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
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.
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.