Official Statistics as a Methodological Resource - Essay Example

Running Head: Using Official Statistics as a Methodological Resource Using Official Statistics as a Methodological Resource Institution’s Name Abstract A new outline for UK National Statistics was introduced in June 2000. Main objectives are to improve the quality, relevance and significance of official statistics within government and the wider community, and to show that the statistics are produced to the best professional standards as well as minimising the burden on those whose supply the information on which they are based. The importance on quality presents crucial challenges to methodologists in developing methods and tools to deliver high quality statistics. The methodologists are also contributing to the development of measures and indicators of quality to establish whether statistical products and services meet the required standards and to evaluate the progress and effectiveness of new developments and quality improvements. This report delves into the significance of Research Methods in Criminology using official statistics as a methodological resource. Knowledge Research About Crime: A General Overview The fast development of electronic data storage in the last quarter of the twentieth century has caused what might be called a ‘data explosion’ in almost every area of public and private life. This is indeed true of crime and justice, most visibly in law enforcement, where the collection and use of information has always been ‘core business’ (see, for example, Ericson and Haggerty 1997). The most interesting aspect of this phenomenon is not just the volume of data being collected and amassed, however the broad range of aspects of the ‘crime problem’ that are now being vigilantly ‘measured’. A study of these provides a useful illustration of the two-way relationship between developments in the information field and changes in thinking about crime and justice. Yet, the more organized kinds of data directly inform policy-making and ‘seep through’ into the public consciousness through political debate and media reports, where they are used to support or counter claims based on more unreliable evidence. In the 1940s and 1950s, almost the only sources of significant and organized information about crime in England and Wales were the annually published Criminal Statistics, and the results of research by the small number of criminologists working in academic or clinical environments. Criminal Statistics, as now, presented national compilations of records produced at local level by the police and the courts: most significantly, the totals of notifiable offences recorded by the police, and of criminals found culpable of or warned for criminal offences. Research data were more varied; nevertheless most frequently were based upon meticulous records of the personal characteristics and social backgrounds of imprisoned criminals (see, for example, Bowlby 1944; 1953; Burt 1944). In the intervening years, the numbers of people engaged in data collection and research have expanded considerably. There has been a major growth in the research capacity of the Home Office, in addition to a fast expansion of criminology in universities: there are now about hundred lecturers and researchers working nationwide, and a thriving market for publications. A wide variety of new data sources have been created and exploited and many new fields of enquiry have been opened up, in many cases challenging the basic pictures of crime presented by the official statistics or studies of the characteristics of sentenced offenders. Among the most important new sources, obviously, are substantial electronic data sets, including the results of comprehensive victim surveys (notably the British Crime Survey BCS), national databases of offenders or offences, and a host of local record systems maintained by the police, criminal justice agencies, and other legal and voluntary organizations, many of which will ultimately be brought together for combined analysis in regional and national ‘data warehouses’ (Home Office 2000). Other large data sets many of them accessible for secondary analysis through the ESRC data archive at Essex University have been produced by major financed research projects, including longitudinal ‘cohort’ studies, local crime surveys, and self-report surveys. There have also been major advances in the investigative tools available, such as computer packages for multivariate analysis and statistical modelling (Hair et al 1998) and, more recently, in depth ‘mapping’ of the locations of offences and the identification of so-called ‘hot-spots’, using postcodes or map references (Read and Oldfield 1995; Longley et al 2001). Last but not least, there has been a detailed impulse of more qualitative research, using methods ranging from formal interviews to participant observation. In terms of the creation of new kinds of ‘knowledge’, the following are among the most significant events: 1. Unreported and unrecorded offences. Before the 1980s, very little data had been analytically collected in England and Wales on offences not reported to, or recorded by, the police. Nevertheless, in 1982, the Home Office performed the first British Crime Survey (BCS), a survey of households across England and Wales, which noticeably showed that only a minority of incidents that are recognized as ‘crimes’ by their ‘victims’ finish up in the official statistics (Hough and Mayhew 1983). The BCS has since been repeated many times and has become as important as if not more important than police-generated statistics for the analysis and presentation of patterns and developments in crime. It has also been supplemented by various local surveys and a periodic international crime survey (Van Kesteren et al 2000). Of late, too, other sources of methodical information about unreported crime, such as questions to assault victims attending Accident and Emergency departments, are being dynamically examined (Home Office 2000). 2. Circumstances of offences. Much more thorough information is now collected on, for example, where, when, and how offences take place, how far criminals travel to offend, and what kinds of loss or damage victims suffer. The spatial aspects of this kind of information have attracted particular attention, which has led to the development of a thriving new branch of the subject, usually referred to as ‘environmental criminology’. 3. Specificity and sub-classification. Following on from the previous comments, it is clear that, unlike in the 1950s, people no longer identify, analyze, and discuss types of crime in terms of a few broad legal categories. Instead, they tend to be sub-classified into a multitude of highly detailed forms of behaviour. For instance, it would be remarkable these days to find a study of ‘robbery’: writers or researchers are more likely to study a more particular problem such as ‘street robbery’, or even something as limited as the armed theft of mobile phones (Harrington and Mayhew 2001). 4. Hidden types of crime. Increasing types of ‘private’ criminal activity which once lay mainly hidden from public view and which remain even now significantly under-represented in recorded crime figures have not only become familiar subjects in programs and newspaper articles, however have been studied, described, and analyzed in regular fashion. Well-known among these are some intra-household offences, ‘white-collar’ and corporate offences, and crimes between consenting parties, none of which drew any continuous attention in the 1950s. 5. Hidden offenders. In the 1940s and 1950s, people who committed crime tended to be represented as a rather small and distinct category, considerably different from the ‘normal’ population: basically, the young, male, socially deprived, and often psychologically damaged perpetrators of offences such as burglary and petty theft, who make up much of the prison population. Nevertheless, it is now recognized that criminal behaviour is in no way limited to this group. Self-report studies have always shown that a majority of the population have committed criminal offences at some time in their lives; and study of the Offenders Index shows, for instance, that one-third of all males born in 1953 had got at least one criminal sentence for an indictable offence by the age of forty-six (Prime et al 2001). The Element of Labelling Theory Despite the fact that the ‘labelling’ and ‘deviancy’ theorists of the 1960s and early 1970s are not generally linked with what people have called the ‘data explosion’ in fact, the latter were largely responsible for a period in British criminology when the climate in the discipline was usually anti-statistical they certainly played an important part in turning criminologists away from traditional statistics towards new and innovative approaches to the collection and perception of crime data. The ‘deviancy’ theorists (e.g., Rock 1973; Cohen 1974) and their more major successors built upon such ideas to start a broad turn in the application of inquiry of explanation, away from ‘the pathology of the criminal’ towards ‘the social construction of crime’ the social and political processes that establish which specific activities and people become defined as ‘crimes’ or ‘criminals’. This required looking on the one hand at the character and scope of criminal law and the processes shaping it, and on the other at the customary social interactions which ‘create’ crime day by day. In this framework, police and court records are considered not as the product of a neutral fact-collecting process, however of one geared primarily to organizational aims and needs. Consequently they do not reflect the ‘reality’ of crime: they are part of its creation. In fact, the figures may tell more about the organization which produced them than about the actions they are used to describe. This line of argument led some writers to presume that there was no point in analysing crime figures for the purpose of finding out anything about the extent of any kind of criminal behaviour––if, in reality, it made any sense to speak of ‘real’ crime rates at all. For them, crime rates were just ‘indices of organisational processes’ (Kitsuse and Cicourel 1963) or ‘an aspect of social organisation’ (Black 1970), worthy crime statistics of study only to help one understand the agency producing them. This ‘institutionalist’, as opposed to ‘realist’, approach was generally the starting position adopted by Bottomley and Coleman (1981) in a major experimental study of crime-recording processes in police stations which showed the significance of police practices and attitudes in shaping the official statistics even though victims were also found to have a major impact. Notwithstanding the fact that the growing uncertainty about the value of information from official sources led many criminologists away from these kinds of data, it had the corresponding effect of raising awareness of the rich potential of alternative sources of knowledge about crime, particularly qualitative research, but also victim surveys, criminal self-report studies, and data from agencies other than the police. Notably, too, studies began to appear of earlier neglected and mostly hidden areas of ‘deviant’ and/or ‘criminal’ activity, such as drugtaking, workplace ‘fiddles’, corporate crime, domestic violence (examples being, respectively, Young 1971; Ditton 1977; Levi 1981; Dobash and Dobash 1979). In the 1980s, when focus began to shift again, this time towards victims and situational crime prevention, this habit of looking beyond the official statistics towards other sources of information about the context of crimes and the interactions between criminals and victims, proved well suited to the new data demands. Advantages & Disadvantages of Using official statistics Criminal Statistics England and Wales, the annual Home Office compilation of data derived from police and court records, dates back to 1876. In spite of the warnings of criminologists and government statisticians equally, these statistics are still treated by many politicians and journalists as a correct ‘barometer’ of crime and any large rise in the figures they produce tends to receive extensive publicity and spark off arguments about police or government incompetence or the need for sentencing changes. The figures are also used much at a local level to inform the distribution of police resources and, increasingly, the preparation of crime ‘audits’ and crime reduction plans, and the measurement of police and crime reduction partnerships’ ‘performance’ in comparison with targets and with other areas. Though other sources not least police ‘incident logs’, records from other agencies, and the expanded BCS are developing fast, it will be some time before the basic crime statistics are knocked off their perch as the central factor of these exercises. Some brief initial comments about the limitations of police-generated crime statistics and some of the main difficulties they pose for analysis and the drawing of conclusions. Firstly, decisions as to which kinds of offence to include or not to include in the official statistics, and what counting rules to apply, can make a big difference to the published totals and consequently to the impressions given to the public about the levels of crime in society. Nevertheless, the problems of police crime statistics are in no way limited to questions about official rules. Not only do the figures not include offences known to the public which fail to come to police notice, although the police have always possessed much of discretion about whether and how to record possible offences which do come to their notice. Reports from the public which are the source of over 80 per cent of all recorded crimes (McCabe and Sutcliffe 1978; Bottomley and Coleman 1981) may be questioned, or considered too unimportant, or considered not to represent a criminal offence, with the result that they are either not recorded at all, or are officially ‘no crimed’ later. They may also be excluded for less defensible reasons, such as to avoid work or to improve the overall clear-up rate (Bottomley and Coleman 1981). The most recent official figures available at the time of writing (Home Office 2001) point out that the total number of ‘notifiable offences’ recorded by the police in England and Wales in the financial year 2000/2001 was just under 5.2 million. Though this is the global figure referred to in most public discussions about the extent of crime, it has to be stressed that, even as a record of criminal offences officially known to the authorities, it is anything but complete. Notifiable offences are mostly, though not fully, co-terminous with ‘indictable’ offences, i.e. those which may be tried in a Crown Court (Home Office 2001: 244). This means that a large number of summary offences do not appear in the figures. No records are kept of the totals of such offences, even though statistics are available on the numbers of people officially sanctioned for them. For instance, in 2000, well over a million people were sentenced or officially warned for summary offences: a total, it is worth noting, over double that of people sentenced or warned for indictable offences. Besides, the ‘official crime figures’ do not include many of the offences recorded by police forces for which the Home Office is not responsible, particularly most of those recorded by the British Transport Police, Ministry of Defence Police, and UK Atomic Energy Authority Police, who between them record about 80,000 notifiable offences annually. Neither, more notably in terms of numbers, do they include several cases of tax and benefit fraud known to agencies such as the Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise, and the Benefits Agency, which have exploratory and prosecutional functions but which take in hand the vast majority of cases by using their administrative powers to impose financial penalties (Levi 1993). Yet again, such agencies keep internal records of the numbers of people dealt with in these ways, or of the total amounts of revenue saved, however not of the total numbers of ‘offences’ coming to their notice a task which, given that a single criminal may repeat the same kinds of fraud many times over a period, would require multifaceted counting rules. It might be argued that, for practical purposes, it is absolutely adequate to determine the size and shape of ‘the crime problem’ by means of the notifiable offences recorded by the police, on the grounds that these include the most serious crimes, for which the vast majority of prison sentences are passed. Nevertheless, they also include large numbers of events which it is difficult to claim are any more serious than some of the offences dealt with administratively. For instance, among the largest categories of notifiable offences, together making up around two-fifths of the total recorded, are theft from a vehicle, criminal damage, and theft from shops: most cases in these categories involve relatively small amounts of loss or damage. Together, many of the uncounted and unprosecuted tax and benefit frauds involve considerable sums of money. There are also some quite critical summary offences which are still not counted for instance, driving after consuming alcohol or drugs notwithstanding a major effort to clear up such anomalies in 1998. Considerations about the logic of the notification rules and the gravity or otherwise of particular kinds of offence have sometimes led the Home Office to change its instructions about what to include in the official crime totals. For instance, before 1977, offences of criminal damage of £20 or less which were not indictable were not counted, however since that date they have been defined as notifiable and included. This decision immediately raised the ‘total volume of crime’ by about 7 per cent. In1998, too, apparently for the purpose of producing a more ‘truthful’ picture of the more serious kinds of crime, a number of quite common summary offences were added to the published totals of notifiable offences, again increasing the overall totals and making comparisons with previous years more difficult. The most important of these numerically were common assault and assault on a constable, which between them considerably increased the numbers of recorded offences of ‘violence against the person’. This has created the impression among those ignorant of the technical issues, of a major ‘rise in violent crime’––interestingly, during a period when the BCS indicates that incidents of violence have seen a important and sustained fall (Kershaw et al 2001: 30). Besides the issue of which categories of offence are included, there are important questions to ask about how individual crimes are counted. Some kinds of offence tend to be repeated many times within a short period, as much as, though there may be several separate actions or people involved, they could be considered to form part of one, concerted criminal incident. Conclusions The ambiguities of Research Methods in Criminology using official statistics as a methodological resource are clearly evident as seen in the report. It is because the anecdotal evidence is found in the reporting of criminal events. There is therefore a need for more analytical research based on new technologies which give better reporting of the events thus providing reliable data. References Black, DJ 1970, ‘The Production of Crime Rates’, American Sociological Review, 35, 4:733–48. Bottomley & Coleman, CA 1981, Understanding Crime Rates, Farnborough: Saxon House. Bowlby, J 1944, ‘Forty-four juvenile thieves’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 25: 1–57. Bowlby, J 1953, Childcare and the Growth of Love, Harmondsworth: Penguin. 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