Others would argue that other measures of crime such as victimisation surveys are more useful than official statistics. The 2000 British Crime Survey (BCS) is England’s best known victimisation survey, had a nationally representative sample of 19,411 people aged 16 and above as well as a further ethnic booster sample of 3,874, the results play an important role in informing Home Office Policy. The sample was selected from the postcode address file, and a 74% return rate was achieved then random postcodes were selected for interviews. This survey found that between 1999 and 2000 burgalry fell by 17% violence also fell by 19% in this time. The proportion of people who were victims of some sort of crime in 2000 fell from 30% to 27%, this was the lowest overall victimisation rate ever recorded in the BCS. However, there were some problems with this as the survey is based on households and not everyone is a householder. Many crimes such as corporate crime and victimless crimes are excluded and crimes against under 16 year olds are also excluded. Despite victim surveys being anonymous it seems that people it seems that people still seem to under-report sexual offences, and also basing statistics on victims memories can be biased. There are also problems of accuracy as the BCS often chooses the sample used, also as the participants are given a computer to key in offences committed against them the BCS can get away with not putting official or legal categories into the computer, further effecting the validity of ant crime statistics. Figures like these do not appear in official statistics so its validity could be questioned.
The police play a large part in official statistics as it is left to them to decide what is considered to be or not to be a crime; only 40 % of crime that is reported to the police is actually recorded. Many police departments want their area to look like its crime statistics are under the nation’s average. There are many ways for them to do this one of which is ‘cuffing’ this is where a current prisoner will be asked to admit to crimes he/she did not commit, they will not be prosecuted for this. Another is downgrading crimes so that they do not fit in to a crime category, for example by changing reported stolen goods to lost property the crime statistics for the area will stay down. In a court a person may plead guilty to a lesser crime than they have actually committed this is called plea-bargaining. If someone had murdered someone they could plead guilty to manslaughter and gain a lesser sentence this largely affects crime statistics as 80% of offenders plead guilty.
There is no guarantee that once reported, an offence won’t necessarily find its way into the official statistics. Or that the recorded crime will correspond to that originally reported or detected perhaps due to ‘cuffing’. Changes in police management can also lead to slips between reporting and recording, clear up rates and other new systems introduced recently mean that the police pay is now determined partly by performance.
The media amplify deviance and create moral panics for example; if in a certain area a certain crime was bad then the media could pick up on it. And amplify it leading to a moral panic. In such a case police may concentrate on the specific area leading to the crime rate going down. It is said that the media can also create crime e.g. copy cat crime may result from media publicity like the riots of 1981. Stan Cohen found that the media created the mods and rockers in the 1960’s.
In 1996 Reiner said that between wars the level of crime remained relatively constant, recorded crime had increased rapidly since the 1950’s and that the 1994 and 1995 crime statistics illustrate a 6% fall in recorded crime. However this data is very dated and it is highly unlikely that it is still correct. The general view is that they reveal more about the process of reporting and recording than about the extent of criminal activity. This questions the reliability of it as it is not doing what it is meant to do. It is also suggested that the dark figure of crime seriously flaws crime statistics affecting their validity. Only about 30% of crime is solved therefore we cannot tell to what extent convicted criminals resemble un-convicted ones.
Offences are cleared up by either primary means or secondary means which can be unreliable as secondary means involve a prisoner admitting to a crime which due to cuffing they may not have done. New counting rules saw the clear up rates for England and Wales go down from 38% in 1981 to 29% in 1998-99. Crime statistics in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland can’t be directly compared as the legal systems differ. Also the counting rules differ as in Scotland each individual offence occurring within an incident is recorded whereas in the other countries only the main offence is counted.
Institutionalists reject the objectivity of official figures and attempt to show how they are neither valid nor reliable. They say that statistics do not show the real picture as most crime is out of sight out of mind. However, Realists would argue that the figures are objective indicators of the social phenomenon they are supposed to reflect, they deny that the problems arising are a result of power but are instead the product of technical incompetence.
Marxists believe that law and its enforcement reflects the interests of the ruling class. The crimes of the poor are strictly enforced and the immoral activities of the rich are either ignored or not defined as criminal, statistics well reflect these inequalities and scapegoating.
