Justify a criminal investigation.
Crime that is not reported or unrecorded compiles the hidden figure of crime.
The largest victim survey in Britain is the British Crime Survey. I am going to compare the official crime statistics with the British crime survey statistics. I am then going to compare the official statistics in my area with the national average. This will help me understand how my area compares to the rest of Britain. I have found the results from the British crime survey and official crime statistics of my area, north Somerset.
I researched the national average crime rate compared to my area, north Somerset. These figures show that the average for most crimes is lower in my area than the national average, however there are slightly more sexual offences in my area than there are England as a whole. When comparing my results from my victim survey to official British statistics I will need to keep this in mind in order to not be biased and fairly carry out my investigation.
I have the official crime statistics for north Somerset, this shows the number of crimes recorded by police since April 2005, also the British crime survey results from the south west, however I could not find the number of crimes recorded by police in the south west, this may be because the police do not record there results in the same regions. However many websites gave the suggestion that the results from the British crime survey are more reliable than those recorded by police, this suggests that crime statistics nationally do not reflect the real crime rate; I need to find if this is true in my area.
Methodology
In order to carry out this investigation I will need to find out the real crime rate in my area, there are a number of ways in which I could do this, the two used by most sociologists are self report studies and victim surveys, I believe that people would be more likely to admit being a victim of crime than they are to actually committing one, for this reason I have chosen to do a victim survey as this will make my results more reliable. I will need to do victim surveys on at least 50 people in my community in order have a large enough proportion of the population within my area and get a fair distribution of age, class etc. I could carry out a victim survey in one of two ways, questionnaires sent to people in my area or interviews with people in my area. The advantages of using questionnaires are that they are cheap, will not take up to much time, questions that are perhaps embarrassing are more likely to be answered than if the are asked by an interviewer and the problem of interviewer bias is avoided. The limitations of using questionnaires is that they are non responsive, leading to unrepresentative biased results, extra questions cannot be asked to get the respondent to explain themselves more thoroughly, the wording may be confusing and there is no interviewer to explain what something means. The strengths of interviews as apposed to questionnaires are, skilled interviewers can persuade people to answer questions, there is more flexibility than with postal questionnaires, unstructured interviews enable the ideas of the sociologist to develop during the interview, unstructured interviews allow the respondent to be more open and honest. I have decided that it would be more effective for me to use questionnaires as this would be far quicker for me to do and allow the respondent to be more open with their answers.
I need to decide what types of questions to ask within my questionnaire
Questions may be
- Closed- the range of possible answers is fixed
- Open ended- the respondent can answer however they like
- Multiple choice
- Scaled
It is hard to choose which type of questions to use in my questionnaire as, closed multiple choice or scaled questions can produce statistical data but limit the answers the respondent can give. Open ended questions enable the respondent to express their opinion but produce data that is difficult to express statistically.
I have decided to mainly use closed questions as these are easy to compare with existing statistics as these produce statistical information. However in order to have a deeper understanding of the why official statistics vary from the actual crime it is important for me to use some open ended questions in order for the respondent to give their opinion on this matter.
In my questionnaire I aim to ask if the respondent has been a victim of crime and if they reported it also if they did not report it why not, I will also give them a chance to give there opinion on why they think not all crimes are reported and what could be done to increase reported crime. I am going to avoid asking them which type of crime they were a victim of as this may be personal and stop them from filling in the questionnaire.
In order to make sure that my questionnaire is easily understood and asks the right questions am going to carry out a pilot study. A pilot study is the study at a much smaller scale done before the real study to make sure that the right questions are asked and that the respondent finds reading the questions easy and that they are simple to answer, doing a pilot study saves having to do the whole study again if something is wrong with my questionnaires. I am going to hand out five pilot questionnaires randomly to people I know and I will ask them if there are any problems with my questionnaires if so I will change them.
Having handed out five pilot questionnaires the people that have filled them in have all said that there were no problems with my questionnaires and so I will use these to hand out to people in my area.
I must choose a way to hand out my questionnaires that is fair and reasonably quick. I must try to have a varied age group and class within the population of my respondents. I have decided to do this by handing out ten questionnaires to different parts of my area, these different parts will have different types of houses varying in value and size, and this should make my results more varied as I will not give my questionnaires to one area with the same types of houses or people living there. I am going to hand out my questionnaires door to door and then ask people to fill them out and then go back and collect them in a week, this will hopefully encourage people to fill them out as they will have to do it on the spot and will have a week in which to do it in.
I am also going to try to interview a local police officer about there views on the difference between the actual crime rate and the official crime statistics. I will try and ask the police officer questions that correspond with my questionnaire in order for me to compare results.
Interview plan.
- Is there much failure to report crime in Backwell?
- Why do you think the main reason for this is?
- Are there many crimes reported but unrecorded?
- Do self report studies and victim surveys allow you to calculate more statistics in Backwell?
- Why do you think many crimes go unreported?
- Do you think the crime statistics in Backwell reflect the actual crime rate?
Discussion
I have now collected in all of my questionnaires and studied my results very carefully, this leads me to being able to draw conclusions from my results. My results show me that most of the people that filled out my questionnaires were in-between the ages of 51 and 60, although the amount of people in the groups between 21-50 have very similar numbers and so I believe that I have managed to make my results fair by spreading out the age of my respondents well. The majority were men although again there is not a huge difference between the numbers taken from both genders.
When asked if they had ever been a victim of crime, the majority of people said yes and the majority of these people did not report this crime, this supports my hypothesis that ‘crime statistics in my area do not support the actual crime rate’ as this would mean that many committed crimes would not be recorded within the statistics.
I wanted to find out through my studies why the majority of crimes went unreported, and so a question was why did you not report the crime, the respondent was given five different options and a box to write any comments. Of those asked 5 believed the matter to trivial, this is suggested by many social scientists as a huge reason for the gap in the statistics of petty crime, this may be an indication that more should be done to encourage victims to report crime. In the space made available, some people commented that they thought police would think they were wasting police time reporting petty crime. Some thought this because they had been deterred by passed experience and thought that it was who were to blame for much crime going unreported; this supports my hypothesis that ‘most think police could do more to increase reported crime’. 5 people answered that they did not report the crime because they were afraid of reprisals, Many elderly people answered this as they feel they are the most vulnerable. In the comment box some wrote that they ‘did not feel safe to do anything about what had happened as this may encourage people to do it again’. This is also considered a main reason for many people not reporting crime. 4 people replied that they did not think the police could do anything. In some circumstances, it is very hard for the police to catch criminals. Some people that ticked this box commented that more should be done to prevent crime. Some may have lost their faith in the police because of them not preventing the crime from happening and so not report it for this reason.3 people answered that they did not think the police would treat the matter sensitively. A feeling that the police ‘treated the victims like criminals’ was felt among some of these respondents.
When asked if they thought there was anything that police could do to increase reported crime a lot of people did not answer , however more said yes than no.
The official statistics that I have say that there were 35 crimes committed in north somerset per 1000 people. Out of the 50 people that I asked 23 answered that they had been a victim of crime. I asked 50 people that is 1 20th or 5% of the 1000, therefore only 2 people (rounded up from 1.75) should have been a victim of crime, this shows a huge gap between the official statistics and the crime real crime rate that my questionnaires have shown.
At the beginning of my investigation I had 4 hypotheses, these were;
- The official crime statistics in my area do not reflect the actual crime rate (Most crime in my area goes unreported.)
- The majority of crime in my area is petty crime
- Crime statistics in my area will be lower than the national average
- The majority of people will believe that the police could do more to increase reported crime.
When asked in my questionnaire if they had reported the crime that they had been a victim of only 6 out of 23 said yes, that means that there are at least 17 unreported crimes in my area, this means that from my study I have learnt that most crime in my area goes unreported, this proves my first hypothesis. I thought that this would be true because I do not think that people report all the crimes that they commit, especially petty crime and so there must be a gap between the official crime statistics and the real crime rate.
My second hypothesis is that ‘the majority of crime in my area is petty’. When asked if the crime that they had been a victim of was petty 17 out of 24 said yes. This shows that from my study I can say that the majority of crime in my area is petty. I accept my second hypotheses to be right. I think that the majority of crime in my area is petty because my area is a rural one, which lowers the chances of serious crime taking place.
In official crime statistics the crime in my area is lower than the national average. However I can not compare the national average for crime to my found results and so cannot say the actual crime rate, therefore it may simply be that less crime in my area is reported than in other areas of England, therefore I cannot accept my second hypotheses to be true.
My fourth hypothesis was that ‘most people will feel that the police could do more to increase reported crime’. The amount of people in my study that commented on their lack of faith in the police was rather shocking. When asked if they thought police could do more to increase reported 18 out of the 25 that answered said yes. In the space provided many said that they believed ploice to be ‘arrogant’ and that when reporting crime they felt as though ‘they were the criminals’ because of the wayu the police treated them. My study has lead me to the conclusion that the police are quite heavily to blame for the difference between the real crime rate and official crime statistics. I think this because many people said that the reason for not reporting crime had something to do with the police.
Evaluation
I wanted to have an interview with a policeman so that I could compare what the public thought and what a police officer thought and also to get his opinion on why there may be a gap between official crime statistics and the actual crime rate. I rang my local police station many times before being put forward to the person on charge of my area, they then arranged an interview with me, however when I went they did not turn up. I was told that I would then be rang to arrange another interview, however this never happened and I simply ran out of time and so I did not the chance to interview a policeman. If I had the chance again, I would have been more persistent in my telephone calls and written a letter to the police station. The biggest limitation of my study was time, I should have arranged the interview earlier and so had more time to deal with problems.
I regret that I did not ask the types of crime that people were a victim of, as this would have made it easier for me to compare statistics. Although I did not ask this on purpose, as I thought it might offend some people as they may believe this to be a very personal matter.
I do believe that I chose the best method of going about my investigation as It gave the public a chance to express their opinion which I think is very important in understanding why crimes are not reported. If I have chosen another method for example a content analysis of a local newspaper to compare crime stories with a national newspaper. I would not have been able to have opinions of the public. I do not think that this method would have been very accurate as I could not distinguish between reported and unreported crimes in my area.
The advantages of doing a victim survey to a self report study or content analysis are that I now have a clear idea of how many crimes in my area go unreported in my area, this may have been hard to do using a content analysis. I also think that a clear advantage of a victim survey over a self report study is that people are more likely to admitting to being a victim of crime than they are to committing a crime.
I think that my coursework was slightly biased against the police as many questions involved people giving there opinion on whether they thought the police could do more to increase reported crime, this may have encouraged some people to wright negative comments about the police. In addition, because I did not mange to get an interview with a police officer (despite trying), this meant that the police did not get their chance to express their opinion. If I had interviewed a police officer my conclusion on their involvement in the difference between the actual crime rate and the official statistics might have been different.
I believe that my results show very clearly that there is a huge difference between the official crime statistics and the actual crime rate. I think that if shown my results most of society would be very shocked by them. I do think that many people would blame police for this difference, however I am not sure if this blame would be fair. I think that if police read my results they may be encouraged to be more sensitive towards victims of crime in order to get rid of the label that has been created of their attitudes towards victims. However, police may resent the public for their comments.