A Second Look at the Big Picture: Watching the FBIs Crime Clock
Consider another set of statistics intended to sum- marize the big picture that are issued yearly by the FBI in its authoritative UCR. This set is called the Crime Clock, and it dramatizes the fact that as time passes—each and every second, minute, hour, and day—the toll keeps mounting, as more and more people join the ranks of crime victims (see Figure 3.1).
V I C T IM I Z AT ION IN T H E UN I T ED S T AT ES : AN OVE RV I E W 77
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The Crime Clock’s statistics are calculated in a straightforward manner. The total number of inci- dents of each kind of crime that were reported to all the nation’s 18,000 plus police departments is divided into the number of seconds (60 60 24 365 31,536,000) or minutes (60 24 365 525,600) in a year. For instance, about 14,200 people were slain in the United States in 2013. The calculation (525,600/14,200 37) indi- cates that every 37 minutes another American was murdered that year (FBI, 2014).
Just a glance at this chart alerts even the casual reader to its chilling message. The big picture it portrays is that crimes of violence (one every 27 seconds) and theft (one every 4 seconds) are all too common. As the Crime Clock ticks away, a
steady stream of casualties flows into morgues, hospital emergency rooms, and police stations throughout the nation. At practically every moment, someone somewhere in the United States is experiencing what it feels like to be harmed by a criminal. These grim reminders give the impression that becoming a victim someday is virtually inevi- table. It seems to be just a matter of time before one’s “number is called” and disaster strikes. Sooner or later, it will be every American’s “turn”—or so it appears.
Furthermore, it can be argued that these alarm- ing figures revealed by the Crime Clock are actually underestimates of how dangerous the streets of the United States really are, due to a shortcoming in the report’s methodology. The big picture is really
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much worse. The FBI’s calculations are based solely upon crimes known to police forces across the country. But, of course, not all illegal acts are brought to the attention of the authorities. The police find out about only a fraction of all the inci- dents of violence and an even smaller proportion of the thefts that occur because many victims do not share their personal troubles with the uniformed officers or detectives of their local police depart- ments. The reporting rate varies from crime to crime, place to place, year to year, and group to group (see Chapter 6 for more details about victim reporting rates). Hence, one way to look at these Crime Clock statistics is to assume that they repre- sent the tip of the iceberg: The actual number of people harmed by offenders in these various ways must be considerably higher.
However, the only disclaimer the FBI offers is this: “The Crime Clock should be viewed with care. The most aggregate representation of UCR data, it conveys the annual reported crime experi- ence by showing a relative frequency of occurrence of the Part I index offenses. It should not be taken to imply a regularity in the commission of crime. The Crime Clock represents the annual ratio of crime to fixed time intervals” (FBI, 2014, p. 44). In other words, the reader is being reminded that in reality, the number of offenses carried out by lawbreakers ebbs and flows, varying with the time of day, day of the week, and season. These Crime Clock numbers represent projections over the course of an entire year and not the actual timing of the attacks. These street crimes do not take place with such rigid regularity or predictability.
The Crime Clock mode of presentation— which has appeared in the UCR for decades—has inherent shock value because as it ticks away, the future seems so ominous. Members of the public can be frightened into thinking they may be next and that their time is nearly up—if they haven’t already suffered in some manner at least once.
This countdown approach lends itself to media sensationalism, fear-mongering political campaigns, and marketing ploys. Heightened anxieties can be exploited to garner votes and to boost the sales of burglar alarms, automobile antitheft devices, or
crime insurance. For example, according to the Better Business Bureau (2014), a common phone scam begins with a warning based on this type of Crime Clock “data”: “The FBI reports that there is a home break-in in the United States every 15 seconds.…” The robocall then invites the fright- ened recipient to sign up for a “free” security system that, of course, has many hidden costs.