Читать книгу Criminology For Dummies - Steven Briggs - Страница 55

In addition to the number of crime reports, the UCR also collects information on the number of arrests. For these statistics, the UCR looks at not only the Part 1 crimes I mention in the preceding section, but also 21 other crimes, including simple assault and driving under the influence of intoxicants.

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation

FIGURE 3-1: The U.S. violent crime rate has dropped fairly steadily since 1991.

Obviously, arrest statistics don’t give a full picture of crime. (Arrest doesn’t necessarily mean guilt, and no nationwide statistics show the percentage of arrested persons who are found guilty in state court.) Even so, arrest statistics do help evaluate police effectiveness by showing clearance rates — the percentage of reported crimes that end in arrests. Obviously, the higher the clearance rate, the more effective the police are at catching the bad guys.

Figure 3-2 shows the 2018 national clearance rates for various crimes.

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation

FIGURE 3-2: The clearance rates for various crimes in 2018.

You can see that police are much more likely to solve violent crimes than they are to solve property crimes, which is largely a result of the greater resources that police commit to solving violent crimes. Another important factor that leads to the increased clearance rate for violent crime is the fact that violent crimes often leave eyewitnesses who can help identify the perpetrators. In contrast, property crimes often happen in the absence of witnesses.

Arrest statistics provide another tool for evaluating crime rates: Tracking the number of arrests helps track certain trends for crimes that people usually don’t report, such as driving under the influence of intoxicants. Yet, tracking the number of arrests has its shortcomings. For instance, a decrease in the number of arrests for a certain crime may have alternative explanations, including these:

 Fewer people are committing the crime.

 Police are putting fewer resources into investigating the crime.

 Criminals have figured out ways to commit the crime without being caught.

A decrease in a certain crime can have some other explanations, too, so you can’t draw many conclusions from these arrest statistics alone. For example, from 2008 to 2018, reported property crime decreased by 26 percent in the United States. However, it is quite possible that as usage of the Internet has exploded in society, some criminals have stopped stealing purses or committing burglary and instead have gone online where the risk of arrest is very low. An enterprising thief can send emails to millions of targets and only one victim needs to respond for the thief to get his payday. And if you are like me, you don’t call the police every time a Nigerian Prince emails you with an offer to make you rich. (See Chapter 6 for a discussion of Internet fraud.)