What is The Crime Rate?
By Shirley Morris, Cool Town News reporter
February 19, 2016
The crime rate is a calculation that expresses the total number of index crimes per 100,000 population:
Index Crimes/Population × 100,000 = Crime Rate
As previously indicated, in 2004 the FBI decided to drop the additional calculation of the crime index rate. The purpose of an index (like the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the Consumer Price Index) is to provide a composite measure, one that does not rely too heavily on any one factor. An index also allows controlling for population size, thus permitting fair comparisons of different-sized units. As noted earlier, it is this UCR crime rate that one reads about in the newspaper, with accounts of crime either rising or falling by a given percentage. A principal difficulty with the UCR crime rate as an index of crime in the United States is that it is an unweighted index. That is, each crime, whether murder or bicycle theft, is added into the total index with no weight given to the relative seriousness of the offense. Thus, no monetary or psychological value is assigned. For instance, a city with 100 burglaries per 100,000 population and one with 100 homicides per 100,000 population would have the same crime rate.
https://strayer.vitalsource.com/#/books/9781483306919/cfi/6!/4/2/ 20/4@0:65.1
CRJ 105 – Crime and Criminal Behavior
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DATA GATHERING STRATEGIES The qualitative methods most commonly used in evaluation can be classified in three broad
categories:
• In-depth Interview
• Observation Methods
• Document Review