Sociologists use these statistics as a method of obtaining information concerning crime. They include the number of crimes recorded by police, the number of crimes solved, who was sent to prison, who commits a specific crime, and who the victims of crime are. Official crime statistics are generally a relatively cheap way of gaining information concerning crimes due to their easy accessibility.
One possibility, which must be faced, is that the concept of a ‘true’ total of the number of crimes committed has no useful meaning. Therefore, it is essential for sociologists to never take statistics at their face value, as the levels of recorded crime may differ dramatically from the true levels of criminal activities. One possibility, which may cause this, is social inequalities present in our society i.e. a systematic bias. From a variety of records, there is a clear trend that young working class men are over-represented in the figures particularly young black men. Women tend to also be treated in a highly gendered way in the criminal justice system. The chivalry thesis suggests that female offenders are treated more leniently than their males. Feminist theorists have suggested that women are treated base on ideas about their ‘proper’ behaviour.
However, white-collar crime and corporate crime are both under recorded and certainly do not fit the popular image of crime as a working class phenomenon. Official crime figures tend to represent the product of a long chain of social practices that entice together the social inequalities of class, gender, and race.
The official crime statistics only represent 43 Home Office Police forces so a number of important non-Home Office police forces producing a whole mass of figures are not included in the official series - including the British Transport police, the MOD and the UK Atomic Energy Authority. More significantly, is the range of tax and fraud benefit cases known to the Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise and the Department of Social Security are also excluded.
Criminal offences may be carefully defined in law, but they are also socially defined: whether people perceive a particular action or event as a crime, let alone whether they report it to anyone else (including the police, or a survey interviewer), can vary according their own knowledge, awareness or feelings about crime, which in turn may be influenced by the general public ‘mood’ or the preoccupations of politicians and the media.
Data from the British Crime Surveys are fast replacing the statistics generated by police crime records as the key ‘official’ source of statistics used in areas such as research and policy making. This comparable rival status has developed mainly through the doubling in the sample size of data being collected enabling survey data to be collected at the level of individual police force areas.
Recently, the Home Office have made proposals that will inevitably have long-term benefits. These proposals include the combining of data from a wider range of sources and more information being collected on other factors such as the locations of the offences enabling the production of a more practical picture of crime. However, the main improvement will be that ‘calls for service’ rather than ‘offences recorded by the police’ will act as the basic building blocks of official statistics.
To conclude, I believe it is important to understand that although many issues have been raised as to whether the crime statistics provide us with accurate data, we do not have to totally adopt the view, that the statistics tell us nothing about the levels of crime. If we ignore the assumption that the statistics are used without the consideration of all of the assumptions made, and approach them critically with a full understanding how data is constructed and for what purpose, they can tell us a great deal.
