3 M I L E S , Victimization in the United States: An Overview S H A Crime into Perspective: The Chances of Dying Putting NViolently—or from Other Causes Summary N Key Terms Defined in the Glossary O Questions for Discussion and Debate N Critical Thinking Questions CHAPTER OUTLINE Victimization Across the Nation: The Big Picture Making Sense of Statistics The Two Official Sources of Data Facts and Figures in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) Facts and Figures in the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) Comparing the UCR and the NCVS A First Glance at the Big Picture: Estimates of the Number of New Crime Victims Each Year A Second Look at the Big Picture: Watching the FBI’s Crime Clock Delving Deeper into the Big Picture: Examining Victimization Rates Tapping into the UCR and the NCVS to Fill in the Details of the Big Picture Searching for Changes in the Big Picture: Detecting Trends in Interpersonal Violence and Theft Taking a Longer View: Murders in the United States over the Past Century Suggested Research Projects 1 9LEARNING OBJECTIVES 0To appreciate how statistics can be used to answer important questions. 9To become aware of the ways statistics can be used to T persuade and mislead. STo find out what information about crime victims is collected routinely by the federal government’s Department of Justice. To become familiar with the ways that victimologists use this data to estimate how many people were harmed by criminal activities and what injuries and losses they suffered. continued The Rise and Fall of Murder Rates Since 1900 66 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. VICTIMIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES: AN OVERVIEW LEARNING OBJECTIVES continued To explore the kinds of information about victims that can be found in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Uniform Crime Report. To learn how the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System is extracting more information drawn from police files about victims. To appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of this source M of official statistics. To discover what data about victims and their plight can I be found in the federal government’s alternative source L of information, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National E Crime Victimization Survey. S , To assemble official statistics to spot trends, and especially To recognize the strengths and weaknesses of this alternative source of government statistics. whether the problem of criminal victimization has been intensifying or diminishing over recent decades. S H To be able to weigh the threat of crime against other A perils by understanding comparative risks. N N O VICTIMIZATION ACROSS THE NATION:N To develop a feel for historical trends in the level of violence in the United States. THE BIG PICTURE Victimologists gather and interpret data to answer1 crucial questions such as: How many people are 9 harmed by criminals each year? Is victimization becoming more of a problem or is it subsiding as0 time goes by? And which groups are targeted the9 most and the least often? Researchers want to find out where and when the majority of incidentsT occur, whether predators on the prowl intimidateS and subjugate their prey with their bare hands or use weapons, and if so, what kinds? It is also important to determine whether individuals are attacked by complete strangers or people they know, and how these intended targets act when confronted by assailants. What proportion try to escape or fight back, how many are injured, what percentage 67 need to be hospitalized, and how much money do they typically lose in an incident? The answers to specific questions like these yield statistical portraits of crime victims, the patterns that persist over the years, and the trends that unfold as time passes; when taken together, they constitute what can be termed the big picture —an overview of what is really happening across the entire United States during the twenty-first century. The big picture serves as an antidote to impressions based on direct but limited personal experiences, as well as self-serving reports circulated by organizations with vested interests, misleading media images, crude stereotypes, and widely held myths. But putting together the big picture is not easy. Compiling an accurate portrayal requires careful planning, formulation of the right questions, proper data collection techniques, and insightful analyses. The big picture is constructed by making systematic observations and accurate measurements on the local level. Then, these village, city, and county reports must be aggregated so victimologists and criminologists are able to characterize the situation in an entire state, region of the country, and ultimately the nation as a whole. (Sociologists would call this process as going from an up-close and personal micro level up to a more institutional and systemwide macro level of analysis.) An alternative path to follow is to assemble a randomly selected nationwide sample and then ask those people to share their experiences about what offenders did to them during the past year. If the sample is representative and large enough, then the findings from this survey can be generalized to project estimates about what is happening in the country as a whole. Once the big picture is assembled, it becomes possible to make comparisons between the situation in the United States and other postindustrial societies around the world. The similarities are increasing and cultural differences are diminishing as globalization is fostering a modern way of life, which involves seeking higher education, commuting over congested highways to work, shopping in malls, watching cable TV programming, using the Internet, and calling the police 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 68 CHAPTER 3 on smartphones for help, that has spread to even the most remote regions of the planet. Until the 1970s, few efforts were made to routinely monitor and systematically measure various indicators of the plight of the nation’s victims. By the 1980s, a great many social scientists and agencies were conducting the research needed to bring the big picture into focus. Also, all sorts of specialinterest groups began keeping count and disseminating their own estimates about the suffering of a wide variety of victims, including youngsters wounded at school, college students hurt or killed on campus, children reported missing by their parents, and people singled out by assailants who hate their “kind.” The statistics presented in this chapter come from official sources and shed light on the big picture concerning “street crimes” involving interpersonal violence and theft. Making Sense of Statistics Statistics are meaningful numbers that reveal important information. Statistics are of crucial importance to social scientists, policy analysts, and decision makers because they replace vague adjectives such as “many,” “most,” and “few” with precise numbers. Both victimologists and criminologists gather their own data to make their own calculations, or they scrutinize official statistics, which are compiled and published by government agencies. Why do they pore over these numbers? By collecting, computing, and analyzing statistics, researchers can answer intriguing questions. Accurate and credible statistics about crimes and victims are vital because they can shed light on these important matters: ■ Statistics can be calculated to estimate victimization rates, which are realistic assessments of threat levels that criminal activities pose to particular individuals and groups. What are the odds various categories of people face of getting robbed or even murdered during a certain time period? Counts (such as death tolls) answer the question “How many?” Better yet, rates (number of persons who get robbed out of every 100,000 people in a year) can provide relative estimates about these disturbing questions. ■ M I L E S , Statistics can expose patterns of criminal activity. Patterns reflect predictable relationships or regular occurrences that show up during an analysis of the data year after year. For instance, a search for patterns could answer these questions: Is it true that murders generally occur at a higher rate in urban neighborhoods than in suburban and rural areas? Are robberies committed more often against men than women, or vice versa? ■ Statistical trends can demonstrate how situations have changed over the years. Is the burden of victimization intensifying or subsiding as time goes by? Are the dangers of getting killed by robbers increasing or decreasing? ■ Statistics can provide estimates of the costs and losses imposed by illegal behavior. Estimates based on accurate records can be important for commercial purposes. For example, insurance companies can determine what premiums to charge their customers this year based on actuarial calculations of the typical financial expenses suffered by policyholders who were hospitalized last year after being wounded by robbers. S H A N N O N ■ 1 9 0 9 T S ■ ■ Statistics can be used for planning purposes to project a rough or “ballpark figure” of next year’s workload. Law enforcement agencies, service providers, and insurance companies can anticipate the approximate size of their caseloads for the following year if they know how many people were harmed the previous year. Statistics also can be computed to evaluate the effectiveness of criminal justice policies and to assess the impact of prevention strategies. Are battered women likely to lead safer lives after their violent mates are arrested, or will they be in greater danger? Do gun buyback programs actually save lives or is their impact on the local murder rate negligible? Finally, statistical profiles can be assembled to yield an impression of what is usual or typical 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. VICTIMIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES: AN OVERVIEW about victims in terms of their characteristics such as sex, age, and race/ethnicity. For example, is the widely held belief accurate that most of the people who die violently are young men from troubled families living in povertystricken, big-city neighborhoods? Portraits based on data can also provide a reality check to help ground theories that purport to explain why some groups experience higher rates of predation than others. For example, if it turns M out that the frail elderly are robbed far less I often than teenagers, then any theory that emphasizes only the physical vulnerability of L robbers’ targets will be totally off-base or at best E incomplete as an explanation of which groups S suffer the most, and why. However, statistics might not only be used,, they can also be abused. Statistics never speak for themselves. Sometimes, statistics can be circulated S to mislead or deceive. The same numbers can be interpreted quite differently, depending on whatH spin commentators give them—what is stressedA and what is downplayed. Cynics joke that statistics can be used by a special-interest group just like aN lamppost is used by a drunkard—for support ratherN than for illumination. Officials, agencies, and organizations withO their own particular agendas may selectivelyN release statistics to influence decision makers or shape public opinion. For example, law enforcement agencies might circulate alarming figures1 showing a rise in murders and robberies at budget hearings to support their arguments that they need9 more money for personnel and equipment to bet-0 ter protect and serve the community. Or these 9 same agencies might cite data showing a declining number of victimizations in order to take credit forT improving public safety. Their argument could be S that those in charge are doing their jobs so well, such as hunting down murderers or preventing robberies, that they should be given even more funding next year to further drive down the rate of violent crime. Statistics also might serve as evidence to argue that existing laws and policies are having the intended desirable effects or, 69 conversely, to persuade people that the old methods are not working and new approaches are necessary. Interpretations of mathematical findings can be given a spin that may be questionable or debatable—for example, emphasizing that a shelter for battered women is “half empty” rather than “half full,” or stressing how much public safety has improved, as opposed to how much more progress is needed before street crime can be considered under control. As useful and necessary as statistics are, they should always be viewed with a healthy dose of scientific skepticism. Although some mistakes are honest and unavoidable, it is easy to “lie” with statistics by using impressive and scientific-sounding numbers to manipulate or mislead. Whenever statistics are presented to underscore or clinch some point in an argument, their origin and interpretation must be questioned, and certain methodological issues must be raised. What was the origin of the data, and does this source have a vested interest in shaping public opinion? Are different estimates available from other sources? What kinds of biases and inaccuracies could have crept into the collection and analysis of the data? How valid and precise were the measurements? How were key variables operationalized—defined and measured? What was counted and what was excluded, and why? Victimologists committed to objectivity must point out the shortcomings and limitations of data collection systems run by the government. They try to interpret statistics without injecting any particular spin into their conclusions because (it is hoped) they have no “axe to grind” other than enlightening people about the myths and realities surrounding the crime problem. THE TWO OFFICIAL SOURCES OF DATA As early as the 1800s, public officials began keeping records about lawbreaking to gauge the “moral health” of society. Then, as now, high rates of interpersonal violence and theft were taken as signs of social pathology—indications that something was 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 70 CHAPTER 3 profoundly wrong with the way people generally interacted in everyday life. Annual data sets were compiled to determine whether illegal activities were being brought under control as time passed. Monitoring trends is even more important today because many innovative but intrusive and expensive criminal justice policies intended to curb crime have been implemented. Two government reports published each year contain statistical data that enable victimologists to keep track of what is happening out on the streets. Both of these official sources of facts and figures are disseminated each year by the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Each of these government data collection systems has its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of providing the information victimologists and criminologists are seeking to answer their research questions. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR): Crime in the United States is a massive compilation of all incidents “known” to local, county, and state police departments across the country. The FBI’s UCR is a virtual “bible” of crime statistics based on victims’ complaints and direct observations made by officers. It is older and better known than the other official source, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS): Criminal Victimization in the United States. The BJS’s NCVS provides projections for various regions and for the entire country based on incidents voluntarily disclosed to interviewers by a huge national sample drawn from the general public. Facts and Figures in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) The UCR was established in 1927 by a committee set up by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The goal was to develop a uniform set of definitions and reporting formats for gathering crime statistics. Since 1930, the FBI has published crime data in the UCR that was forwarded voluntarily to Washington by police departments across the United States. In recent years, more than 18,000 village, town, tribal, college, municipal, county, and state police departments and sheriff’s departments in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and several territories that serve about 97 percent of the more than 300 million inhabitants of the United States participate in the data collection process, usually by sending periodic reports to state criminal justice clearinghouses. Several federal law enforcement agencies now contribute data as well (FBI, 2014). M The FBI divides up the crimes it tracks into two listings. Unfortunately, both Part I and Part II I the UCR have been of limited value to those of interested in studying the actual flesh-and-blood L victims rather than the incidents known to police E departments or the characteristics of the persons S arrested for allegedly committing them. Part I of the UCR focuses on eight index , crimes, the illegal acts most people readily think about when they hear the term “street crime.” Four S index crimes count violent attacks directed “against persons”: murder, forcible rape, robbery, H aggravated assault. The other four monitor and crimes A “against property”: burglary, larceny (thefts of all kinds), motor vehicle theft, and arson. (The N category of arson was added in 1979 at the request of NCongress when poor neighborhoods in big cities experienced many blazes of suspicious origin. O However, incidents of arson are still unreliably measured because intentionally set fires might N remain classified by fire marshals as being “of unknown origin.”) These eight crimes (in actual 1 practice, seven) are termed index crimes because the FBI adds all the known incidents of each one 9 of these categories together to compute a “crime 0 index” that can be used for year-to-year and place-to-place comparisons to gauge the seriousness 9 of the problem. (But note that this grand total is T unweighted; that means a murder is counted as just S one index crime event, the same as an attempted car theft. So the grand total [like “comparing apples and oranges”] is a huge composite that is difficult to interpret.) The UCR presents the number of acts of violence and theft known to the authorities for cities, counties, states, regions of the country, and even many college campuses (since the mid-1990s; see 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. VICTIMIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES: AN OVERVIEW Chapter 11). For each crime, the FBI compiles information about the number of incidents reported to the police, the total estimated losses in billions of dollars due to property crimes, the proportion of cases that were solved, and some characteristics of the suspects arrested (age, sex, race)—but, unfortunately for victimologists, nothing about the people who suffered harm and filed the complaints. In Part II, the UCR only provides counts of the number of people arrested for 21 assortedM offenses (but no estimates of the total number of these illegal acts committed nationwide). SomeI Part II crimes that lead to arrests do cause injuriesL to individuals, such as “offenses against women and E children,” as well as “sex offenses” other than forcible rape and prostitution. Others do not haveS clearly identifiable victims, such as counterfeiting,, prostitution, gambling, drunkenness, disorderly conduct, weapons possession, and drug offenses. Still other Part II arrests could have arisen fromS incidents that directly harm identifiable individuals, including embezzlement, fraud, vandalism, andH buying/receiving/possessing stolen property. A The Uniform Crime Reporting Division furnishes data in separate annual publications aboutN how many hate crimes were reported to policeN departments (see Chapter 11). It also issues a yearly analysis of how many law enforcement officersO were feloniously assaulted and slain in the line ofN duty, the weapons used against them, and the assignments they were carrying out when they were injured or killed (also analyzed in Chapter 11).1 From a victimologist’s point of view, the 9 UCR’s method of data collection suffers from several shortcomings that undermine its accuracy and0 usefulness (see Savitz, 1982; and O’Brien, 1985).9 First of all, underreporting remains an intractable problem. Because many victims do not informT their local law enforcement agencies about illegalS acts committed against them and their possessions (see Chapter 6), the FBI’s compilation of “crimes known to the police” is unavoidably incomplete. The annual figures about the number of reported crimes recorded as committed inevitably are lower than the actual (but unknown) number of crimes that really were carried out. Second, the UCR 71 focuses on accused offenders (keeping track of the age, sex, and race) but does not provide any information about the complainants who reported the incidents. Only information about murder victims (their age, sex, and race) is collected routinely (see Chapter 4). Third, the UCR lumps together reports of attempted crimes (usually not as serious for victims) with completed crimes (in which offenders achieved their goals). Fourth, when computing crime rates for cities, counties, and states, the FBI counts incidents directed against all kinds of targets, adding together crimes against impersonal entities (such as businesses and government agencies) on the one hand, and individuals and households on the other. For example, the totals for robberies include bank holdups as well as muggings; statistics about burglaries combine attempted break-ins of offices with the ransacking of homes; figures for larcenies include goods shoplifted from department stores in addition to thefts of items swiped from parked cars. Another shortcoming is that the FBI instructs local police departments to observe the hierarchy rule when reporting incidents: List the event under the heading of the most serious crime that took place. The ranking in the hierarchy from most terrible to less serious runs from murder to forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, vehicle theft, and finally larceny. For instance, if an armed intruder breaks into a home and finds a woman alone, rapes her, steals her jewelry, and drives off in her car, the entire incident will be counted for record-keeping purposes only as a forcible rape (the worst crime she endured). The fact that this person suffered other offenses at the hands of the criminal isn’t reflected in the yearly totals of known incidents. If the rapist is caught, he could also be charged with armed robbery, burglary, motor vehicle theft, possession of a deadly weapon, and possession of stolen property, even though these lesser offenses are not added to the UCR’s compilations. Phasing in a National Incident-Based Reporting System Fortunately, the UCR is being overhauled and is becoming a much more useful source of information about individuals who are harmed 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 72 CHAPTER 3 by lawbreakers. The FBI is converting its data collection format to a National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Law enforcement officials began to call for a more extensive record-keeping system during the late 1970s. The police force in Austin, Texas, was the first to switch to this comprehensive data collection and reporting system. However, other big-city police departments that deal with a huge volume of crime reports have had trouble meeting NIBRS goals and timetables, so complete implementation has been postponed repeatedly. North Dakota and South Carolina were the first two states to adopt NIBRS formatting in 1991. As of 2008, NIBRS data collection was taking place in 32 states and the District of Columbia, covering 25 percent of the nation’s population, 26 percent of its reported crimes, and 37 percent of its law enforcement agencies (IBR Resource Center, 2011). But the switchover seems to be proceeding very slowly. A 2012 NIBRS national report compiled figures submitted by 6,115 law enforcement agencies (only 33 percent of the over 18,000 participating departments) in 32 states that covered about 30 percent of the nation’s population and 28 percent of all crimes known to police departments across the country (FBI, 2014b). One major change is the abandonment of the hierarchy rule of reporting only the worst offense that happened during a sequence of closely related events. Preserving a great many details makes it possible to determine how often one crime evolves into another, such as a carjacking escalating into a kidnapping, or a robbery intensifying into a life-threatening shooting. For the incident cited above that was categorized as a forcible rape under the hierarchy rule, this new record-keeping system also would retain information about the initial burglary; the resulting robbery; the vehicle theft; other property stolen from the victim and its value; other injuries sustained; the woman’s age, sex, and race; whether there was a previous relationship between her and the intruder; and the date, time, and location of the incident. Until the advent of the NIBRS computer database, only in cases of homicide were some of these facts extracted from police files and retained. Another significant aspect of the overhaul is that the NIBRS provides expanded coverage of additional illegal activities. Instead of just eight closely watched UCR index offenses, FBI computers are now prepared to keep track of 46 Group A offenses derived from 22 categories of crimes. In addition to the four “crimes against persons” and the four “against property” of the UCR’s Part I, the new Group A monitors offenses that formerly had M been listed in Part II or just not collected at all. Victim-oriented data are becoming available for I simple assault (including intimidation), vandalism (property damage and destruction), blackmail L (extortion), fraud (swindles and con games), forcible E sex crimes (sodomy, sexual assault with an object, S fondling), nonforcible sex offenses (statutory and rape , and incest), kidnapping (including parental abductions), and the nonpunishable act of justifiable homicide. The data collected about a victim of a Group S A offense include these variables: sex, age, race and ethnicity, area of residence, type of injury, H prior relationship to the offender, and the any circumstances surrounding the attack in cases of A aggravated assault and murder. If items were stolen, N details preserved about them include the types the of Npossession taken and their value, and in cases of motor vehicle theft, whether the car was recovered. O the NIBRS makes a distinction between Also, attempted and successfully completed acts (from N the criminal’s point of view) (IBR Resource Center, 2011). 1 Already, some data mining studies based exclusively on the NIBRS archives from selected states 9 and cities address some intriguing issues. For exam0 an analysis of roughly 1,200 cases of abductions ple, in 9 the 12 states that had switched over to NIBRS by 1997 shed light on a previously overlooked subcatT of “holding of a person against his or her egory will,” S called acquaintance kidnapping. This newly recognized offense includes situations such as when a teenage boy isolates his former girlfriend to punish her for spurning him, to pressure her to return to him, to compel her to submit sexually, or to evade her parents’ efforts to break them up. Also included are incidents in which street gang members spirit off rivals to intimidate them, retaliate against them, or 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. VICTIMIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES: AN OVERVIEW even recruit them. In these types of hostage takings, the perpetrators tend to be juveniles just like their teenage targets, the abductions often take place in homes as opposed to public places, and the captives are more likely to be assaulted (Finkelhor and Ormrod, 2000). Several studies using NIBRS data from certain jurisdictions have revealed important findings about various types of murders. In general, elderly men are murdered at twice the rate as elderly womenM (Chu and Kraus, 2004). Specifically, older white males are the most frequent victims of “eldercide”;I they are killed predominantly by offenders who areL below the age of 45 and tend to be complete stranE gers. Female senior citizens are more likely to be slain by assailants who are older than 45 and areS often either a spouse or grown child (Krienert and, Walsh, 2010). Murders of intimate partners tend to be committed late at night, during weekends, and in the midst of certain holidays more often than atS other times (Vazquez, Stohr, and Purkiss, 2005). Also, the higher homicide rate in Southern citiesH actually may not be due to a presumed subcultureA of violence or “code of honor” that supposedly compels individuals likely to lose fights and sufferN beatings to nevertheless stand up to the aggressorsN to save face (Chilton, 2004). Facts and Figures in the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) O N 1 Victimologists and criminologists have reservations9 about the accuracy of the official records kept by police departments that form the basis of the FBI’s0 UCR as well as its NIBRS. Tallies maintained by9 local law enforcement agencies surely are incomplete due to victim nonreporting. Also, on occa-T sion, these closely watched statistics may beS distorted by police officials as a result of political pressures to either downplay or inflate the total number of incidents in their jurisdiction in order to manipulate public opinion about the seriousness of the local crime problem or the effectiveness of their crime-fighting strategies (for example, see Eterno and Silverman, 2012). 73 Dissatisfaction with official record-keeping practices has led criminologists to collect their own data. The first method used was the selfreport survey. Small samples of people were promised anonymity and confidentiality if they would “confess” on questionnaires about the crimes they had committed. This line of inquiry consistently revealed greater volumes of illegal acts than were indicated by official statistics in government reports. Self-report surveys confirmed the hypothesis that large numbers of people broke the law (especially during their teens and twenties), but most were never investigated, arrested, or convicted, especially if they were members of middleor upper-class families. But self-reports about offending did not shed any light on those who were on the receiving end of these illegal acts. After establishing the usefulness of self-report surveys about offenses, the next logical step for researchers was to query people from all walks of life about any street crimes that may have been committed against them rather than by them. These self-report studies originally were called “victim surveys.” But that label was somewhat misleading because most respondents answered that they were not victims—they had not been harmed by street crimes during the time period in question. The first national survey about victimization (based on a random sample of 10,000 households) was carried out in 1966 for the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. It immediately confirmed one suspicion: A sizable percentage of individuals in the sample who told interviewers that they had suffered losses and/or sustained injuries acknowledged that they had not reported the incident to the police. This proof of the existence of what was termed the “dark figure” (meaning a murky, mysterious, imprecise number) of unreported crimes further undercut confidence in the accuracy of the FBI’s UCR statistics for all offenses except murder. Confirming the existence of unreported crime also underscored the importance of continuing this alternative way of measuring victimization rates and trends by directly asking members of the general public about their recent experiences. 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 74 CHAPTER 3 In 1972, the federal government initiated a yearly survey of businesses as well as residents in 26 large cities, but the project was discontinued in 1976. In 1973, the Census Bureau began interviewing members of a huge, randomly selected, nationwide, stratified, multistage sample of households (clustered by geographic counties). Until 1992, the undertaking was known as the National Crime Survey (NCS). After some revisions, it was retitled the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The Aspects of Victimization That It Measures NCVS respondents answer questions from a survey that runs more than 20 pages. They are interviewed every six months for three years. The questioning begins with a series of screening items, such as, “During the last six months did anyone break into your home?” If the respondent answers yes, follow-up questions are asked to collect details about the incident. When completed, the survey provides a great deal of data about the number of violent and property crimes committed against the respondents, the extent of any physical injuries or financial losses they sustained, and the location and time of the incidents. It also keeps track of the age, sex, race/ ethnicity, marital status, income level, and place of residence of the people disclosing their misfortunes to survey interviewers. The survey records the victims’ perceptions about the perpetrators (in terms of whether they seemed to have been drinking and if they appeared to be members of a gang), whether they used weapons, and what self-protective measures—if any—the respondents took before, during, and after the attack. Additional questions probe into any prior relationships between them, as well as the reasons why they did or did not report the crime to the police. The survey is person-centered. It is geared toward uncovering the suffering of individuals 12 years of age or older and the losses experienced by entire households (but not of workplaces, such as burglaries of offices or robberies of banks). The questionnaire focuses on crimes of violence (forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) just like the UCR, plus simple assault, but not murder. It also inquires about two kinds of thefts from individuals (personal larceny with contact like purse snatching and pickpocketing, and without any direct contact), and three types of stealing directed at the common property of households—burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft—again, just like the UCR (except that crimes against collectivities like organizations and commercial enterprises are not included in the NCVS but are counted in the UCR). M Identity theft is now examined, but the list of possible offenses is far from exhaustive. For I example, respondents are not quizzed about instances of kidnapping, swindling, blackmail, L extortion, and property damage due to vandalism E or arson. S The benefit of survey research is that it eliminates , the futility of attempting the impossible: interviewing every person (of the nearly 265 million people 12 years old or older residing in the entire United States in 2013) to find out how he or she S fared in the past year. The combined experiences of H about 160,000 individuals over the age of 11 just living A in roughly 90,000 households randomly selected to be in the national sample in 2013 can N projected to derive estimates of the total number be of N people throughout the country who were robbed, raped, or beaten, and of households that O suffered burglaries, larcenies, or car thefts (Truman and N Langton, 2014). Shortcomings of the Data At the survey’s inception, 1 the idea of asking people about their recent misfortunes was hailed as a major breakthrough that 9 would provide more accurate statistics than those 0 in the UCR. But, for a number of reasons, found the 9 technique has not turned out to be the foolproof method for measuring the “actual” amount of T interpersonal violence and theft that some victimologists S had hoped it would be. (For more extensive critiques of the methodology, see Levine, 1976; Garofalo, 1981; Skogan, 1981b, 1986; Lehnen and Skogan, 1981; Reiss, 1981, 1986; Schneider, 1981; O’Brien, 1985; Mayhew and Hough, 1988; Fattah, 1991; and Lynch and Addington, 2007). First, the findings of this survey, like any other, are reliable only to the extent that the national 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. VICTIMIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES: AN OVERVIEW sample is truly representative of the population of the whole country. If the sample is biased (in terms of factors connected to victimization, such as age, gender, race, class, and geographical location), then the projections made about the experiences of the roughly 250 million people who actually were not questioned in 2013 will be either too high or too low. Because the NCVS is household based, it might fail to fully capture the experiences of transients (such as homeless persons and inmates) orM people who wish to keep a low profile (such as I “illegal” immigrants or fugitives). Second, the credibility of what people tell poll-L sters is a constant subject of debate and a matter of E continuing concern in this survey. Underreporting remains a problem because communication barriersS can inhibit respondents from disclosing details, about certain crimes committed against them (incidents that they also probably refused to bring to the attention of the police). Any systematic suppressionS of the facts, such as the unwillingness of wives to reveal that their husbands beat them, of teenageH girls to divulge that they suffered date rapes, or ofA young men to admit that they were robbed while trying to buy illicit drugs or a prostitute’s sexualN services, will throw off the survey’s projection ofN the true state of affairs. Furthermore, crimes committed against children under 12 are not probed (soO no information is forthcoming about physical andN sexual abuse by caretakers, or molestations or kidnappings by acquaintances or strangers). Memory decay (forgetting about incidents) also results in1 information losses, especially about minor offenses 9 that did not involve serious injuries or expenses. But overreporting can occur as well. Some0 respondents may exaggerate or deliberately lie for9 a host of personal motives. Experienced detectives filter out any accounts by complainants that do notT sound believable. They deem the charges to beS “unfounded” and decide that no further investigation is warranted (see Chapter 6). But there is no such quality control over what people tell NCVS interviewers. The police don’t accept all reports of crimes at face value, but pollsters must. “Stolen” objects actually may have been misplaced, and an accidentally shattered window may be mistaken as 75 evidence of an attempted break-in. Also, no verification of assertions takes place. If a person in the sample discusses a crime that was supposedly reported to the local police, there is no attempt to double-check to see if the respondent’s recollections coincide with the information in the department’s case files. Forward telescoping is the tendency to vividly remember traumatic events and therefore believe that a serious crime occurred more recently than it actually did (within the survey’s reference period of “the previous six months”). It contributes to overreporting because respondents think a crime should be counted, when actually it was committed long before and ought to be excluded. Because being targeted within the previous six months is a relatively rare event, tens of thousands of people must be polled to find a sufficient number of individuals with incidents worthy of discussion to meet the requirements for statistical soundness. For example, about 1,000 people must be interviewed in order to locate just a handful who were recently robbed. Estimates derived from small subsamples (such as robbery victims who are elderly and female) have large margins of error. The NCVS therefore requires a huge sample and becomes very expensive to carry out. Even with a relatively large number of participants, the findings of the survey can only describe the situation in the nation as a whole. The seriousness of the crime problem in a particular city, county, or state cannot be accurately determined because the national sample is not large enough to break down into local subgroups of sufficient size for statistical analysis (with a few exceptions). Furthermore, the projected absolute number of incidents (offenses committed and victims harmed) and the relative rates (victims per 1,000 people per year) are really estimates at the midpoint of a range (what statisticians call a confidence interval). Therefore, NCVS rates always must be regarded as approximate, plus or minus a certain correction factor (margin of error) that depends mostly on the size of the entire sample (all respondents) and becomes statistically questionable for a very small specific subsample, such as low-income 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 76 CHAPTER 3 young men, living in cities, who were robbed within the last six months. The NCVS has improved over the years as better ways have been devised to draw representative samples, to determine which incidents coincide with or don’t fit the FBI’s uniform crime definition, and to jog respondents’ memories (Taylor, 1989). In particular, more explicit questions were added about sexual assaults (involving unwanted or coerced sexual contact) that fell short of the legal definition of forcible rape and about instances of domestic violence (simple assaults) (Hoover, 1994; and Kindermann, Lynch, and Cantor, 1997). Over its four decades, the survey’s questions have been refocused, clarified, and improved. But the accuracy of the NCVS has suffered because of waves of budget cuts. To save money, the sample size has been trimmed repeatedly. Over the decades, expensive “paper and pencil interviews” (PAPI) carried out at people’s homes have been replaced by follow-up phone calls (computerassisted telephone interviews [CATI]) and mail-in questionnaires. The response rate for individuals who were invited to participate has held steady at about 88 percent; in other words, 12 percent of the people chosen for the study declined to answer questions in 2010 as well as in 2013 (Truman, 2011; and Truman and Langton, 2014). Comparing the UCR and the NCVS For victimologists, the greater variety of statistics published in the NCVS offer many more possibilities for analysis and interpretation than the much more limited data in the UCR. But both official sources have their advantages, and the two can be considered to complement each other. The UCR, not the NCVS, is the source to turn to for information about murder victims because questions about homicide don’t appear on the BJS’s survey. (However, two other valuable, detailed, and accurate databases for studying homicide victims are death certificates as well as public health records maintained by local coroners’ and medical examiners’ offices. These files may contain information about the slain person’s sex, age, race/ ethnicity, ancestry, birthplace, occupation, educational attainment, and zip code of last known address [for examples of how this non-UCR data can be analyzed, see Karmen, 2006]). The UCR is also the publication that presents information about officers slain in the line of duty, college students harmed on campuses, and hate crimes directed against various groups. The UCR is the place to go for geographically based statistics; itMprovides data about the crimes reported to law enforcement agencies in different towns and cities, I entire metropolitan areas, and counties, states, and regions of the country. NCVS figures are calculated L for the whole country, four geographic regions, and E urban/suburban/rural areas, but are not available S specific cities, counties, or states (because the for subsamples would be too small to analyze). The , UCR, but not the NCVS, calculates the overall proportion of reported crimes that are solved by police departments. Incidents counted in the S UCR can be considered as having passed through H sets of authenticity filters: Victims felt what two happened was serious enough to notify the authorA ities shortly afterward, and officers who filled out N reports believed that the complainants were the telling N the truth as supported by some evidence. Although limited information about arrestees is O provided in the UCR, this annual report doesn’t provide any descriptions of the persons harmed by N those accused rapists, robbers, assailants, burglars, and other thieves (until the NIBRS replaces current 1 record-keeping formats). NCVS interviewers collect a great deal of 9 information about the respondents who claim 0 were harmed by street crimes. The NCVS is they the 9 source to turn to for a more inclusive accounting of what happened during a given year because it T contains information about incidents that were but also S were not reported to the police. The yearly surveys are not affected by any changes in the degree of cooperation—or level of tension—between community residents and their local police, by improvements in record-keeping by law enforcement agencies, or by temporary crackdowns in which all incidents are taken more seriously. But the NCVS interviewers must accept at face value the 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. VICTIMIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES: AN OVERVIEW accounts respondents describe. Also, the NCVS annual report has nothing to offer about murders, line-of-duty assaults and deaths of police officers, offenses committed against children under 12, robberies and burglaries directed at commercial establishments, and injuries and losses from intentionally set fires. Even when both of these official sources collect data about the same crimes, the findings might not be strictly comparable. First of all, the defini-M tions of certain offenses (such as rape) can vary, so the numerators may not count the same incidents.I The UCR kept track only of rapes of women andL girls (sexual assaults against boys and men were E considered as “forcible sodomy”) until a genderneutral definition that explicitly described all formsS of intrusive bodily invasions was adopted in 2011., The NCVS counts sexual assaults against males as well as females. Similarly, the definitions of robbery and burglary are not the same in the twoS official record-keeping sources. For example, the UCR includes robberies of commercial establish-H ments and burglaries of offices, but the NCVSA does not. In addition, the denominators differ. While theN FBI computes incidents of violence “per 100,000N people,” the BJS calculates incidents “per 1,000 people age 12 or older.” For property crimes, theO NCVS denominator is “per 1,000 households,” notN individuals (the average household has between two and three people living in it). Therefore, it is difficult to make direct compar-1 isons between the findings of the UCR and the 9 NCVS. The best way to take full advantage of these two official sources of data from the federal0 government is to focus on the unique information9 provided by each data collection system. Even when the new and improved NIBRST data storage system is taken into account, severalS important variables are not tracked by any of these government monitoring systems. For example, information about the victims’ education, occupation, ancestry, birthplace, and rap sheet is not collected by the UCR, the NIBRS, or the NCVS. Yet these background variables could be crucial to investigate certain issues (like robbers preying on 77 recent immigrants or murders of persons known to be involved in the drug scene). A First Glance at the Big Picture: Estimates of the Number of New Crime Victims Each Year To start to bring the big picture in focus, a first step would be to look up how many Americans reveal that they were victims of street crimes each year. The absolute numbers are staggering: Police forces across the nation learned about nearly 1.25 million acts of “violence against persons” during 2013, according to the FBI’s (2014) annual Uniform Crime Reports. In addition, over 9 million thefts were reported to the police (however, some were carried out against stores or offices, not individuals or families). The situation was even worse, according to the BJS’ National Crime Victimization Survey. It projected that people 12 years old and over suffered an estimated 6.1 million acts of violence, and households experienced close to 16.8 million thefts during 2013 (Truman and Langton, 2014). Some individuals and households are victimized more than once in a year, so the number of incidents might be greater than the number of people. Then again, in some incidents, more than one person might be harmed, so the number of people could be larger than the number of criminal events. Either way, it is obvious that each year, millions of Americans are initiated into a group that they did not want to be part of: They join the ranks of those who know what it is like from firsthand experience to endure crime-inflicted injuries and losses. A Second Look at the Big Picture: Watching the FBI’s Crime Clock Consider another set of statistics intended to summarize 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). 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 78 CHAPTER 3 One murder every 37 minutes 55 60 One forcible rape every 7 minutes 5 50 10 45 15 40 20 35 30 25 One violent crime every 27 seconds One crime index offense every 4 seconds One property crime every 4 seconds F I G U R E 3.1 The FBI’s Crime Clock, 2013 SOURCE: FBI, 2014. The Crime Clock’s statistics are calculated in a straightforward manner. The total number of incidents 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 ¼ 31,536,000) or minutes (60
24
365 ¼ 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 ¼ 37) indicates 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 One robbery every 90 seconds M I L One aggravated assault every E 44 seconds S One , burglary every 16 seconds S One Hlarceny-theft every 5 seconds A N One motor vehicle theft every N 45 seconds O N steady stream of casualties flows into morgues, 1 hospital emergency rooms, and police stations throughout the nation. At practically every 9 moment, someone somewhere in the United States is0experiencing what it feels like to be harmed by a criminal. These grim reminders give the impression 9 that becoming a victim someday is virtually ineviT It seems to be just a matter of time before table. one’s 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 alarming 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 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. VICTIMIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES: AN OVERVIEW 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 incidents 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 departments. The reporting rate varies from crime toM crime, place to place, year to year, and group to group (see Chapter 6 for more details about victimI reporting rates). Hence, one way to look at theseL Crime Clock statistics is to assume that they repreE sent the tip of the iceberg: The actual number of people harmed by offenders in these various waysS 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 UCRS data, it conveys the annual reported crime experience by showing a relative frequency of occurrenceH of the Part I index offenses. It should not be takenA to imply a regularity in the commission of crime. The Crime Clock represents the annual ratio ofN crime to fixed time intervals” (FBI, 2014, p. 44).N In other words, the reader is being reminded that in reality, the number of offenses carried out byO lawbreakers ebbs and flows, varying with the timeN 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 timing1 of the attacks. These street crimes do not take place 9 with such rigid regularity or predictability. The Crime Clock mode of presentation—0 which has appeared in the UCR for decades—has9 inherent shock value because as it ticks away, the future seems so ominous. Members of the publicT can be frightened into thinking they may be nextS 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 79 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 frightened recipient to sign up for a “free” security system that, of course, has many hidden costs. Delving Deeper into the Big Picture: Examining Victimization Rates Statistics always must be scrutinized carefully, double-checked, and then put into perspective with some context. Victimologists and criminologists look at both raw numbers and rates. Raw numbers reveal the actual numbers of victims. For example, the body count or the death toll is a raw number indicating how many people were dispatched by murderers. Rates are the appropriate measurements to use when comparing the incidence of crime in populations of unequal size, such as the seriousness of the violence problem in different cities or countries, or at different periods of time. The UCR could offer another disclaimer—but doesn’t—that the Crime Clock’s figures are unnecessarily alarming because they lack an important measurement of risk—the recognition that there are millions of potential targets throughout the nation. The ticking away of the Crime Clock is an unduly frightening way of depicting the big picture because it uses seconds, minutes, hours, or days as the denominator of the fraction. An alternative formulation could be used in the calculation: one that places the reported number of victimizations in the numerator of the fraction and the (huge) number of people or possessions who are in danger of being singled out by criminals into the denominator. Because there are so many hundreds of millions of residents, homes, and automobiles that could be selected by predators on the prowl, the actual chances of any given individual experiencing an incident during the course of a year may not be so high or so worrisome at all. This denominator provides some context. 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 80 CHAPTER 3 This alternative calculation—using a large denominator, “per 100,000 persons per year”— puts the problem in perspective and can yield a very different impression. In fact, the UCR does present these “crime rates”—which also could be called “victimization rates”—right after the Crime Clock in every yearly report. It seems to make a world of difference in terms of context. The implicit message when rates are calculated is almost the opposite: Don’t worry so much about being targeted. These misfortunes will probably burden someone else. Indeed, the UCR’s yearly findings seem relatively reassuring, suggesting that the odds of being harmed are not at all as ominous as the Crime Clock implies. For example, the Crime Clock warned that a violent crime took place about every 27 seconds during 2013. That understandably sounds frightening because violence is the part of the street crime problem that the public worries about the most. However, when the UCR findings are presented with a huge denominator as a rate (per 100,000 persons per year), the figure seems less worrisome. For every 100,000 Americans, only 368 were subjected to a violent attack during 2013. Another way of expressing that same rate is that 99,632 out of every 100,000 persons made it through the year unscathed. Put still another way, only about 0.4 percent (far less than 1 percent) of the public complained to the police that they had been raped, robbed, or assaulted that year (or they were murdered). (Remember, however, that not all acts of violence are reported; some robberies were of stores or banks, or other commercial enterprises or offices; and also, some individuals face much higher or much lower risks of being targeted, as will be explained in Chapter 4.) As described above, victimization rates also are computed and disseminated by another branch of the U.S. Department of Justice, the BJS. Its estimates about the chances of being harmed come from a different source—not police files, but a nationwide survey of the population: the NCVS. The survey’s findings are presented as rates per 1,000 persons per year for violent crimes, and per 1,000 households per year for property crimes (in contrast to the UCR’s per 100,000 per year; to compare the two sets of statistics, just move the NCVS figure’s decimal point two places to the right to indicate the rate per 100,000). The NCVS’s findings M indicated that 23.2 out of every 1,000 residents age 12 and over in the United States (or I 2,320 per 100,000, or 2.3 percent) were on the receiving end of an act of violence during 2013. L (This estimate is substantially greater than the E UCR figure because it includes those incidents S were not reported to the police but were that disclosed to the interviewers; and it counts a , huge number of less serious simple assaults while the UCR only counts more serious aggravated assaults—for definitions, see Box 3.1 S below.) Furthermore, the NCVS supplies some H reassuring details that are not available from the UCR: A The rate of injury was about 6 per 1,000 (Truman and Langton, 2014). In other words, N victim was not physically wounded in the about three quarters of the confrontations. N Accentuating the positive (interpreting these staO with an “upbeat” spin), despite widespread tistics public N concern, for every 1,000 residents of the United States (over the age of 11), 977 were never confronted and 994 were not wounded 1 during 2013. In sum, the two sources of data—the UCR and 9 the NCVS—published by separate agencies in the 0 federal government strive to be reasonably accurate and trustworthy. What differs is the way the statis9 tics are collected and presented. Each format lends T to a particular interpretation or spin. The itself UCR’s Crime Clock calculations focus on the S number of persons harmed per hour, minute, or even second. But stripped of context, these figures are unduly alarming because they give the impression that being targeted is commonplace. They ignore the fact that the overwhelming majority of 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. VICTIMIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES: AN OVERVIEW Americans went about their daily lives throughout the year without interference from criminals. The rates per 100,000 published in the UCR and per 1,000 in the NCVS juxtapose the small numbers who were preyed upon against the huge numbers who got away unscathed in any given year. This mode of presenting the same facts yields a very different impression: a rather reassuring message that being targeted is a relatively unusual event. M I Tapping into the UCR and the NCVS to Fill L in the Details of the Big Picture E The two official sources of government statistics can yield useful information that answers impor-S tant questions about everyday life, such as, “How, often does interpersonal violence break out?” (Note that when working with statistics and rounding off numbers such as body counts andS murder rates, it is easy to forget that each death represents a terrible tragedy for the real peopleH whose lives were prematurely terminated, and aA devastating loss for their families.) The BJS’s definitions that are used by NCVSN interviewers appear side by side in Table 3.1 withN the FBI’s definitions that are followed by police departments transmitting their figures to theO UCR. Also shown are the estimated numbers ofN incidents and victimization rates for 2013 derived from both data collecting programs. Glancing at the data from the UCR and the1 NCVS presented in Table 3.1, the big picture 9 takes shape. Note that the numbers of incidents and the victimization rates from the NCVS are0 often higher than the UCR figures for each type9 of offense. The main reason is that the NCVS numbers include crimes not reported to the police, andT therefore not forwarded to FBI headquarters forS inclusion in the UCR. Both sources of data expose a widely believed myth. Contrary to any false impressions gained from news media coverage and television or movie plots, people suffer from violent crimes 81 much less frequently than from property crimes. Every year, larceny (thefts of all kinds, a broad catch-all category) is the most common crime of all. Burglary is the second most widespread form of victimization, and motor vehicle theft ranks third. According to NCVS findings, thefts of possessions—the stealing of items left unattended outdoors plus property or cash taken by someone invited into the home, such as a cleaning person or guest—touched an estimated 10,050 out of every 100,000 households, or roughly 10 percent, in 2013. Fortunately, this kind of victimization turns out to be the least serious; most of these thefts would be classified as petty larcenies because the dollar amount stolen was less than some threshold specified by state laws, such as $1,000). The NCVS finding about how common thefts are each year is confirmed by the UCR. Larcenies of all kinds (including shoplifting from stores in the UCR definition) vastly outnumber all other types of crimes reported to police departments. As for violent crimes, fortunately a similar pattern emerges: The most common is the least serious type. Simple assaults (punching, kicking, shoving, and slapping) are far more likely to be inflicted than aggravated assaults, robberies, rapes, or murders. Aggravated assaults, which are intended to seriously wound or kill, ranked second in frequency on the NCVS. According to the UCR, aggravated or “felonious assaults” were the most common type of violent offense reported to the police, but that is because the UCR doesn’t monitor the number of simple assaults committed. Only the number of arrests for simple assaults, not the number of incidents, appears in Part II of the UCR; the NIBRS keeps track of statistics for both simple and aggravated assaults but a nationwide tally is not yet possible. Because so many complicated situations can arise, interviewers for the NCVS receive instructions about how to categorize the incidents victims disclose to them. Similarly, the FBI publishes a manual for police departments to follow when 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 82 CHAPTER T A B L E 3.1 3 Estimated Nationwide Victimization Rates from the UCR and the NCVS, 2013 Crime Definition Incidents Rate (per 100,000) The willful (nonnegligent) killing of one human being by another; includes manslaughter and deaths due to recklessness; excludes deaths due to accidents, suicides, and justifiable homicides. The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will; includes attempts; excludes other sexual assaults and statutory rape. The taking of or attempting to take anything of value from the care, custody, or control of a person or persons by force or threat of force; includes commercial establishments and carjackings, armed and unarmed. The unlawful attacking of one person by another for the purpose of inflicting severe bodily injury, often by using a deadly weapon; includes attempted murder and severe beatings of family members; excludes simple, unarmed, minor assaults. No weapon used, minor wounds inflicted The unlawful entry of a structure to commit a felony or theft; includes unlawful entry without applying force to residences and commercial and government premises. The unlawful taking, carrying, leading, or riding away of property from the possession of another; includes purse snatching, pocket picking, thefts from vehicles, thefts of parts of vehicles, and shoplifting; excludes the use of force or fraud to obtain possessions. The theft or attempted driving away of vehicle; includes automobiles, trucks, buses, motorcycles, snowmobiles, and commercially owned vehicles; excludes farm machinery and boats and planes. 14,200 4.5 80,000 25 345,000 109 724,000 229 Not measured 1,928,000 Not computed 610 6,004,000 1,900 700,000 221 Not measured 174,000 Not computed 110 369,000 240 633,000 380 2,047,000 1,580 2,458,000 2,570 (per 100,000 households) 9,071,000 10,050 (per 100,000 households) 520 (per 100,000 households) FBI’s UCR Definitions Murder Forcible Rape Robbery Aggravated Assault Simple Assault Burglary Larceny-Theft M I L E S , S H A BJS’s NCVS Definitions N Murder Not included in the survey Rape/Sexual Rape is the unlawful penetration of a male or female through the use of N Assault force or threats of violence; includes all bodily orifices, the use of objects, and attempts as well as verbal threats. Sexual assaults O are unwanted sexual contacts, such as grabbing or fondling; includes attempts and may not N 12. involve force; excludes molestations of children under Motor Vehicle Theft Robbery Aggravated Assault Simple Assault Household Burglary Theft Motor Vehicle Theft The taking directly from a person of property or cash by force or threat of force, with or without a weapon; includes attempts; excludes hold-ups of commercial establishments. The attacking of person with a weapon, regardless of whether an injury is sustained; includes attempts as well as physical assaults without a weapon that result in serious injuries; excludes severe physical abuse of children under 12. The attacking of person without a weapon resulting in minor wounds or no physical injury; includes attempts and intrafamily violence. The unlawful entry of residence, garage, or shed, usually but not always, for the purpose of theft; includes attempts; excludes commercial or governmental premises. The theft of property or cash without contact; includes attempts to take possessions and stealing by persons invited inside. The driving away or taking without authorization of any household’s motorized vehicle; includes attempts. 1 9 0 9 T S 556,000 NOTES: All UCR and NCVS figures for incidents were rounded off to the nearest 1,000, except for murder, which is rounded off to the nearest 100. All NCVS rates were multiplied by 100 to make them comparable to UCR rates. The FBI definition of rape is the old narrow one, referred to as the “legacy” definition, not the new expanded one. SOURCES: FBI’s UCR, 2013; BJS’s NCVS, 2013 (Truman and Langton, 2014). 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. VICTIMIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES: AN OVERVIEW they submit records to the UCR about the crimes they are aware of that were committed in their jurisdiction. These guidelines are intended to insure that the annual crime reports are genuinely “uniform”—in the sense that the same definitions and standards are used by each of the roughly 18,000 participating law enforcement agencies. For example, all police and sheriffs’ departments are supposed to exclude from their body count of murders all cases of vehicular homicides caused byM drunk and impaired drivers; accidental deaths; justifiable homicides carried out by officers of the law orI by civilians acting in self-defense; and suicides. ButL some very complex situations may arise on rare E occasions and need to be clarified, so guidelines for scoring them on the UCR are disseminated byS the FBI. Some of these instructions appear in, Box 3.1 below. (Note that local prosecutors might view these crimes differently.) Poring over “details” like the precise wordingS of definitions and arguing over what should and should not be included and counted, or excludedH and not monitored, may seem like a rather dryA technical exercise and even a “boring” waste of time. However, definitions and the statistics derivedN from them can really matter. For example, considerN the implications of this issue: O Police officials and women’s groups … N applauded a recommendation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation subcommittee that the definition of rape used by the agency be 1 revised. The definition, written more than 80 years ago, has been criticized as too narrow,9 resulting in thousands of rapes being excluded0 from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. The subcommittee recommends a broader defini- 9 tion, to include anal and oral rape as well as T rapes involving male victims. (Goode, 2011). S What would be the consequence of adopting the more inclusive definition? Initially, forcible rape rates as monitored by this government source would rise, reflecting a more comprehensive and accurate count of the actual amount of sexual violence in the United States. That larger statistic could result in the allocation of additional federal, 83 state, and local resources to fund efforts to catch and prosecute more rapists, and to provide support and assistance to a greater number of victims (Goode, 2011). Searching for Changes in the Big Picture: Detecting Trends in Interpersonal Violence and Theft The data in the annual UCR as well as the NCVS represent the situation in the streets and homes of America after a particular year has drawn to a close. These yearly reports can be likened to a snapshot at a certain point in time. But what about a movie or video that reveals changes over time? To make the big picture more useful, a crucial question that must be answered is whether street crime is becoming more or less of a problem as the years roll by. Sharp increases in rates over several consecutive years are commonly known as crime waves. Downward trends indicating reduced levels of criminal activity can take place as well. Ironically, there isn’t a good term to describe a sudden yet sustained improvement in public safety. Perhaps the term crime crash (see Karmen, 2006) captures the essence of such a largely unexpected, yearafter-year downturn (just as a quick plunge in the price of shares on the stock market is called a crash, except that a “crime crash” goes on for years before it is noticeable, and then is welcomed). During the late 1960s, a major crime wave engulfed the country, according to the FBI’s UCR, which was the only annual source of nationwide data during that decade. Since 1973, the findings of the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) NCVS have provided an additional set of figures to monitor the upward and downward drifts in victimization rates. The establishment of a second, independent reporting system to measure the amount of street crime in contemporary American society initially appeared to be a major breakthrough in terms of bringing the big picture into sharper focus. In theory, the federal government’s two monitoring systems should support and confirm each other’s findings, lending greater credence to all official statistics shared with the 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 84 CHAPTER B O X 3.1 3 The FBI’s Instructions About How to Classify Certain Complicated Crimes: Guidelines from the Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook Part A. Does the death of the victim fall into the category of a murder? What if the victim…: SITUATION 1) …is confronted by a robber or other assailant and suffers a heart attack and dies? ANSWER: Do not count this as a murder, but simply as a robbery or as an assault (because it is not a “willful killing”). SITUATION 2) …is a woman in the ninth month of pregnancy who is stabbed in the stomach; she survives, but the fetus dies? ANSWER: Do not categorize this as a murder. Score this as an aggravated assault against the woman (because the definition of murder excludes deaths of unborn fetuses). SITUATION 3) …is a firefighter or a police officer who enters a burning building and dies; later it is determined that the blaze was intentionally set by an arsonist? ANSWER: Do not count this as a murder because it is understood that firefighting and police work is hazardous and requires taking grave risks. SITUATION 4) …is a motorist embroiled in a road rage incident who dies because his adversary intentionally crashes his vehicle into the motorist’s car? ANSWER: Score this as a murder. If the victim survives, then consider the incident to be an aggravated assault (the vehicle is the deadly weapon), no matter how minor the injury to the person or the damage to the car. Part B. Is it a rape? What if the victim… SITUATION 1) …is slipped a date-rape drug in her drink by a man who is after her, but he is unable to lure her away from her friends? MA I L E S S , A NSWER: ITUATION S H SA N N A O N Count this as an attempted forcible rape, since he intended to have intercourse with her against her will (she would be incapable of giving consent because of her temporary mental or physical incapacity) but was thwarted by his inability to get her alone. 2) …is married to a man who beats her until she submits to intercourse? NSWER: Count this as a forcible rape. Ever since marital rape was recognized as a crime, the law no longer permits a husband to be exempt from arrest for forcing himself on his wife. Part C. Is the incident an armed robbery? What if the victim… ITUATION 1) …is a cashier in a store who is ordered to hand over money by a man who claims to have a weapon in his pocket but does not brandish it, so the cashier does not actually see it? NSWER: Score this as an armed robbery, since the robber claimed to have a weapon (or perhaps had a fake knife or gun). SITUATION 2) …returns home and surprises a burglar, who then assaults him with a crowbar, steals valuables, and escapes out the door? 1 A : Score this as an armed robbery, since the resident was confronted and attacked by the intruder. 9 SOURCE: Adapted and reworded from Uniform Crime Reporting System Guidelines 0 (FBI, 2009). 9 T public. But in practice, estimates from the UCR and NCVS S doesn’t ask about murder (a relatively small NSWER the NCVS have diverged for particular categories of offenses during certain brief stretches of time, clouding the big picture about national trends (Rand & Rennison, 2002). The UCR measures the violent crime rate by adding together all the known cases of murder, forcible rape, aggravated assault, and robbery. The number) but it does inquire about simple assaults (a huge number). The BJS then combines all disclosed cases of simple and aggravated assault, all sexual assaults (of males as well as females), and some robberies (only of people, not banks or stores) into its violent crime rate. Other differences in data collection methodology plus divergent definitions that 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 85 VICTIMIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES: AN OVERVIEW 600 NCVS Rate (per 1,000 persons) 500 400 300 200 100 the graph in Figure 3.3 echoes that of Figure 3.2: Property crime rates “crashed” during the 1990s and have fallen farther during the twenty-first century. In sum, both the FBI’s UCR and the BJS’s NCVS confirm that diminishing numbers of residents of the 50 states are being affected by the social problems of violence and theft. In other words, even though each year millions of new individuals join the ranks of crime victims, the rate of growth has been slowing down for about two decades. This substantial decline in victimization rates since the early 1990s is certainly good news. But how much longer will this crime crash continue? Few social scientists, politicians, or journalists would dare declare that the “war on crime” has been won. And since the experts can’t agree about the reasons why this substantial improvement in public safety took place, if someday there is a return to the S H A N N O N 60 NCVS violent crime rate UCR violent crime rate 1 9 0 9 T S 40 30 20 10 0 19 7 19 3 7 19 4 7 19 5 7 19 6 7 19 7 7 19 8 7 19 9 8 19 0 8 19 1 8 19 2 8 19 3 8 19 4 8 19 5 8 19 6 8 19 7 8 19 8 8 19 9 9 19 0 9 19 1 9 19 2 9 19 3 9 19 4 9 19 5 9 19 6 9 19 7 9 19 8 99 20 0 20 0 0 20 1 02 20 0 20 3 04 20 0 20 5 0 20 6 0 20 7 08 20 0 20 9 1 20 0 1 20 1 1 20 2 13 0 50 Year F I G U R E 3.2 Trends in Violent Victimization Rates, United States, 1973–2013 SOURCES: FBI’s UCRs 1973–2013; BJS’s NCVSs 1973–2013. 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. UCR Rate (per 100,000 inhabitants) were discussed above may help explain some of the inconsistent results in the years between 1973 and the start of the 1990s, when the two trend lines were not in synch. But one finding clearly emerges: According to both of these monitoring systems, violent crime rates “crashed” during the 1990s and have continued to drift downward, as the graph in Figure 3.2 demonstrates. A parallel set of problems and findings arise when the changes over time in property crimeM rates are graphed. The UCR defines property crime to include burglary, motor vehicle theft,I and larcenies against persons and households butL also against commercial enterprises, government E offices, and nonprofit entities. The NCVS counts burglaries, vehicle thefts, and larcenies but only ifS they are directed against individuals and their, households. Once again, despite differing signals during the first 20 years, the takeaway message of 86 CHAPTER 3 600 6000 NCVS property crime rate NCVS Rate (per 1,000 persons) UCR property crime rate 500 5000 400 4000 300 200 100 M I L E S , 3000 2000 1000 S 0 H A Year N 1973–2013 F I G U R E 3.3 Trends in Property Crime Rates, United States, SOURCES: FBI’s UCRs 1973–2013; BJS’s NCVSs 1973–2013. N O “bad old days” of much higher rates of victimizaand then during the time period of the Thirteen N tion, the causes of this reversal will be the subject of Colonies, the American Revolution, the centuries 19 7 19 3 7 19 4 7 19 5 7 19 6 7 19 7 7 19 8 7 19 9 8 19 0 8 19 1 8 19 2 8 19 3 8 19 4 8 19 5 8 19 6 8 19 7 8 19 8 8 19 9 9 19 0 9 19 1 9 19 2 9 19 3 9 19 4 9 19 5 9 19 6 9 19 7 9 19 8 9 20 9 0 20 0 0 20 1 02 20 0 20 3 04 20 0 20 5 0 20 6 0 20 7 0 20 8 0 20 9 1 20 0 1 20 1 1 20 2 13 0 bitter debate (see Karmen, 2006). TAKING A LONGER VIEW: MURDERS IN THE UNITED STATES OVER THE PAST CENTURY Another aspect of the big picture involves getting a feel for historical trends. Is the level of criminal violence in the United States today far worse or much better than in the distant past? Is the United States becoming a safer place to live or a more dangerous society as the decades pass by? Today’s crime problem needs to be seen in a broader context. Historians write about the carnage of the past, especially when the first European settlers arrived, of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the frontier days of the “Wild West.” But accurate 1 records are hard to find before industrialization took place, cities sprang up, and urban police forces 9 began to guard local residents on a daily basis. 0 Graphs are particularly useful for spotting historical 9 trends at a glance. Trends in homicide rates can be traced further back than changes over time T the other interpersonal crimes. for S Murder is the most terrible crime of all because it inflicts the ultimate harm, and the damage cannot be undone. The irreparable loss is also felt by the departed person’s loved ones. But the social reaction to the taking of a person’s life varies dramatically. It is determined by a number of factors: the state’s laws, the offender’s state of mind, the deceased’s possible contribution to the escalation of hostilities, the social 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. VICTIMIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES: AN OVERVIEW standing of each party, where the crime was committed, how the person was dispatched, and whether the slaying attracted media coverage and public outcry. Some murders make headlines, while others slip by virtually unnoticed except by the next of kin. Some killings lead to the execution of the perpetrator; others ruled to be justifiable homicides result in no penalty and possibly even widespread approval. Homicide is broadly defined as the killing of one human being by another. Not all homicides are pun-M ishable murders. All murders are socially defined: How to handle a specific killing is determined byI legislators, police officers, and detectives; prosecutorsL and defense attorneys; judges and juries; and even E the media and the public’s reaction to someone’s demise. Deaths caused by carelessness and accidentsS are not classified as murders (although if the damage, was foreseeable, they might be prosecuted as manslaughters). Acts involving the legitimate use of deadly force in self-defense whether carried outS against felons by police officers or by private citizens under attack (see Chapter 13) are also excluded fromH the body counts, as are court-sanctioned executions.A The law takes into account whether a killing was carried out intentionally (with “express malice”), in aN rational state of mind (“deliberate”), and with advanceN planning (“premeditation”). These defining characteristics of first-degree murders carry the most severeO punishments, including (depending on the state) exe-N cution or life imprisonment without parole. Killing certain people—police officers, corrections officers, judges, witnesses, and victims during rapes, kidnap-1 pings, or robberies—may also be capital offenses. 9 A homicide committed with intent to inflict grievous bodily injury (but no intent to kill) or0 with extreme recklessness (“depraved heart”) is9 prosecuted as a second-degree murder. A murder in the second degree is not a capital crime and can-T not lead to the death penalty. S A homicide committed in the “sudden heat of passion” as a result of the victim’s provocations is considered a “voluntary” (or first-degree) manslaughter. The classic example is the “husband who comes home to find his wife in bed with another man and kills him.” Offenders convicted of manslaughter are punished less severely than those convicted of murder. 87 A loss of life due to gross negligence usually is handled as an “involuntary” (second-degree) manslaughter, or it may not be subjected to criminal prosecution at all. Involuntary manslaughter in most states occurs when a person acts recklessly, or appreciates the risk but does not use reasonable care to perform a legal act, or commits an unlawful act that is not a felony and yet a death results. Some types of slayings have special names (see Holmes, 1994): infanticide (of a newborn by a parent), filicide (of a child by a parent or stepparent), parricide (of a parent by a child), eldercide (of an older person), intimate partner homicide (of a spouse or lover), serial killing (several or more victims dispatched one at a time over an extended period), mass murder (several people slaughtered at the same time and place), felony murder (committed during another serious crime, like robbery, kidnapping, or rape), and contract killing (a professional “hit” for an agreed-upon fee). The UCR has been monitoring murder (combined with manslaughter) rates since the beginning of the 1930s, but in the beginning only big-city police departments forwarded their records to FBI headquarters. Fortunately, another source of data is available that is drawn from death certificates (maintained by coroner’s offices, which are called medical examiners offices in some jurisdictions) that list the cause of death. This database, compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics, can be tapped to reconstruct what happened during the earliest years of the twentieth century up to the present. Graphing this data facilitates the identification of crime waves and spikes but also sharp drops and deep “crashes” in the homicide rate over the decades. Long-term trends can then be considered in context (against a backdrop of major historical events affecting the nation as a whole). The Rise and Fall of Murder Rates Since 1900 It is possible to look back over more than a century to note how the homicide rate has surged and ebbed in America during various historical periods. As the trend line in Figure 3.4 indicates, homicide rates appeared to rise at the outset of the 1900s 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 88 CHAPTER 3 as states’ coroners’ offices joined the statistical reporting system. From 1903 through the period of World War I, which was followed by the prosperous “Roaring Twenties” until the stock market “crash” of 1929, the murder rate soared. It rose even further for a few more years until it peaked in 1933. So during the first 33 years of the twentieth century, the homicide rate skyrocketed from less than 1 American killed out of every 100,000 each year to nearly 10 per 100,000 annually. The number of violent deaths plummeted after Prohibition—the war on alcohol—ended in 1933, even though the economic hardships of the Great Depression persisted throughout the 1930s. During the years of World War II, when many young men were drafted to fight overseas against formidable enemies trying to conquer the world, only 5 slayings took place for every 100,000 inhabitants. A brief surge in killings broke out as most of the soldiers returned 12 Homicides per 100,000 inhabitants 10 8 6 4 2 home from World War II, but then interpersonal violence continued to decline during the 1950s, reaching a low of about 4.5 slayings for every 100,000 people by 1958. During the turbulent years from the early 1960s to the middle 1970s, the number of deadly confrontations shot up, doubling the homicide rate. This crime wave reflected the demographic impact of the unusually large baby-boom generation passing through its most crime-prone teenage and youngM adult years, as well as the bitter conflicts surrounding I sweeping changes in everyday life brought about the by L social protest movements that arose during the 1960s and lasted well into the 1970s. The level of E lethal violence during the twentieth century reached S all-time high in 1980, when the homicide rate hit its 10.2 , deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. After that peak, murder rates dropped for several years until the second half of the 1980s, when the crack epidemic S H A N N O N 1 9 0 9 T S 19 00 19 05 19 10 19 15 19 20 19 25 19 30 19 35 19 40 19 45 19 50 19 55 19 60 19 65 19 70 19 75 19 80 19 85 19 90 19 95 20 00 20 05 20 10 20 15 0 Year F I G U R E 3.4 An Historical Overview of Homicide Rates, United States, 1900–2013 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. VICTIMIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES: AN OVERVIEW touched off another escalation of bloodshed. By the start of the 1990s, murder rates once again were close to their highest levels for the century. But as that decade progressed, the fad of smoking crack, selling drugs, and toting guns waned; the economy improved; the proportion of the male population between 18 and 24 years old dwindled; and consequently, the murder rate tumbled (see Fox and Zawitz, 2002; and Karmen, 2006). The death toll has continued to drift downward throughout theM twenty-first century, even during the hard times of the Great Recession that set in after the subprimeI mortgage meltdown, stock market crash, andL corporate bailouts of 2008, as Figure 3.4 shows. E Returning to the UCR database, the impressive improvement in public safety became strikinglyS evident in 2013, when the body count declined, to about 14,200, about 10,500 fewer victims than in 1991, when the death toll had reached an all-time record of close to 24,700. Taking popula-S tion growth into account, the U.S. murder rate in 2013 stood at 4.5 killings per 100,000 inhabitants,H an overall “crash” of about 50 percent since 1991A (Cooper and Smith, 2011). The U.S. murder rate N hadn’t been as low as 4.5 since 1958. N O PUTTING CRIME INTO PERSPECTIVE: N THE CHANCES OF DYING VIOLENTLY—OR FROM OTHER CAUSES 1 9 One final way to grasp the big picture involves weighing the relative threats posed by different types0 of misfortunes. The chance of being harmed by a9 criminal needs to be compared to the odds of being hurt in an accident or of contracting a serious illness.T The study of comparative risks rests on estimatesS of the likelihood of experiencing various negative life events. One purpose of studying comparative risks is to determine what kinds of threats (crimes, accidents, or diseases) merit greater precautionary measures by both individuals and governmentsponsored campaigns. (A list of calamities could be expanded to include plagues, fires, and natural 89 disasters such as floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes.) Once the chances of being stricken by dreaded events are expressed in a standardized way, such as rates per 100,000 people, the dangers can be compared or ranked, as they are in Table 3.2. The data is derived from death certificates filed in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It is collated by the National Center for Health Statistics into a National Vital Statistics System (Xu et al., 2014). The nationwide data assembled in the first column of Table 3.2 pertains to people of all ages, both sexes, and varying backgrounds. The statistics in column 2 indicate that overall, about 800 out of every 100,000 Americans died in 2010. That year, the number of deaths from natural causes (diseases) greatly exceeded losses of life from external causes (accidents, suicides, and homicides). In particular, heart disease, cancer, and stroke were by far the leading causes of death in the United States at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. As for other untimely demises, more people died from accidents (including car crashes) than from homicide (murders plus deaths by “legal intervention”—justifiable homicides by police officers as well as executions of death row prisoners). In fact, more people took their own lives through suicides than lost them due to violence unleashed by others (homicide was added to the bottom of the list and did not rank in the top 10 leading causes of death). Tentatively, it can be concluded that most people worry too much about being murdered and ought to focus more of their energies toward their health, eating habits, and lifestyles instead. However, this inspection of comparative risks surely doesn’t seem right to some readers. For example, dying from Alzheimer’s disease might be a very real and scary prospect to aging baby boomers, but it is off the radar screen for most millennials. The usefulness of comparing the mortality rates assembled in the second column of Table 3.2 to each other is limited. The reason is simple: The data in the second column of the table ignores the key factor of age. Column 2’s figures about the causes of death describe the dangers faced by the “average” American, a social construct that each person resembles to some extent. But the actual odds a specific individual faces may differ tremendously from this fictitious composite norm. 9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 90 CHAPTER T A B L E 3.2 3 Comparing the Risks of Death Posed by Crime, Accidents, and Certain Diseases, 2010 and 2012 Cause of Death Death Rate per 100,000, All Americans, 2010 Death Rate per 100,000, 20–24 years olds, 2010 Death Rate per 100,000, All Americans, 2012 800 194 186 45 87 3 5 Fewer than 1 733 171 167 42 Fewer than 36 Fewer than Fewer than Fewer than 1 14 13 12 37 39 24 21 13 14 13 5* All causes 1) Heart problems (cardiovascular disease) 2) Cancers (malignant neoplasms) 3) Lung problems (pulmonary and respiratory diseases) 4) Strokes (cerebrovascular disease) 5) Accidents (unintentional injuries) 6) Alzheimer’s disease 7) Diabetes 8) Kidney problems (nephritis) 9) Influenza and pneumonia 10) Suicides (intentional self-harm) Homicides (including legal intervention) (assault) All other causes NOTE: Homicide rate for 2012 is estimated from the FBI’s UCR for 2012. 42 39 27 22 16 16 12 6 194 M I L E S , 1 1 1 1 SOURCE: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics Report, 2013; Yu et al., 2014 (column 5) Besides age, the most important determinants of mortality rates are sex, race/ethnicity, social class, and place of residence. To make more meaningful comparisons, some of these key variables, especially age, must be controlled, or held constant (see Fingerhut, Ingram, and Feldman, 1992). Death rates for young adults appear in the third column of Table 3.2. Comparing the rates in column 3 to those in column 2 reveals some sharp differences. For example, of all Americans between the ages of 20 and 24 (of both sexes and all races), only 87, not 800, out of every 100,000 died in 2010. For people in their early twenties, homicide was a real threat—the third leading cause of death—after accidents (especially involving motor vehicles) and suicides. Few young adults died from heart attacks, cancer, strokes, influenza, or other diseases like HIV/ AIDS (NCHS, 2013). Also, although this is not shown in the table, within every age group, being murdered loomed as a greater danger to boys and men than to girls and women, and to racial minorities as compared to members of the white majority. These observations raise an important issue. Besides comparative risks, victimologists have to also study S H differential risks. The perils facing different groups (in terms of age, sex, race/ethnicity, social A class, and other factors) can vary dramatically. DifN ferential risks will be scrutinized in the next chapter. Another problem with risk comparisons is that N the ranking represents a snapshot image of a fluid O situation. Thus, Table 3.2 captures a moment frozen in time—the relative standing of dangers of N accidents, diseases, and lethal violence in 2010. But it cannot indicate underlying trends. The chances of something terrible ending a life can 1 change for everyone substantially over the years. 9 That is why yearly data must be assembled into 0 and graphs in order to spot trends. tables 9 For example, an encouraging downward trend in fatal accidents took place during the 1980s. Deaths T to plane crashes, falls, drownin...
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