For some crimes, no arrests are made. For others, there may be multiple arrests. Furthermore, not everyone who is arrested has committed the crime for which he or she was arrested. Arrests also depend on a number of factors other than overall crime levels, including policies of particular police agencies, the cooperation of victims, the skill of the perpetrator, and the age, sex, race, and social class of the suspect Cook and Laub, ; McCord, c.
Nor should arrest statistics be confused with the number of crimes committed, because in some cases, the arrest of one person may account for a series of crimes, and in others several people may be arrested for one crime. This is particularly true for young people, who are more likely than adults to commit crimes in a group McCord, ; Reiss, ; Reiss and Farrington, ; Zimring, Snyder contends that this tendency to offend in groups makes arrest statistics an inappropriate measure of the relative proportion of crime attributed to young people.
Checking on Snyder's position, McCord and Conway analyzed a random sample of juvenile offenders in Philadelphia. They found that the number of crimes accounted for by juveniles would be reduced by approximately 40 percent with an adjustment for co-offending. Rather, arrest statistics measure the flow of young people into the juvenile justice system or the criminal justice system.
For this reason, the number of crimes known to police is often a preferred measure of crime Cook and Laub, The UCR provide information on all crimes known to reporting police agencies, whether or not an arrest has been made. There is no information on age of the perpetrator, however, in the data on crimes known to police; thus even if they are a more accurate crime measure, the number of crimes known to police cannot be used to analyze juvenile crime.
Arrest clearance statistics, which measure the proportion of reported crime cleared by arrest or other exceptional means, such as death of the offender , may more accurately portray the proportion of crime committed by young people, according to Snyder But even clearance statistics may overestimate juvenile crime.
For example, if young people are more easily apprehended than adults, the proportion of their crimes cleared by arrest would be higher than the proportion of all crimes for which they were responsible Snyder, The proportion of young.
Likewise, Reiss and Farrington showed that offending appears less common in the teenage years if the rate is based on the number of offenses which takes into account co-offending committed by juveniles rather than on the number of juvenile offenders. Another problem with the UCR as a measure of crime is that, regardless of the number of offenses that occur in an incident leading to arrest, only one offense—the most serious—is counted for a detailed discussion of gaps in the UCR see Maltz, This procedure results in less serious crimes being undercounted by arrest statistics and a lack of information on the circumstances surrounding the crime.
For example, if a homicide occurs during a robbery, only the homicide is counted. As Maltz points out, this masks the nature of the circumstances surrounding the homicide. The UCR statistical system is summary-based. That is, each reporting agency reports totals of crimes known to police, of arrests, and of other information.
Although summary-based statistics are important, there is a lot of information they cannot provide. For example, it is impossible to determine from such data the number of crimes committed by multiple rather than single offenders or the relationship of the victim to the offender from such data Maxfield, This system reports information by incident instead of by totals for an agency.
NIBRS includes up to 10 different offense types per incident and provides details about all of the offenders and victims, as well as the situational context of the incident.
Although NIBRS may have many advantages for researchers and federal agencies, its adoption by states and law enforcement agencies has been slow. Roberts reported that cost of implementing the new system was the most common concern cited as an obstacle to the adoption of NIBRS. Other obstacles noted by Roberts include uncertain benefits of NIBRS to the reporting agencies; concern that NIBRS reporting would be too time-consuming for officers; and concern that reporting all offenses in an incident may give the appearance of an increase in crime.
NIBRS may one day provide much useful information about juvenile crime that is currently not available from the UCR, but it is not problem free. NIBRS continues to rely on police to make decisions about how to classify offenses and what information to report. All police reports represent interpretations of events that are usually not witnessed by officials. In addition to reporting totals of homicides, reporting agencies currently must fill out incident-based Supplemental Homicide Reports SHR detailing information about each homicide.
Researchers have found inconsistencies between SHR data and police agency records Loftin, and inappropriate classifications of murders as motivated by robbery Cook, Supplemental Homicide Reports may be completed and archived before all the evidence has been gathered, calling into question their validity National Research Council, b. There is also variation among agencies and over time in how homicide circumstances are recorded Maxfield, These types of problems may be even greater in NIBRS, which requires detailed information on crimes for which fewer police resources are dedicated than for homicides.
Information about crimes committed is also available from surveys of crime victims. The National Crime Victimization Survey NCVS , begun in , collects data annually on crime victimization from a nationally representative sample of approximately 43, households. Persons over the age of 12 in these households are asked about their experience with crime.
The NCVS includes crimes whether or not they were reported to the police. Detailed information is collected on the frequency and nature of the crimes of rape, sexual assault, personal robbery, aggravated and simple assault, household burglary, theft, and motor vehicle theft Bureau of Justice Statistics, Victims ' perception of the age of the offender for violent crimes is included in the data collected.
Because offenders' age may be difficult for a victim to estimate accurately, caution must be exercised in using NCVS to estimate juvenile crime. The NCVS does not ask. The NCVS underestimates crimes because it omits crimes to businesses e. It also omits crimes against victims under the age of Nor is information about homicides gathered in the NCVS.
Because the sampling unit is a household, transient and homeless people—populations at substantially great risk of victimization —are not represented National Research Council, b. Other aspects of the NCVS methods may inflate crime rates. Households are in the sample for three years and are interviewed every six months. Studies that rely on victim reports show that people tend to recall events of the distant past as though they happened more recently.
When households first enter the NCVS, a bounding interview is therefore conducted. Information gathered at this interview is not used except as a corrective for the subsequent interviews. However, households are kept in the survey even if the occupants change. No new bounding interview is done when the household contains new residents. Hence, in these households, there is a greater likelihood that reported victimizations would have occurred outside the six-month survey interval, thereby inflating official crime rates.
There has also been a shift in data collection methods over the years, away from face-to-face interviews to telephone and proxy interviews. The latter interview methods result in fewer victimizations being reported than in face-to-face and victim respondent interviews Steffensmeier and Harer, Nevertheless, the NCVS provides another source of information to compare with UCR arrest data when looking at trends in juvenile violent crime.
Data on the commission of delinquent acts and crimes are also available from surveys of young people. Self-report data include crimes not known to the police, but they have their own set of drawbacks. Some self-report surveys that are frequently used for examining juvenile crime e.
Missing from these data are students who are absent from school when the survey is taken, those who have dropped out of school, and homeless juveniles who are not attending school.
In particular, school dropouts have higher rates of delinquency than those who remain in school. There may be an implicit bias inherent in which schools are selected to be included in the study. In addition, the behav-. National cross-sectional or longitudinal studies that are population-based rather than school-based may provide more valid samples for estimating juvenile crime. Another problem with self-report data is accuracy of the information provided.
Surveys generally indicate higher levels of delinquency than indicated by offenses known to police or arrests. Because police do not know about all offenses, it is difficult to verify the accuracy of the self-report offending data. However, in general, a high proportion of offenses known to the police are reported by respondents, although there is variation by offense Huizinga and Elliott, Some researchers have found the validity of self-report data to vary by race and by gender.
For example, some researchers found that black or nonwhite respondents are less likely to report offenses already known to officials than are whites Hindelang et al. It is not known whether the self-reports or the official records are more accurate. More recently, Farrington et al. In other research Maxfield et al.
Maxfield and colleagues suggested that subjects with more recorded official contacts e. Less is known about the effect of gender on self-reports of offending.
Some studies have found that self-reports by males and females are equally valid, whereas others have found that females are less likely to report being arrested, even when they were convicted Maxfield et al.
It may be that girls and women experience more social stigma concerning their criminal behavior than do boys and men and are therefore less willing to report it to interviewers.
Males, in contrast, have been found less willing than females to report a history of childhood sexual abuse Widom and Morris, Maxfield et al. Each type of data for analyzing crime trends has advantages and disadvantages.
It is important to keep the weaknesses of the various types of data in mind whenever crime rates are discussed. In the following sections, trends in juvenile crime, based on the three different datasets, are discussed and compared.
Overall arrest rates in the United States have increased over the past three decades for all age groups Figure In , arrest rates were 28 percent higher than in The increase in arrest rates does not necessarily mean that crime had grown by 28 percent.
The arrest rate can be influenced by changes in policy, in police practices, and in the number of offenders arrested per crime. In fact, victim reports of overall crime indicate fairly consistent decreases since the early s. The picture of crime becomes more complicated when broken down by age and offense. Official crime rates are based on data reported by police agencies to the FBI about the index crimes of homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault—which make up the violent crime index—and burglary, larceny and theft, auto theft, and arson—which make up the property crime index.
In , there were a total estimated 12,, index crimes both violent and property known to police, 2,, arrests for index crimes, and 14,, arrests for all crimes including status offenses in the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, The vast major-.
Source: Arrest data from Federal Bureau of Investigation Arrests of those ages 10 to 17 accounted for In , when those ages 10 to 17 were 11 percent of the population, Not only do young people account for a small percentage of all arrests, but also the vast majority of arrests of those ages 10 to17 are for nonindex crimes 73 percent of arrests in , which are less serious than index crimes see Table In , only 4 percent of juvenile arrests were for index violent crimes and less than one-tenth of one percent of their arrests were for homicide.
Even in , at the height of the violent crime wave that began in the mid to late s, only about 6 percent of all juvenile arrests were for violent crimes and about two-tenths of one percent were for homicide. Young people are much more likely to be arrested for property crimes than for violent crimes. In comparison, in , about 5 percent of arrests of those over age 18 were. The likelihood of arrest differs by race, gender, and area of the country.
For young people under 18, blacks and males have consistently higher arrest rates than whites and females, respectively, for both violent crimes and property crimes. In , males accounted for 83 percent of arrests of those under 18 for violent crimes and 72 percent of arrests for property crimes.
In , only 15 percent of those under age 18 in the United States were black whites made up 79 percent and other races were 6 percent of the juvenile population , yet blacks made up Distributions for adults are similar, with blacks accounting for a disproportionate 40 percent of violent crime arrests and 35 percent of property crime arrests, compared with whites at 58 percent for violent crimes and 63 percent for property crimes, and others at 2 percent for both violent crimes and property crimes.
A more thorough discussion of racial disproportionality and possible reasons for it appears in Chapter 6. The concern in recent years over juvenile crime has centered on violent crime. Indeed, it appears that there was a significant upswing in violence among juveniles and adults.
As can be seen in Figure , beginning in the mid- to late s, there was a large increase in arrests for violent crimes not only among juveniles to year-olds , but also among adults ages 18 to 24 and 25 to Arrests for violent crimes of those 35 and older also increased, but more gradually and not nearly as much as for the younger groups. Since the mids, arrest rates for violent crimes have dropped dramatically for all age groups and are approaching the rates of the early s.
Note that for federal data collection purposes, Hispanic is not considered to be a race, but rather an ethnicity. Hispanics are included in both black and white counts. The UCR do not provide data by race for individual ages, but rather for those under 18 and for those 18 and older.
Victim reports of violent crimes in which the perpetrator was thought to be under the age of 18 show somewhat different trends, although both indicate increases beginning in the late s through the early s and declines at the end of the century. The juvenile violent crime rate based on victim reports remained fairly flat from to , then increased between and see Figure By , when arrest rates according to the FBI were close to their peak, the victimization rate had returned to the level of the rate.
There are a variety of reasons that lead to this rise. Throughout the warmer months, there are extended daylight hours allowing people to stay outside longer, ultimately creating more opportunities for misconduct to occur. Additionally, experts reveal that higher temperatures play a role in the common crimes committed due to windows and doors frequently left open. With all of these changes, youth are more likely to make the following violations:.
The Pandemic May be Contributing. Not only does summer play a role in the increase of crimes, but data suggests a global pandemic does too. Many states across the U. Increasing youth violence has become a national concern, and juvenile arrests are on the rise. Between and , arrests of juveniles for violent offenses rose by nearly sixty-eight percent.
Most of this increase occurred between and , during which time juvenile arrests for murder increased forty-five percent, arrests for robbery increased thirty-seven percent, and arrests for aggravated assault increased thirty-seven percent.
The most alarming statistics among these increases are the growth in homicides and weapons violations among younger juveniles. Between and , homicide arrests of adolescents under age fifteen increased twenty-four percent, while arrests of youth in this age group for weapons violations increased twelve percent.
It is interesting to note that between and , juvenile arrests for murder increased by fifty-one percent compared to a nine percent increase for those over the age of eighteen. The fact that young people commit crime at a high rate should not be a revelation.
Blumstein, supra. The rates of robbery and burglary, based upon the offender's age, indicate the peak age for offending is about seventeen. Beginning in , the murder rate for eighteen year-olds more than doubled in the following seven years. For young people of all ages under eighteen, the murder rate dramatically more than doubled. Among black males aged fourteen to seventeen, the murder rate from the mid's to the mid's consistently ran four to five times higher than the murder rate of similar aged white males.
Persons who have been arrested are booked only for the highest level of crime they committed — thus, arrest records exclude some data. For example, if a person robbed a bank at gunpoint and at the time of arrest was found to be carrying drugs, he would be arrested for armed robbery, not drug possession. A one-to-one ratio does not exist between arrests and crimes.
In some cases one crime may result in several arrests especially among youth, who frequently commit crimes in groups. In other cases a number of crimes may result in only one arrest. The following patterns in juvenile crime have been particularly interesting: Between and most arrest rates increased sharply.
Aggravated assault rates doubled, as did murder rates. Since most arrest rates have been in steady decline.
0コメント