The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program was instituted in the year 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police in order to help in providing an accurately reliable uniform statistics in the United States of America(USA) (Greenwood, P.W., 1999).
However, In 1930, the FBI was given the mandate to gather, publish, and store the same statistics. currently, various annual statistical publications, like Crime in the United States(CIUS), are got from the data provided by almost16,000 judicial agencies in USA. (Hsiao, C., 2004).
It is published annually by the FBI to give an information on the rate of criminal offences for the individual agencies, sates and the entire nation. In doing this, it goes ahead to give further information on the arrest and Clarence of the suspected criminals.
In my analysis, I would like to pick on cases like drug trafficking, robbery with violence, sexual harassment and theft cases that were reported in Minnesota, New York, Maryland and Arizona. This will be retrieved from an extensive data with detailed statistics taken from 1960s. however, my data will only report on the cases reported between 2002 up to 2006 as shown in the following table:
MINNESOTA NEW YORK MARYLAND ARIZONA
According to this statistics, it appears that the rate at which criminal cases were reported is not constant. It varies depending on the place and the time at whi9ch they were reported.
Precisely, it comes out very clearly that it is Arizona that recorded the highest criminal cases in the base year of 2002 followed by New York, Maryland and Minnesota in that order. This trend continued for the next three years until 2006 when it was overtaken by Minnesota which reported the highest rates at 46.
However, this rate remained changing in all the other areas with many of them recording a dramatic decrease in the rate of criminal activities. This implied that a good work was done by the law enforcement agencies to curb crime possibly in the whole nation.
In deed, the rate of criminal activities reported in these areas were not constant. According to my observation, they kept on changing after every now and then. This means that the rate of criminal activities reported in each and every area directly depends on the rate at which it is performed.
Even if they were varying depending on an area, it is important to note that this kind of change was not uniform in all the areas. For instance, while the rate of drug peddling cases might be considered reduced in an area, it could be recorded to have substantially increased in another metropole under the same analysis (Endes, W.,1997).
Reasons
In my well thought opinion, I would like to suggest that the rate at which criminal cases are reported varies a lot and greatly depends on very many factors. It is true, as David Duffee et al.(,2000) assert that the rate of criminal activities heavily changes with the changing time and space.
People’s criminal acts changes with the changes in time. This means that one act of offence may be performed at given times of the year. In other words, there are criminal cases rampant during certain periods in the year. Such seasonal cases may be unheard of completely at certain times. For example, according to my observation, nearly in all the metropoles, the rate of petty offences like burglary, theft and robbery without violence were common during the December particularly at the eve of Christmas celebrations (Deffee, D.E., 2005).
I think, this is because, it is a time when people are fully engulfed in the celebration moods and may forget to create enough time to put their security primary to any other thing.
Besides, I can strongly attribute this changing trend to the psychology of the masses. Individuals may decide to do an offensive act depending on how it is perceived in the general society. In other words, it may appear that if a case is seriously punished, especially under a newly instituted clause of the law, people will develop a phobia to the extent that they may fail to do such an offence. If this is practiced for quite some time, they may totally refrain from such a behavior to the extent that such an offence fully fades away from the memories of the people. This is definitely why some cases reduce up to zero level.
Finally, I think that the rate at which these cases are recorded is closely associated with the way in which they are reported to the investigative authorities (Diggle, P. et al, 2003). Many cases may be reported if justice is expected to be done to all the sides involved in the offence and people are empowered to collaborate with the bureau through community policing. Otherwise, if the volunteers and the suspects themselves fear victimization, nobody will be ready to submit any report to the bureau for investigations. In this case, it means that the rate of cases will drastically reduce.
References
Diggle, P. et al(2003) Analysis of Longitudinal Data. New York: Oxford University Press.
Deffee, D.E.(2005)Executive Summary: New York State Probation Outcomes Project Phase One. New York State Division for Probation and Correctional Alternatives.
Endes, W.(1997) Applied Econometric Time Series. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Greenwood, P.W.(1999)The Criminal Investigation Process. Massachusetts: Lexington Books.
Hsiao,C.(2004)Analysis of Panel Data. New York: Cambridge University Press.
