Chapter 3: The Magnitude of the Crime Problem

Crime reporting rates in the US and UK

Crime US reporting rate

(%) UK reporting rate

(%) Motor vehicle theft 95 93

Burglary 53 66Aggravated assault/wounding 64 58

Robbery 61 47Assault without injury 40 36Theft from the person 40 35

All violent offences 49 43All crime 41 41

Reasons for not reporting crime to police (UK)

Reason for not reporting Vandalism Burglary Violence Trivial/no loss/police would not/could

not do anything 83 70 46

Private/dealt with ourselves 10 17 34Inconvenient to report 5 6 4

Reported to other authorities 2 2 8Common occurrence 3 2 4

Fear of reprisal 3 4 7Dislike or fear of the police/previous bad experience with police or courts 2 2 2

Other 3 9 10

Reasons for not reporting crime to police (US)

Reason for not reporting Violence Robbery Household burglary

Object recovered; offender unsuccessful 20 15 23

Reported to another official 14 5 4 Private or personal matter 19 8 7

Not important enough 7 6 4 Insurance would not cover 0.1 0 3

Case study

Calls for service in Camden, NJ

CAD incidents, Camden (NJ) 2005

Top potential crime calls for service, Camden, 2005

Calls for service in Camden, NJ

While 80 per cent of CAD incidents in Camden appear to relate to crime…

… over 80 per cent of these same incidents do not result in a crime report.

The crime funnel

Criminal careers

Criminal careers can be defined by their Onset Duration (usually measured in years) Termination

Youth Lifestyles Survey

57 per cent of males and 37 per cent of females had committed an offence at some point in their life

Nearly 20 per cent of them had done so in the previous 12 months

Some major criminal career studies

Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development Wolfgang’s Philadelphia cohort UK Home Office study of the 1950s and 1960s

Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development

Frequents (43% of offenders) Occasionals Innocents

Criminal careers average between 7 and 9 years

Marvin Wolfgang

Philadelphia cohort study 627 chronics constituted only 6.3 per cent of the whole

cohort of 9,945 boys Chronic offenders were responsible for 52 of all cohort

offences

Prevalence of offenders per 100 males

Adapted from Farrington, D.P. (1992) ‘Criminal career research in the United Kingdom’, British Journal of Criminology, 32(4): 525.

Reoffending increases with court appearances

Source: Coumarelos, C. (1994) ‘Juvenile offending: predicting persistence and determining the cost-effectiveness of interventions’

(Sydney: NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research), p. 20

Key risk factors for prolific offenders

Background risk factors Systemic identifiable risk factors

Socio-economically deprived Early age of first conviction

Antisocial parents and siblings History of court appearances

Received poor rearing as a child History of drug usage

Coming from broken homes Hanging around in public

Low intelligence Having delinquent friends

Poor school record Excessive drinking

Being truant or excluded from school Being a victim of personal crime

Lack of parental supervision Antisocial behavior

Organized crime

Term loosely applied Includes long-term, hierarchically structured teams,

to ‘loose networks of career criminals, who come

together for specific criminal ventures and dissolve once these are over’ (Serious Organized Crime Agency, 2006)

Money laundering

Estimates of yearly global sums laundered can range from US$500 billion to US$1.5 trillion (Brooks 2001)

However, the estimates that do exist have ‘little evidence to justify them’ (Levi 2002: 184)

Another constituent of the ‘dark figure of crime’

Criminal careers summarized

The criminal careers research can best be summarized as 6 per cent of the population commit about 60 per cent of the crime

Still leaves 1. a large number of prolific offenders to be disrupted or

incapacitated, and 2. a significant minority of the crime being committed by

occasional offenders who may not come to notice.