Statistics, crime

National Crime Surveys Reports of crime statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. These include numbers of various types of crimes such as homicides, assaults, and burglaries and statistics on incarcerated persons. 

Not surprisingly, there are important government sites that have useful information for gun issues research. The Treasury s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (http //www.atf.treas.gov) is the source for official federal gun regulations and their interpretation. The FBI (http //www. fbi.gov) is responsible for tracing guns involved in crime, and it gathers many statistics about gun use. And because the gun issue is so closely connected with crime trends, the Department of Justice s Bureau of Justice Statistics home page at http //www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/ is another very important resource, as is its annual compilation Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics (available at http //www.albany.edu/ sourcebook/). Note that the bureau site also has a set of links to other crime-statistics sites. 

One essential precondition of this transformation was the discovery of society as a reified object that was separate from the state and that could be scientifically described. In this respect, the production of statistical knowledge about the population—its age profiles, occupations, fertility, literacy, property ownership, law-abidingness (as demonstrated by crime statistics)—allowed state officials to characterize the population in elaborate new ways, much as scientific forestry permitted the forester to carefully describe the forest. Ian Hack-... 

Crime statistics, especially official police figures, are notoriously unreliable for two main reasons. First, many crimes are not reported, presumably because the victims are not motivated to do so. Secondly, the pressure on the police is to reduce reported crime. Given that this is so, there is a temptation for the police, where possible, to under-report. There are... 

The field of statistics as a separate discipline began m the early to mid nineteenth century among German, British, French, and Belgian social reformers, refeired to as statists i.e., those that were concerned with numbers related to the state, including crime rates, income distributions, etc. [34] The appeal of frequency-based interpretation of probability would have been natural m the study of large human populations. 

The value placed on efficiency and predictability, and the institutional pressures for cost-containment, accountability and measurability are enhancing the appeal of reductionist theories. They fit with the tendency to locate social problems in individual pathology. They suit the actuarial mentality that places faith in statistical information as a means to predict and minimize future risk.7 Genetic and evolutionary explanations have become a way to address the issues that trouble society - the perceived decline of the family, the problems of crime and persistent poverty, changes in the ethnic structure of the population, and the pressures on public schools. 

When the statistieally sophisticated psychologists realized what I was doing, they had a field day pointing out my failings unjustified assumptions, violations of statistical theory and other mathematical crimes. They talked about ordinal scales versus ratio scales and scolded me for not using analysis of variance instead of Chi-square and Student s T tests of significance. 

Uniform Crime Reports An annual FBI report titled Crime in the United States. It summarizes statistics provided by state and local law enforcement agencies. 

Uniform Crime Reports, 2002. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Available online. URL http //www.fbi.gov/ucr/02cius.htm. Posted in 2002. Provides access to the most comprehensive and authoritative compilation of crime-related statistics, including those relating to firearms. Statistics are issued annually. 

Kovandzic, Tbmislav V., and Thomas B. Marvell. Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns and Violent Crime Crime Control through Gun Decontrol Criminohg and Public Policy, vol. 2, July 2003, pp. 363-396. The authors were unahle to find a statistically significant correlation in 58 Florida counties from 1980 to 2000 between the number of concealed carry permits issued and a reduction in violent crime. 

Ramesar, Romesh. Should You Carry a Gun A New Study Argues for Concealed Weapons. Time, vol. 151, July 6, 1998, p. 48. Reports on John Lott s book More Gum, Less Crime. The most extensive study on concealed-carry laws and crime rates yet undertaken, it concludes that areas with more liberal gun-carry laws have lower crime rates. The book has touched off fierce controversy, and gun control advocates dispute some of Lott s statistical methods. 

Performs background checks and gun traces for local authorities and compiles many statistics involving gun violence and guns used in crime. 

Source U.S. Dept, of Justice, Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, 2002, available online at URL http //www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/cv2.htm. 

Home Office, Home Office Statistical Bulletin, Drug Misuse Declared findings from the 2005/06 British Crime Survey, October 2006. 

Morrison, S. Approaching Organised Crime Where Are We Now and Where Are We Going Trends Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice series No. 231. Canberra Australian Institute of Criminology, 2002. Scalia, J. Federal Drug Offenders, 1999 . Washington, D.C. Bureau for Justice Statistics, 2001. 

Several organizations collect data on juvenile arrests. The Federal Bureau of Investigation s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) program, established in 1930, compiles crime information from nearly 17,000 state and local law enforcement agencies around the country. The UCR s main objective has been to produce criminal statistics for use in law enforcement. Today its crime index has become a leading public indicator of yearly fluctuations in the level of crime in the United States. 

In the third quarter, we plan to offer a course which includes the presentation of expert witness testimony in a mock court of law with the assistance of the Northeastern University Law School. Practice trial sessions with student attorneys are envisioned. The course on arson and explosives will deal with detection of related crimes, and biometrics in the fifth quarter will cover concepts of statistics important in forensic chemistry. 

The NAA method for the determination of firearm discharge residue has been generally accepted, but applications have been limited to just a few laboratories. In the process of establishing NAA capability for the State of Illinois crime laboratories we re-examined the standard techniques (10). In the course of our work it became clear that post-irradiation is the cause of several constraints which have discouraged a more widespread use of NAA. The inherent time limitation due to the 87 min. half-life of 139Ba necessitates fast manipulations of radioactive solutions which in turn requires an experienced radiochemist. In addition to an ever present danger of overexposure and contamination, typically only a dozen samples can be irradiated per batch, which makes the method quite expensive. The developed statistical bivariate-normal analysis (11) is convenient for routine applications. With this in mind, a method was developed which a) eliminates post-irradiation radiochemistry and thus maximizes time for analysis b) accommodates over 130 samples per irradiation capsule (rabbit) c) does not require a collection of occupational handblanks and d) utilizes a simplified statistical concept based on natural antimony and barium levels on hands for the interpretation of data. The detailed procedure will be published elsewhere (15). 

Here the research statistics got fuzzy and perhaps a little creative to demonstrate the hypothesis that psilocybin therapy was effective in reducing the crime rate. In their paper published in Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice (Leary et al. 1965), the researchers broke the numbers down into types of return due to parole violations and due to new crimes. They found that, compared to a 50/50 incidence in the prison population as a whole, only 7% of project participants were returned for new crimes, with 52% returned for parole violations. One and one half years after termination of the program the rate of new crimes has been reduced from 28% to 7%, although if parole violations are counted the overall return rate has not changed. It is proposed that these results warrant further research into the potentials of the methods used, especially since no other method of reducing the crime rate exists. (Leary et al. 1965 Doblin 1998). 

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