Outline and assess the usefulness of official statistics in measuring crime and deviance

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‘Outline and assess the usefulness of official statistics in measuring crime and deviance’.

The term deviance cover a wide range of behaviour which digresses from the norms and values of society; but an act doesn’t have to break the law for it to be labelled as deviant. Whereas a crime is an act of behaviour or action that break the laws of a society; and covers all activities from trivial to serious. There are many methods for the measuring and collection of data on crime and deviance level within the British Society. The main one is Official Crime Statistics (OCS) - these government statistics that cover a wide range of topics. There are two major soruces of which official statistics are based on; these are crimes recorded by the police (which form the majority of the Statistics) and statistics about those who have been convicted of offences. The basic process for the collection of official statistics is: witness (es) discover(s) a crime, witness reports the crime, the crime is recorded by the police and OCS are collated.

There are several purposes for the use of OCS, these are: to establish the volume of crime over a certain period of time; find trends and patterns in the crime statistics, give and to provided characteristics on people who are most likely to commit crime according to age, gender, social class and ethnicity. In addition once combined with statistics formed from court records and the police cautioning records (to create an official picture of those responsible of criminal offences- “criminal”) together a picture of the “crime problem” is made, which can then be used/ interpreted by politicians and transmitted to us by the media.

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Yet even though the purpose of OCS is the main benefit of this type of crime measurement, there are still quite a few advantages that can be gained from the use of official statistics. Collecting official statistics on crime and deviance is cheap and they are readily available; due to the Home Office publishing they annually and they can be downloaded by anyone with internet access. An additional pro of using official statistics is that they are high in reliability and validity. As they have the ability to go back and check the findings of the data means that there ...

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