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Uniform Crime Report
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The Uniform Crime Report, also written as UCR, compiles essential, official data on crimes in the United States. The report is published by FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) on an annual basis depending on the rate of crimes within the state. This report is actually a statistical effort of over 17,000 city, college, and university, state, tribal, federal and county law enforcement agencies sharing information about crimes and terrorist attacks brought to their notice. The Uniform Crime Report provides people with sufficient information regarding day-to-day crimes, their possible consequences, and how to take measures and ensure their protection. The Federal Bureau of Investigation does not collect the information itself; for this purpose, it has joined hands with different law enforcement agencies all over the United States, which compile reports and provide FBI with complete details (Dahl, 2017).
The Uniform Crime Report program was initiated in 1929, and soon became a good and reliable source of crime data collection for police officers, scholars, media, public, and policymakers (Sarver, 2014). There are four main parts of this report:
* Law Enforcement Officers Murdered and Assaulted Project
* Traditional Summary Reporting System
* Cargo Theft Reporting Project
* Hate Crime Statistics Project
Based on these four categories, FBI prepares a final report and publishes it on a yearly basis, allowing people to understand the severity of different crimes and ensuring their safety. Regardless of the fact that the Uniform Crime Report is published every year, law enforcement agencies keep collecting data on a monthly basis by comparing different cities, provinces, towns, and villages. The main data collection resources are police stations where crimes are reported, police officers or investigators who supervise different cases in their specific areas, and online journals as well as newspapers. From the different case studies, I got to know that there are multiple methodologies of collecting data for the Uniform Crime Report, but I chose the Reporting Procedure and Group Discussion methods (1969).
Reporting procedure is all about reporting crimes by law enforcement agencies or police officers who investigate the crime scenes, evaluate each and every evidence, submit multiple samples to the forensic laboratory, and interview the witnesses secretly. Once all these steps are completed, the information that is considered irrelevant or useless is eliminated from the totals. It’s safe to say that this is one of the best methods to prepare a valid and reliable Uniform Crime Report. First of all, there is no room for errors or omissions since the investigation is carried out in different steps and the final report is prepared only when the representatives of law enforcement agencies cross-check everything. Secondly, the FBI itself evaluates and verifies everything before presenting the final Uniform Crime Report (2017).
The second method titled Group Discussion is also valid, authentic and reliable because it gets different experts involved who evaluate crimes by dividing them into multiple categories. Their representatives sit together and discuss every point. The evidence is verified and cross-checked for their authentication, and then the Federal Bureau of Investigation is informed about ...