Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Uniform Crime Reporting

There seems to be a definition and a code for every possible crime in this report. Criminal Justice Information  Services (CJIS) Division Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. . . User Manual.

“The FBI UCR Program is a nationwide, cooperative statistical effort of over 18,000 city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies (LEAs) voluntarily reporting data on offenses reported or known. Since 1930, the FBI has administered the UCR Program and continued to assess and monitor the nature and type of crime in the nation. The program’s primary objective is to generate reliable information for use in law enforcement administration, operation, and management. However, over the years, UCR data have become one of the country’s leading social indicators. Criminologists, sociologists, legislators, municipal planners, the media, and other students of criminal justice use the data for varied research and planning purposes.

The FBI UCR Program prepared this manual to assist LEAs in reporting crime statistics via the NIBRS. It addresses NIBRS policies, the types of offenses reported via the NIBRS, and guidelines for an agency to become certified to submit NIBRS data to the FBI.”

Example 2, Acting in Concert
A domestic argument escalated from a shouting match between a husband and wife to an aggravated assault during which the husband began beating his wife. The wife, in her own defense, shot and killed the husband. The responding officer submitted one incident report. The LEA should have reported this information via the NIBRS as two separate incidents because the husband could not have been acting in concert with the wife in his own killing. The LEA could have submitted one incident involving the Aggravated Assault perpetrated by the husband and the second incident involving the killing. This would have allowed the maintenance of the original incident number for record keeping purposes at the local level and simultaneously satisfied reporting requirements for the NIBRS.

Hate crime classifications are difficult:

Example 5
A 51-year-old black male wielding a tire iron attacked a 29-year-old Japanese-American male. The victim suffered severe lacerations and a broken arm. The incident took place in a parking lot next to a bar. Investigation revealed the offender and victim had previously exchanged racial insults in the bar; the offender initiated the exchange by calling the victim by a well-known epithet used against the Japanese and complained the Japanese were taking away jobs from Americans. The offense would be reported as 14 = Anti-Asian based on the difference in race of the victim and offender, the exchange of racial insults, and the absence of other reasons for the attack.

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