The three major reporting systems used by law enforcement agencies were the old Uniform Crime Report (UCR), the new redesigned UCR called the National Incident-Based Report System (NIBRS), and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) implemented the Uniform Crime Report in 1930; its purpose was to create a national system of uniform crime statistics. As time went by, the UCR was deemed too broad and overgeneralized so it was altered and improved upon to include specific details about each incidents on a city, county, state, and federal levels to become the NIBRS. The National Crime Victimization Survey was first conducted in 1972 using victim self-reports as an effort to uncover crimes that were …show more content…
1). The limitations of reporting were due to several reasons; Black (1970) and Skogan (1975) argued, “some offenses are never discovered and thus cannot be recorded as official statistics,” and citizens report fewer than half of the crimes they know about to the police as investigated by Maguire and Pastore (1995), and finally, some crimes “may not be included in the UCR because police may not officially record an incident as a crime” (As cited by Bryan & Desmond, 1998, Literature Review, para. 3-5). Methodological problems arose from how the UCR classify and tabulate crimes. The UCR “uses its own set of crime definitions, and these often differ in subtle ways from those contained in the state and/or local statutes of the agencies submitting data” (Bryan & Desmond, 1988, Literature Review, para. 7). The UCR also “records one offense per incident, as determined by the hierarchy rule, which suppresses counts of lesser offenses in multiple-offense incidents” and it “does not distinguish between attempted and completed crimes” (Schmalleger, 2017, p. 35). The only advantage the UCR currently has is its decades worth of crime statistics that are still being debated today as to whether or not it’s considered …show more content…
“The NCVS is designed to estimate the occurrence of all crimes, whether reported or not” (As cited Schmalleger, 2017, p. 54). The Bureau of Justice Statistics, through a cooperative arrangement with the U.S. Census Bureau, gathers data for the NCVS. The major weakness of this survey is that it relies on door-to-door surveys and personal interviews for its subjective data. However, it also led to the discovery that crimes were more prevalent than the UCR statistics indicated but it ultimately led to a more accurate representation of the overall crimes in the U.S. “Similarities appears [between the NBIRS and the NVCS] in the proportions of men and women involved as victims and offenders for robbery and assault” (Chilton & Jarvis, 1999, Abstract). Another similarity is how both the UCR and the NCVS employs a hierarchical counting system in which only the most “serious” incidents are counted. However, it is undeniable that some “significant differences exists between the UCR/NBIRS and the NCVS [which] lead to significant variation in the crime rates reported under both programs” (Schmalleger, 2017, p. 67). This proves that no matter how effective each programs are, there will always be problems in measuring