Fbi's Uniform Crime Report

During the 19th century, Benjamin Disraeli, a British politician made a statement that still has significant resonance today: “There are three kinds of lies – lies, damned lies, and statistics” (as cited in Ball, 2004). Disraeli’s statement is merely a simple explanation of how the media sensationalize data, especially crime data, when reporting or publishing news items to the public. In that regard, reporters and journalist on many occasions take liberties in spicing data and news items up just to garnish some increased attention from the readers or the listeners. In a broader sense, media reporting may not accurately reflect facts since reporters and journalists has the ability to manipulate figures to say whatever they want them to. In …show more content…
And, if such indexes contain accurate and reliable data, they can illuminate government or institutional failures, suggest solutions and, in many cases, goad a complacent government agency or a police department into action. However, the problem is that they may not contain reliable data. Not only that, the media frequently publish or broadcasts sensationalized news that are based on these data with the aim of generating high ratings for their company. Nevertheless, there are rooms for improvement. My argument here is this: the media can enhance the authenticity and credibility of their reporting by making use of data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and the U.S. Census …show more content…
Census data has some limitations. And it is important for the reporters and media houses to take note of these limitations. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR), for instance, reports only crimes known to the police. This means that are reported underestimate both the incidence (the number of crimes committed) and the prevalence (the number of offenders) of crime, since a high percentage of crime victims do not report their experiences to law enforcement agencies participating in the UCR program. Also, the FBI’s UCR reports only the most serious crime incidents. This means that for a single crime incident in which multiple offences are committed, the UCR’s hierarchy rule requires that only the most serious offense is reported (Regoli & Hewitt, 2010). For instance, suppose an offender rubs and murders a victim. Going by the UCR’s hierarchy rule, only the murder will be reported. In spite of these limitations, as the source of data and information for media crime reporting and analysis, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and the U.S. Census data remain the gold