1.) What is the Uniform Crime Report (URC)
- This is used for law enforcement and it provides reasonable statistics
- Its also a great platform for students who are studying criminology and criminal justice
- This is a platform that has been used since 1930
- This is nation wide and has been submitting crimes and data that has been observed from over 18,000 cities
2.)What are Index Crimes and Non-Index Crimes?
- Index crimes are crimes considered serious in nature and occurring with sufficient frequency and regularity that they are considered index to the crime situation in a given area
- This involves murder, homicide, physical injury, rape, robbery, theft and carnapping
- Non-Index crimes are violations of special laws which involve reckless imprudence resulting in damage
- This includes property or physical injury, violations against women and children, illegal possession of firearms and drugs, illegal logging, lasciviousness, direct assault, and other crimes not listed under index crimes.
3.) What crimes are excluded from Index offenses?
- Arson (couldn’t find much on this topic)
- Any deviant crime
4.) What is the “dark figure” of crime?
- Is the amount of unreported or undiscovered crime
- This is in Criminology and Sociology
5.) What do SRD and NCVS stand for, and how do these approaches address the “dark figure”?
- SRD= Self Report Data
- NCVS= National Crime Victimization Survey
- NCVS approaches the “dark figure” by polling a large number of households, victimization surveys such as the National Crime Victimization Survey are able to uncover some of the crime incidents that were never reported or discovered by police.
6.) What are some examples of major trends that are observed in UCR, SRD, NCVS Data?
