Thefts and criminal damage make up 44% of police recorded crime, whilst the BCS records vandalism and thefts as 57% of all crime committed. This can give us a valuable insight into how people treat the survey and the police differently. Despite the slightly different categorisation, the crimes still amount to the same thing. However, these statistics do show that people are more comfortable reporting to an organisation that they are not in risk of retribution from. It is common in some societies not to trust the police, and in some cases, people do not report to the police for the sake of a friend or family member who has committed the crime. Therefore, the police cannot record these crimes and the statistics that are released are still under the ‘iceberg effect’ where a lot of the crime that is committed cannot be seen.
There are other reasons why crimes may not be reported to or recorded by the police. For example, a victim of a minor offence may report a crime to the police, but in their professional opinion they may deem it to be too trivial to be recorded as an official crime. This ties in with previously mentioned categorisation - the offence is categorised and its seriousness is also therefore determined by the police officer’s opinion. More worryingly, its has been deemed that the police force, when a crime is reported, may view the social status of the person reporting the crime to be too low or not high enough to pursue the matter.
Therefore, in relation to this, the British Crime Survey is very important in giving a better oversight and picture of crime to the public and the home office. The survey, which interviews around twenty-four thousand people, is crucial in reporting to the government crimes which are unrecorded, and is also used in designing crime prevention programmes. The way in which it differs most from official police statistics is that it covers a much larger area of topics. The survey itself includes questions on attitudes towards the Criminal Justice System, crime experienced in the workplace, illegal drug use and other subjects which are sometimes considered taboo in society. People are often scared to tell the police or confide in others when they experience these sorts of issues, or participate in these activities themselves. Therefore they make up part of the hidden crime rate.
However, self report studies, and victim studies such as the British Crimes Survey do have their disadvantages as well as their advantages. Self report studies are criticised more than the others for the method in which they gain statistics. They give volunteers a confidential list of offences and ask them whether or not they have committed any of the listed crimes. This is aimed as such so that the results can be compared with official conviction rates so that is can be seen which types of offence are generally punished and those which are going un-noticed. Yet, the problems that these surveys may encounter are multiple: those who choose to respond will generally only be from one section of the public, i.e. those who have enough time to carry out such questionnaires and who are interested. This will more often than not be the elderly, so answers may also be affected by exaggeration and/or forgetfulness on behalf of the respondent. Respondents may also be affected by embarrassment, for example, they may not want to admit that they took recreational drugs, or committed a sexual offence. This is all also based on the limited list of offences that are listed, and in many cases largely ignore middle class and white collar crime such as fraud in all its many shapes and forms.
Hidden crime is therefore a serious problem today, and it is seemingly impossible to conduct a nationwide survey which will include every single type of crime. Changes in legislation for example, or targeting by police forces (for example, and famously, drink driving around Christmas time) mean that crime is forever changing, and different types of crime are increasing and decreasing constantly. One type of hidden crime is increasing substantially, yet it is not regarded as a particularly serious in the general public’s eyes: online crime, particularly ‘wi-fi tapping’, where a computer user has logged on to somebody else wireless internet collection illegally to gain access to the internet for free. The police themselves are particularly worried about this type of crime. At the time of the survey, conducted by The Times newspaper, only eleven arrests had been made for this crime, but it is believed that over half of computer users have committed this crime (54%). This has boomed in the past few years as hijackers have taken advantage of the huge increase in wireless internet available and people who have not protected their networks. It is particularly alarming as hackers can use these networks to download pornographic material or illegal images, and only the legitimate owner of the wi-fi account is likely to be tracked down.
From a sociological perspective however, crime statistics can be viewed very differently according to the sociological viewpoint you are coming from. For example, interpretivists would blame the shortcomings of official statistics purely on the labelling theory – that is, that police target particular groups of society such as ethnic minorities and would point to statistics that show that the majority of convicted criminals in England and Wales, and the majority of people stopped for crimes are young, black males, who are stereotyped to be the typical criminal in some people’s eyes. On the other hand, a positivist approach to this subject would be that all early sociological theories of crime and deviance in society are based on the universal assumption that all crime statistics are accurate. This therefore challenges the traditional stereotype of believing what we see. Positivists only trust research that they have conducted through the logic of confirmation, otherwise known as verificationism, which means that a fact can only be believed when there is completely firm evidence supporting the fact. Working on this assumption, positivists therefore are very open minded, and read into statistics in a number of ways.