of Criminal Law

Perhaps few decisions have more of an impact on the operational functioning of the criminal justice system than the decision by victims of crime to notify the police. Researchers in the United States and abroad have found that victims often choose not to mobilize the criminal law in the aftermath of a victimization event. A large percentage of property and violent crimes never appear in official crime data estimates. Most remain hidden in the dark figure of crime. Victim nonreporting has numerous implications for criminal justice system processing, crime control policy, and substantive research on the causes and correlates of crime. Studies have long sought to identify the victim-, incident-, and community-based mechanisms that might account for patterns of police notification. Although several important findings have emerged, critical questions remain unanswered. This article provides a critical overview of the determinants of victim nonreporting and charts potential avenues for future research.

Changing Crime in Phnom Penh

Is Phnom Penh more or less dangerous than it was five years ago? Residents and frequent visitors to the city have in recent years noted a more relaxed and peaceful ambience. In the past self-imposed curfews emptied streets early in the evening but has Phnom Penh become as safe as other cities? All over the world official crime statistics account for only a fraction of crime. Many crimes are not detected or reported to the police. Even when crimes are reported they are not always recorded by the police, although records of serious crimes such as homicide are usually more reliable. Criminologists refer to these unaccounted crimes as the ‘dark figure of crime’. The ‘dark figure’ of unreported crime varies from country to country and partly reflects confidence in police and differences in the severity and frequency of some crimes. Compared to many places in the world Cambodia has one of the lowest rates of reporting crime to the police and thus one of the largest ‘dark figure’ of crime.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Youth (and) Violence

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Youth (and) Violence

Who actually steals? A study of covertly observed shoplifters*

Shoplifting is one of the most common and costly crimes, yet little data exist to determine reliably characteristics of the typical shoplifter or the modus operandi of the crime. It is a crime that has most often been studied using official, secondary data provided by either retail security personnel or law enforcement officers. Reliability issues plague these official data. Continuing the “dark figure of crime” tradition, this study examines shoplifting by covert observation with a camera system installed in a typical suburban retail drug store. A standardized data template was used to record the demographic and behavioral characteristics of shoppers. Significant numbers of shoppers (8.5%) were observed shoplifting. Logistic regression analysis reveals that, while members of some demographic groups shoplifted more often than others, behavioral indicators carried far more predictive power. The methodology and findings are considered within the larger context of the law enforcement and “profiling” literatures.

Of Doctors, Deterrence, and the Dark Figure of Crime: A Note on Abortion in Hawaii

The current controversy about abortion involves two very different kinds of issues. First, there are arguments about the morality of abortion and its prohibition. Second, there are questions of fact about the extent to which criminal law regulation has an impact on the rate of abortions and other incidents of social life. These ethical and empirical issues are distinct: the morality of criminal law restrictions on abortion is independent of the degree to which such laws are effective.' Still, the extent to which law changes behavior in this area is of interest to scholars and legislators and the subject of heated debate.2 In the United States, legal regulation of abortion has traditionally been a matter of individual state policy, but until recently all states prohibited abortion except in narrowly defined situations. Recent legislation in a number of states has, however, made medical abortion available to greater numbers of pregnant women-in some states to all women who can afford the operation.3 In March, 1970, Hawaii's law