Newspapers, criminologists, and crime statistics

• Published in: Crime, law, and social change law, and social change, 2012-09, Vol.58 (2), p.131-138
• Main Author: Geis, Gilbert
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arthur Andersen and company; Census; Crime; Crime Rates; Criminal investigations; Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law; Criminal sociology. Police. Delinquency. Deviance. Suicide; Criminal statistics; Criminology; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Fraud; Government Agencies; Identity; Identity theft; Investigation; Journalism; Jurisdiction; Law and Criminology; Law Enforcement; Media coverage; Murders & murder attempts; Offenses; Police; Political Science; Press; Publicity; Robbery; Scandals; Social Sciences; Sociology; Sociology of law and criminology; Statistics; Studies; Surveys; Uniform Crime Reports; Victims; White Collar Crime
• ISSN: 0925-4994; 1573-0751
• DOI: 10.1007/s10611-012-9371-4

Twice each year the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issues a statistical report on crime in the United States under the title of Uniform Crime Report. The initial of the two reports is a preliminary statement of the extent of specified crimes that had become known to the police during the previous year. That report is released in the spring or early summer. The second report emerges early the following calendar year. The statistics presented in both releases are based on numbers voluntarily supplied by local law enforcement agencies. After some holdouts in earlier years, the reports now are submitted by 13,000 agencies, a total that includes virtually every police and sheriff's department in the nation. On very rare occasions a jurisdictions submission will be rejected because it defies credibility. The FBI report focuses heavily on street crimes and attends peripherally to mundane white-collar offenses, despite the deluge of catastrophic economic violations, many of them criminal, that were highlighted during the Enron and Arthur Andersen debacle and onward through the subprime lending fraud and what became known as the Great Economic Meltdown. The National White Collar Crime Center has published a survey of white-collar offenses [12], but the Bureau of the Census victimization survey, which added identity theft to its concerns in 2005, barely touches the edges of white-collar and corporate law-breaking. Besides, the media have paid scant attention to these publications: the FBI publicity department has a good deal more clout and the FBI more public recognition than agencies that tabulate white-collar crime. Adapted from the source document.