There and Back Again

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12334
• Author: Sean E. Goodison,J. Scott Thomson
• Date: 01 November 2017
• Published date: 01 November 2017

COMMENTARY

CRIME DATA SETS

There and Back Again

Ensuring Law Enforcement’s Continued Support

for Modernized Crime Data

Sean E. Goodison

Police Executive Research Forum

J. Scott Thomson

Camden County Police Department

The efforts described in this issue, specifically to transition law enforcement to

incident-based reporting (Strom and Smith, 2017), redesign victimization data

(Langton, Planty, and Lynch, 2017), and develop new measurements for crime

statistics (Lauritsen and Cook, 2017), each deserve high praise. We have no doubt that

any of these recent efforts would drastically improve data, and many of the provided

recommendations are long overdue. For example, additional data collections are planned to

capture use-of-force incidents nationally (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2017) and wider

scope police data, such as calls for service, arrests, and administrative police data from across

the country (Police Foundation, 2017).

Policing is entering a new world of data as a willing partner to expanded data collection.

As noted in Strom and Smith (2017), law enforcement directly benefits from an incident-

based reporting system rather than from summary statistics with increased precision in crime

measurement, an ability to evaluate programs rigorously, and a comprehensive picture of

crime that can be provided to the public. The hierarchy rule as currently used cannot

accurately capture typical instances of crime when multiple offenses occur simultaneously,

whereas incident-based reporting allows for a complete understanding of crime. Data,

as described in Langton et al. (2017), could transform how police understand crime by

providing an ability to assess unreported crimes and tailor strategies among populations

not willing to report incidents to police. Capturing crime statistics has to advance beyond

categories we have used for decades, especially in light of drastic technological and social

Direct correspondence to Sean E. Goodison, Police Executive Research Forum, Center for Applied Research

and Management, 1120 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 930, Washington, DC 20036 (e-mail: sgoodison@

policeforum.org).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12334 C2017 American Society of Criminology 1099

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 16 rIssue 4