In Concluding this, it proves that the police only report offences and produce statistical data if a law has been broken and reported. Due to this the definition of crime “an action or an instance of negligence that is deemed injurious to the public welfare or morals or to the interests of the state and that is legally prohibited” (Dictionary.com) stands to be correct. On the other hand the BCS produce statistics which are based on a person committing a crime even if it is not reported and reported crimes. The sort of crime which would have to committed would be something like theft from a vehicle and burglary. The statistics also support crimes like, for example if a person was to leave open their car door and someone nicked their car radio the police may say hat it is their own fault because they left the car unlocked, although it is still a crime because someone took something without permission. Therefore this would explain higher statistics in the BCS than the police.
As you can see there is a difference between the BCS statistics and the police statistics. There are several ways in which the public can report crimes to the police such as, in person (at their local or central police station or directly to a police), by telephone (the public can contact the police station at there local station) and online (for non emergency crimes). A large proportion of crime is not reported so it is considered to be ’invisible’. This is where the victim is not aware that a crime has been committed toward them. More than likely this is because people do not report the crime because they have lack of time, may be too embarrassed, too trivial, may have little faith in the police, no financial advantage to do so, frightened of retaliation by offender or victim may not be want to hurt the offender. Due to this the police statistics would be naturally lower.
Crime statistics have been gathered since 1857. The conclude all of the statistics that are gathered they would of have to been gathered by police statistics, British crime survey and local crime survey. Police statistics are produced on a quarterly and annual basis. As I have explained before not all of the police recorded crime is not all recorded into the statistics? Only one half of personal offences and one quarter of property offences reported are not recorded as crime. This is mainly because the police officer makes the excuse of that there is not enough evidence. This is in about one fifth of cases where a crime was reported to the police it would be recorded in a different category to the original allegation. On average only 47% of crime allegations are actually recorded as crime, as where the crimes reported to the police are not serious enough to appear in statistics.
The police and BCS both use different ways to collect the data. The police would use quantitative data that is built on real figures, facts and recorded crimes, while the BCS would go round house to house and use the data from what they get from peoples opinion, which is only built on facts and estimates. The BCS only ‘paint a picture’ of how much crime there is, while the police have true figures. Overall, they both have negative side to the way they collect their data. The police cannot actually create an accurate picture of how much crime there is because they only use the recorded crime to put into statistics. In addition, the police and the BCS use different categories to put crime into. For example, for theft from a vehicle, the police would put it down as just burglary and the BCS would specify it more. Therefore, that is why most statistics will have the use of both the police and the BCS, which Is able to create a more accurate picture of how much crime there is in England and Wales.
