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A-Level Criminology Unit 1 AC1.6
- Module
- Changing Awareness of Crime
- Institution
- WJEC
A-Level Criminology Unit 1 AC1.6 notes for a level criminology unit 1 from a 90/100 answer
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AC1.6 Evaluate Methods of Collecting Statistics about CrimeWhy do police need statistics?
The police department needs statistics to measure the rate of crimes and to identify patterns
and trends within the number of crimes being committed or the number of specific crimes
being committed. These numbers collected by the statistics help indicate what specific
crimes the police need to focus their attention on, or what crimes they should not spend all
their time on.
Reliability refers to the data being collected in a scientific and balanced way. Someone else
doing the same research would get the same result. This ability to reproduce means that
crime data is a crucial factor if data is going to be accepted as dependable and therefore
worth using to understand crime.
Validity refers to data that is truly measuring what it sets out to measure. Valid data should
include representation from all groups of people involved in the research and balanced
representations of all geographical areas. The correct research ‘question’ should be asked,
and the data collected must be accurate.
Home Office Statistics
The Home Office Statistics provides police-recorded crime (PRC). Every month, each police
force (43 in the United Kingdom) reports to the Home Office (a government department) the
number of crimes they have recorded in their area (offence type, geography, time). These
figures are then sent to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) who publish the final
statistics. The reliability of this method is that different officers and police forces are expected
to follow the same procedures and use the same definitions of crime, eliminating any bias
and misinterpreted situations from happening. However, different officers can interpret the
same incident differently, meaning that the same crime could be dealt with in dissimilar ways.
In addition, the accuracy of how a crime is recorded could function as a limitation. Errors can
be made when recording the niceties of a crime or victim. In terms of validity, statistics do not
always give an accurate depiction of the crimes recorded. The police recorded 45,000 rape
incidents in 2017 and 2016, however, victims might not always report the offence due to fear
or shame or in some cases the police fail to record it, as police do not record 40% of the
crimes they receive. Ethically, The Home Office Statistics do not cross any boundaries when
dealing with participants as they remain anonymous; statistics only rely on quantitative data.
The purpose of this research is to give valid and reliable details of the amount of crime.
However, the statistics published by HOS only tell us about the crime, they do not provide
any information for other associated issues, such as the fear of crime for example. Police
statistics are demonstrated as useful to report police activity or to serve as an indicator of
crime trends. There are many strengths and limitations to how they record crime. For
example, ‘The Counting Rules’ is a rule which issues a detailed counting rule, the current
one is that the statistics should reflect the number of victims, rather than the number of
criminals. Rules like these could be different for every individual, some might argue that the
number of offences is a suitable reason as to why a person should prosecuted, instead of
the number of victims. Despite the difference in opinions a strength of the HOS is that it is
dependable, as it is audited and available for the public. A limitation is that it could be sorted
into the wrong categories, or police departments could fiddle with the statistics and make
certain crimes ‘disappear’ to give themselves a good reputation under pressure.
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