1. Chapter 3: The Magnitude of the Crime Problem

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3. Crime reporting rates in the US and UK
US reporting rate (%)
UK reporting rate (%)
Motor vehicle theft 95 93
Burglary 53 66
Aggravated assault/wounding 64 58
Robbery 61 47
Assault without injury 40 36
Theft from the person 35
All violent offences 49 43
All crime 41

4. Reasons for not reporting crime to police (UK)
Reason for not reporting
Vandalism
Burglary
Violence
Trivial/no loss/police would not/could not do anything 83 70 46
Private/dealt with ourselves 10 17 34
Inconvenient to report 5 6 4
Reported to other authorities 2 8
Common occurrence 3
Fear of reprisal 7
Dislike or fear of the police/previous bad experience with police or courts
Other 9

5. Reasons for not reporting crime to police (US)
Reason for not reporting
Violence
Robbery
Household burglary
Object recovered; offender unsuccessful 20 15 23
Reported to another official 14 5 4
Private or personal matter 19 8 7
Not important enough 6
Insurance would not cover
0.1 3

6. Case study
Calls for service in Camden, NJ

7. CAD incidents, Camden (NJ) 2005

8. Top potential crime calls for service, Camden, 2005

9. Calls for service in Camden, NJ
While 80 per cent of CAD incidents in Camden appear to relate to crime…
… over 80 per cent of these same incidents do not result in a crime report.

10. The crime funnel

11. Criminal careers Criminal careers can be defined by their Onset
Duration (usually measured in years)
Termination

12. Youth Lifestyles Survey
57 per cent of males and 37 per cent of females had committed an offence at some point in their life
Nearly 20 per cent of them had done so in the previous 12 months

13. Some major criminal career studies
Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development
Wolfgang’s Philadelphia cohort
UK Home Office study of the 1950s and 1960s

14. Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development
Frequents (43% of offenders)
Occasionals
Innocents
Criminal careers average between 7 and 9 years

15. Marvin Wolfgang Philadelphia cohort study
627 chronics constituted only 6.3 per cent of the whole cohort of 9,945 boys
Chronic offenders were responsible for 52 of all cohort offences

16. Prevalence of offenders per 100 males
Adapted from Farrington, D.P. (1992) ‘Criminal career research in the United Kingdom’, British Journal of Criminology, 32(4): 525.

17. Reoffending increases with court appearances
Source: Coumarelos, C. (1994) ‘Juvenile offending: predicting persistence and determining the cost-effectiveness of interventions’ (Sydney: NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research), p. 20

18. Key risk factors for prolific offenders
Background risk factors
Systemic identifiable risk factors
Socio-economically deprived
Early age of first conviction
Antisocial parents and siblings
History of court appearances
Received poor rearing as a child
History of drug usage
Coming from broken homes
Hanging around in public
Low intelligence
Having delinquent friends
Poor school record
Excessive drinking
Being truant or excluded from school
Being a victim of personal crime
Lack of parental supervision
Antisocial behavior

19. Organized crime Term loosely applied
Includes long-term, hierarchically structured teams, to
‘loose networks of career criminals, who come together for specific criminal ventures and dissolve once these are over’ (Serious Organized Crime Agency, 2006)

20. Money laundering
Estimates of yearly global sums laundered can range from US$500 billion to US$1.5 trillion (Brooks 2001)
However, the estimates that do exist have ‘little evidence to justify them’ (Levi 2002: 184)
Another constituent of the ‘dark figure of crime’

21. Criminal careers summarized
The criminal careers research can best be summarized as 6 per cent of the population commit about 60 per cent of the crime
Still leaves
a large number of prolific offenders to be disrupted or incapacitated, and
a significant minority of the crime being committed by occasional offenders who may not come to notice.