Criminology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 3

Criminology - Essay Example (Beck 2006).Two statistical programs to measure the magnitude, nature, and impact of crime administered by the U.S. Department of Justice are the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The purpose, focus, and method of these two programs cover different aspects of crime, whereas, the information they produce gives a comprehensive picture about the Nation’s crime problem. The UCR Program, directly under FBI, compiles data from monthly law enforcement reports or individual crime incident records received by FBI, which is further scrutinized and compared with previous monthly submission for discrepancy. National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) has been formulated after intensive research by Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the crime data collected from nationally representative sample by the U.S. Bureau of Census, through personnel household interviews. The data is individualized, covers individual information as well as feed-back on the performance of criminal justice system, and generally projects those crimes that were not reported to law enforcement. Though NCVS is designed to complement the UCR program there are Major differences in UCR and NCVS. UCR provides a reliable quantitative statistics for law enforcement, whereas NCVS projects qualitative statistics on previously unavailable information about crime, as the two programs measure non-identical set of crimes. In addition, crime definitions and scale adopted to calculate crime rates differ from each other, resulting in statistical discrepancies and estimation. Major sources for Crime data collection in the United States are (1) Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The National Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program is a nationwide statistical collaboration in the United States to collect accurate