Crime statistics are not what we are led to believe. We hear a lot about the crime rates going up and down from the media and they tend to expand on specific types of criminal behavior that might be of interest to the public. When politicians are running for office we are told that the crime rates are down due to the tough crime policies that they have been implemented. Citizens seek crime rates for assistance in determining if the area they reside in is safe. Some people wish to get a general idea of the crime rates for a specific neighborhood where they are thinking of purchasing a house. But what is never explained is where do the crime statistics come from and were there any factors that could have had an effect on their reliability. Crime statistics, which are created from what is reported to the police, are often unreliable. There are several influential factors that can make crime statistics both increase and decrease at any time. Most police departments, but not all, use Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) to submit their statistics to the state. Attempting to compare two police agency's crime statistics is almost impossible because not all police agencies use the UCR program for classifying crimes. UCR is a national data reporting policy that is maintained by the state and regulated by the FBI. This policy requires police agencies to report their monthly statistics by following a hierarchy scale for classifying the criminal offenses. A hierarchy scale is a list of crimes in a specific order of importance used to pick out the highest crime when there are multiple crimes committed in one incident. An example: a citizen contacts the police and makes a report of a burglary, a rape and a larceny all occurring in one incident. As per the hierarchy scale, the crime of rape would be the only one counted because of the higher classification of crime than the other two. By police agencies using this form of statistical classifying, there is...
