Читать книгу Criminology For Dummies - Steven Briggs - Страница 58

Analyzing crime stats isn’t just an intellectual exercise. Criminologists don’t stand around sipping glasses of Chateau Margaux with their pinky fingers extended, saying (in their best British accents), “Reginald, tell us your theory about why child homicides have risen.” Analyzing crime stats is too important to be a parlor game.

Rather, U.S. citizens ask — and deserve informed answers to — questions such as how can we do a better job protecting ourselves and our neighbors, how can we improve services for victims, and how can we prevent kids from choosing a life of crime? Crime stats help law enforcement agencies deal with these questions by helping them correct mistaken approaches and point the way to improvement.

The U.S. Congress, along with every state legislature, faces the challenge of not having enough resources to tackle all of society’s challenges. As a result, Congressional representatives must look for information to help them decide how best to spend tax dollars, and often they turn to statistics for help. If statistics show that a particular program is successful, a legislature is more likely to fund that program in the future. Conversely, a lack of evidence to support a particular program’s success more or less dooms it to termination.

Unfortunately, policymakers often use statistics without sufficiently understanding their limitations. Like guns, statistics in the hands of untrained users can be dangerous. All too frequently, statistics can be subject to enough differing interpretations that they end up being of little value. I’ve seen policymakers spend more time arguing over the value of a set of statistics than the actual merits of the program they’re trying to justify.

The wisest course for policymakers to follow is to take advantage of all relevant sources of information, including crime stats, arrest stats, and surveys. I once attended a meeting to discuss drug trends in my home state. Although some people wanted to rely just on arrest stats, the group eventually agreed to gather information from each of these sources:

 Arrest stats

 A youth drug and alcohol survey

 Amounts of drugs seized by police drug task forces

 Studies of drug residue amounts in a city’s sewage system (which is an increasingly valuable tool for measuring drug use)

 A survey of drug cops

Through careful analysis of the information from these five sources, policymakers may be able to establish an accurate picture of illegal drug use. However, this approach takes much more work than simply relying on arrest stats.