Class 3:

Crime Statistics and

Researching Crime
 When researching crime, what
should we research?
• How much crime there is? Is it increasing or decreasing?
– Trends
• Who are offenders, victims? What are their characteristics?
• When and how does crime happen?
– Crime itself
• Why it happens?
– Criminality

• We need different methodologies to study different questions

• Common theme – study of crime is hard
– Why?
 Example: Rat experiment 1977 by
Bruce Alexander, Simon Fraser
University
• What did it study?
• What was the presumption that
the research was based on?
• If a drug is addictive, then if you take it for
a while you will get addicted.
• Findings:
• What causes addiction is not heroin itself
• Importance of environment
• Policy implication?
 Understanding trends
• Must be able to count crime, i.e. have
crime statistics
• Two views on statistics:
– Realist view
– Constructivist view
 Realist view on statistics
• Official records are good indicators of level
of crime
• Improving methodology will get us closer
to “actual” levels of crime
Constructivist view on statistics
• Official records tell us about what
agencies do, not what crime trends are
• Statistics collected by Government
agencies:
– Are administrative rather than direct measure;
– Measure administrative processes, rather
than crime.
 Should we even bother?
• Lets see what we know?
– Is there more and more crime, or less
and less crime?
– Which crimes are widespread?
– Compared to other countries, is Turkey
more or less violent?
– What do you base your answers on?
 Nature of crime statistics
• What metric (measure) should we use to
measure how much crime there is?
• Counts
– Number of offences (in time/area)
• Frequencies
– How counts are distributed among people
– i.e. how many victims, how many offenders
• Rates
– Combination of two
• Number of crimes per population
 What is “crime rate”?
• Crime Rate
– Index of crime occurring in defined area,
within defined amount of time.
– Key concepts that allow comparison:
• Index
• Defined area
• Defined time
 Comparisons
• Index:
– Number of crime per 100.000 persons, or
similar
• Area:
– Country, city, geographical area, region, etc.
• Time
– Year, 5 years, month, etc.
 How to do comparisons?
• Can you compare Albania 2010 Homicide
rate and Turkey 2018 homicide rate?
– No because 2 determinants are different (year
and area). Only one can be different for
proper comparison:
• You can compare Turkey 2010 with Turkey 2018
• You can Compare Albania 2010 and Turkey 2010
 Sources of crime data
• Official statistics
– Law enforcement statistics
– Administrative statistics
• Surveys
– Victimization and offending surveys
 Law enforcement statistics
• Law enforcement = ?
• What data on crime do they have?

Reported crime >

Recorded crime >
Solved crime
 Those who go to
prison
“The Dark Figure”
Crimes that went through trial

Crimes where offender was

identified / arrested

Crimes known to police

All crimes commited

 Law enforcement statistics

Reported crime >

Recorded crime >
Solved crime
Unreported crime (dark figure)
Unrecorded crime (grey figure)
Unsolved crime (cold figure)
 So the problem is....
• We don’t know how much of actual crime
police statistics include
• Are all crimes equally “underrepresented”
in official statistics?
– OR
Which types of crimes are less likely to be
reported?

© 2010, Galma Jahic,

ALL RIGHTS
Reporting rates in Istanbul 2005

Corruption

Fraud

Attempted burglary

Assault

Theft

Theft from car

Robbery

Burglary

Car theft

0 20 40 60 80 100

%
Why some crimes are unrecorded even
though they are reported?
• Police unconvinced that crime has
occurred.
• Little chance of solving the crime (don’t
want cold cases on their books)
• Victim not wiling to file official complaint
• Victim withdraw the complaint
• Not policy priority
• Inconvenience
 Limitations of police data
• Incomplete
• Not rich
• Not collected for research purposes
 Police crime data in Turkey
• Did you find any?
• None reported
• Last reported in 2013
 How can we find out what
“the dark figure” is?
• Go to the source: Surveys (self-reporting
research)
• These are surveys of:
– Private individuals
– or organisations (businesses and government
organisations)
• Hope is to identify:
– Victims
– Offenders
© 2010, Galma Jahic,
ALL RIGHTS
 Victimization surveys
• Widespread use
• Benefits:
– Ability to identify unreported crime
– Allows for audit (control) of police data
– Can include other questions (such as fear of
crime)

• Limitations:
– Cannot be used for all crimes – Which?
– Hard to do – Rarity of crime; Clustering
– Under/overreporting – Why?
– Telescoping
– Series victimization
 Victimization statistics
• Allow calculation of victimization rates:
– Incidence rate: How widespread is crime
• Crime / population (C/P)
– Prevalence rate: How widespread is
victimization
• Victims / population (V/P)
– Concentration rate: How localized is
victimization (repeat (multiple) victimization)
• Crimes / Victims (C/V)
• Incidence = Prevalence * Concentration
• C/P = V/P * C/V
C VC
------- = --------
P PV
• So to reduce incidence (crime) reduce:
A. either prevalence (number of victims)
B. or concentration (repeat victimization)

Which one is easier?

 Victimization surveys
• In Turkey:
• No dedicated survey
– Some questions included into annual “Life
Satisfaction Survey”
– Specialized surveys:
• Violence against women survey
TÜİK Yaşam Memnuniyeti Araştırması /
Life Satisfaction Survey
• Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu (TÜİK) conducts a national survey
annually (since 2003) in order to measure satisfaction with life in
general population
• Some of the topics it covers are:
– Income
– Personal happiness and satisfaction with work, health,
relationships
– Satisfaction with public services: Social security, education,
law and order, justice, health, public transport, etc.
– Expectations in life
– Values: social pressure
Findings in 2011
Findings in 2013
 TÜİK Kadına Karşı Şiddet
İstatistikleri / Violence Against
Women Survey
• https://biruni.tuik.gov.tr/kadinasiddetdagit
im/
kadin.zul
 Offender surveys
• Not used a lot
• Benefits
– Ability to collect data on unreported and unnoticed
crime
– Ability to collect data on victimless crime

• Limitations
– Under/overreporting
• Why would offenders tell you about their crimes??
• Why would they tell you they committed a crime, when they
did not?
– But some crimes are very difficult to study otherwise
• Shoplifting
• Drunk driving
 Examples of self reported
offending surveys
• ISRD: https://web.northeastern.edu/isrd/
– Turkey also included into ISRD 3
• Monitoring the Future
http://monitoringthefuture.org
 Other administrative statistics
• What we get from other government
agencies
– Courts, Prisons…
– But also health care institutions
– Education sector
 Is “rate” all there is know about
crime?
• What were the findings of Sudhir
Venkatesh on crack dealers?

•Ethnographic research offers much more

in-depth understanding of crime
– Goes beyond “how much”