Essay Sample on Criminal Law: UCR, NCVS and NIBRS

Introduction

Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) programs play a crucial role in law enforcement in the United States. The UCR is a nationwide program that compiles data about incidences of crime in the country. The reports include crime occurrence as reported by police, public reports, reports from institutions such as universities and colleges, among others (BJS, 2017). According to BJS (2016), NCVS, on the other hand, is a nationwide survey done twice a year on American households' exposure to crime. The survey covers about 135,000 households annually and focuses on victimizations for persons aged at least 12.

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The UCR program helps in assessing the nature and type of crimes committed across the nation. The data collected contains details of the crime and the persons involved. It further includes crime cases that have been cleared by the police (BJS, 2017). Such data provides law enforcement agencies with information necessary for fighting crime. Additionally, the information is used by policy makers and academics to address the issue of crime in the sense that it enables them to theorize and understand the circumstances that motivate people to commit criminal acts (BJS, 2017; Rand & Rennison, 2002). The understanding of criminal motivations informs government policy on socioeconomic programs.

The NCVS gathers information about the characteristics, frequency, and consequences of criminal victimization. Given the highlighted details, the survey provides an invaluable source of information on nature, prevalence, and trends concerning crime victimizations in households and individuals (FBI, 2018; BJS, 2016). As such, it helps security agencies to design preemptive crime strategies as well as monitor leads of criminal activities.

UCR and NCVS are similar in the sense that both programs entail gathering of information on incidences of crime in the US. Both techniques also utilize reported data. The information is then used to design crime prevention and control strategies. However, the two crime information collection techniques differ in many ways.

For UCR, the process of data collection takes place daily, but information is compiled every month whereas data collection in NCVS is done in the form of interviews on crime victimization every six months for a period of three years on sampled populations. Additionally, UCR measures criminal activity based on reported data while NCVS measures criminal activities based on both reported and unreported crime data. Moreover, NCVS utilizes representative samples of the US population to collect information while UCR covers persons who have been reported to the authorities as actors in criminal offenses (BJS, 2017; Rand & Rennison, 2002).

Despite the widespread use of UCR in fighting crime, securities agencies are transitioning into the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The NIBRS has the advantage of quality of data obtained as the system records all details on each single crime incident, including information on victims, offenders, relationships between offenders and the victims, property involved in the crime , and arrestees(FBI, 2018). Such data provides circumstances and context for crimes which improves the quality of law enforcement.

References

Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). (2016). )National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Retrieved from https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=dcdetail&iid=245

Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). (2017). Uniform crime reporting statistics. Retrieved from https://www.bjs.gov/ucrdata/abouttheucr.cfm

Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI). (2018). NIBRS overview. Retrieved from https://ucr.fbi.gov/nibrs-overview

Rand, M. R., & Rennison, C. M. (2002). True crime stories? Accounting for differences in our national crime indicators. Chance, 15(1), 47-51.