Rafe wrote: ↑Mon Oct 24, 2022 2:39 pm
Unfortunately, the FBI uniform crime statistics information keeps declining in value as more dimocrat-run cities opt to pull their law enforcement agencies out of reporting their data. Too, the whole purpose of the FBI's statistical database was for analysis and reporting of prosecuted crimes. I've always felt that the number of incidents stopped by a good guy with a gun, with no shot being fired or at least no crime prosecuted, were grossly underreported. If there was no crime prosecuted, it never hit their radar. Not like air traffic control towers that record near-misses.
My bet is that in the 2022 Biden Crime Epidemic, there are violent crimes prevented daily that we never hear about: they never make the police blotters or the news.
The UCR is not based on or related to crimes prosecuted. It is based solely on crimes reported to the police. This is one of the major problems with it, that it misses crimes that are not reported. Based on self-reported crimes in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), around 50% of all crimes go unreported to the police with higher numbers for some crimes. The NCVS is not particularly reliable either since it is base on self-reported crime and uses a sample of the population.
The second problem with the UCR is that all of the data is reported voluntarily by police departments, and they may be inconsistent in their reports. To be fair, one reason many departments stop reporting to the UCR is that they are now reporting to another FBI run program called NIBRS (National Incident Based Reporting System). NIBRS is the preferred system for analysis of crime because it provides a lot of the details for each incident that are missing in the UCR. It is not 100% for the type of analysis I like to do, but it is close.
Again, to be fair, the FBI cautions against using the UCR data for any real analysis and recommends it be seen only as a tracking tool for the specific department you want to look at. While the original design was to give everyone standard definitions for the major crimes so they could be compared across jurisdiction, the FBI long ago realized this was not valid for this purpose. Different departments interpret the instructions different ways, so it cannot be compared to each other.
But all of this means that the FBI undercounts almost everything crime related, not just good guys stopping crimes. And the good guys stopping crimes are more likely to be undercounted because they rarely get reported to the police at all and many local departments will take it as an information report instead of a crime to tell the FBI about.
