Crime Statistics

As the positivists believe, the purpose of having a crime statistic is to have a brief outline of the crime rate of the society. Durkheim even suggests that crime statistics are an objective social fact telling us the condition of the society if it is healthy or not. Also, it provides the authority to check the effectiveness of the law, as to reform or demolish to law. The statistics can be used to manage performance of criminal justice system and understand the cause of people committing crime. As a citizen of the country, the statistics can reflect the risk of being a victim in his living region and as an indicator of the economic instability.

As the main purpose of having a crime statistics is to gather crime rate as a reference, the statistics measures trends in crime, which will be very useful to the public. In general, the statistics can measure the crime rate and level in society, at the same time reflecting the moral and social value. To the government, it is the best reference to evaluate the efficiency of the law and to set up the particular rule to protect the society. For the police, the statistics can give them a clear picture on the trend of crime, the detail information of the criminals, for instance, the age difference, their occupation and the relationship between social status and the kind of crime they committed are useful for the police authority to have a more detail planning on the solution in order to maintain the peace of the society. In addition, as mentioned above, the police can also evaluate their operations, for example, disturbing of manpower responsible for different region, to put more police force to areas that with higher crime rate and put more attention on the age groups that are found to have a higher chance as a criminal.

However, for the constructionists, they think that crime rate is simply a social construction of the perceived social reality of crime. This means that even crime itself does not exist in reality. To them, crime only exists in and through the social institutions such as rules, regulations and laws that give them meaning within a culture. And this social construction of reality is an ongoing, dynamic process that is reproduced by people acting on their interpretations of what is right or wrong, and their knowledge of it. Thus, instead of giving us an accurate and clear picture of the crime in the society, crime statistics merely tell us about the organizations that produce crime statistics, such as the government and the police.

It can clearly be seen that there is a tremendous amount of room for the police to exercise their discretion. Rather than a true depiction of crime in the society, they are often the result of a series of decisions made by the police as to whether or not to record a crime. As a result of this police discretion, several trends have been spotted in official statistics which destroy its credibility of being valid.

Police recorded statistics reveal the typical offenders as being young males, in the working class and belonging to certain ethnic group. This is not entirely valid. It shows an underestimation of other criminal groups and activities. Crime which is committed by the middle or upper class is unnoticed. For example, white collar crime, which is committed mostly by those of a high socio-economic status are rarely caught. The reason for this may be a lower level of focus by the government on this particular type of crime and group of people. It illustrates the Marxist

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