Expanding Our Understanding of Crime

• Date: 01 November 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12332
• Published date: 01 November 2017

RESEARCH ARTICLE

FUTURE OF CRIME STATISTICS AND

MEASUREMENT

Expanding Our Understanding of Crime

The National Academies Report on the Future of Crime

Statistics and Measurement

Janet L. Lauritsen

University of Missouri—St. Louis

Daniel L. Cork

National Academies of Sciences

Research Summary

This article summarizes the recommendations of the National Academies’ Commit-

tee on National Statistics’ Panel on Modernizing the Nation’s Crime Statistics first

report— Modernizing Crime Statistics, Report 1: Defining and Classifying Crime

(Lauritsen and Cork, 2016)—and discusses some of its implications for criminologists

and practitioners.

Policy Implications

The crime classification offered in the National Academies’ report recommends the

adoption and development of a more expanded system of crime statistics so that the

nation has reliable and comparative data on crime beyond what is currently available.

Many basic facts about the levels and changes in crime arenot known or well understood,

posing significant problems for crime policy development and evaluation, particularly

in the areas of crimes by and against businesses, organizations, and governments and

crimes against the environment. We discuss the new crime classification system in an

effort to engage criminologists and practitioners in the work that is necessary to improve

our responses to crime.

Keywords

crime statistics, modernization, crime measurement

Direct correspondence to Janet L. Lauritsen, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of

Missouri—St. Louis, One University Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63121 (e-mail: janet_lauritsen@umsl.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12332 C2017 American Society of Criminology 1075

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 16 rIssue 4

Research Article Future of Crime Statistics and Measurement

When policy makers and the public hear about crime data, references are typ-

ically made to one or both of two principal sources—the Uniform Crime

Reporting (UCR) program that compiles information on crimes known to

law enforcement and the household-based National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

These long-standing sources cover a large array of violent and property crimes that are

of deep and continuing interest to the public. Yet many other types of crime also are of

great (or growing) concern to society, and there is little systematic information that can

be used to answer even basic questions about levels and trends in such crimes. Given the

current state of crime data, it is impossible to assess, for example, the full extent to which

crimes are committed by or against businesses and organizations. Nor is it possible to state

whether crimes against government agencies or the environment, or by persons in positions

of authority, are more numerous nowcompared with the past. For example, basic trends in

“white-collar” crime in the financial sector or Medicare fraud against the U.S. government

are difficult to discern, and the amount of economic harm resulting from these crimes

compared with thefts, robberies, and burglaries suffered by individuals is difficult to com-

pare. Without a more comprehensive set of crime statistics, we cannot know, for example,

whether the large-scale declines in the 1990s in traditional and well-measured violent and

property crimes reflect broader declines in crime, or whether these recorded changes were

offset by notable increases in alternative and newly emerging forms of crime that are not

captured in current data systems. As a result, crime and policy analysts cannot answer basic

questions about whether adequate resources are being directed toward crimes that are not

well measured or whether programmatic and legislative efforts to prevent or reduce their

occurrence are effective.

In this article, we summarize the activities and recommendations of the National

Academies of Sciences (NAS), Engineering, and Medicine’s Panel on Modernizing the

Nation’s Crime Statistics (hereafter, “the panel”) for improving crime data.1We d o no t

focus on the improvements currently underway for the UCR program (including wider

implementation of the more detailed National Incident-Based Reporting System [NIBRS])

and for the NCVS because the changes in these critical data systems are discussed (by

Kevin Strom and Erica Smith [2017] and by James Lynch [2017], respectively) in the

accompanying articles in this issue. Rather, our discussion is based on the first report of the

panel (Modernizing Crime Statistics: Report 1 – Defining and Classifying Crime [Lauritsen

and Cork, 2016]), the principal output of which is the development of a modern crime

classification framework. This work is the first major reassessment of the definition and

coverage of U.S. crime statistics since the development of the UCR program in 1929.

The proposed classification is intended to map out a new set of indicators of crime in the

1. Both authors of this article served on the NAS panel, with Lauritsen as chair and Cork as study director.

The panel’s first report is available at nap.edu/catalog/23492/modernizing-crime-statistics-report-1-

defining-and-classifying-crime.

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