Lynn A. Addington

Using National Incident-Based Reporting System Murder Data to Evaluate Clearance Predictors: A Research Note

One limitation with the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program’s Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) is its failure to indicate whether a particular murder has been cleared. As a result, researchers using the SHR must rely on proxy measures to study clearance at the national level. Currently, the UCR Program is undergoing a large-scale conversion from its traditional summary system and SHR to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). One benefit of NIBRS is that it enables law enforcement agencies to report incident-level clearance information. Although NIBRS provides a new and important source of clearance information, researchers have largely ignored these data. The present study provides an initial examination of the NIBRS murder clearance data. Specifically, these data are used both to evaluate clearance predictors and to assess the validity of the proxy clearance measures previously used with the SHR.

Understanding Crime Statistics: Revisiting the Divergence of the NCVS and UCR

Introduction: 1. Introduction James P. Lynch and Lynn A. Addington Part I. Overview of the Two National Measures of U.S. Crime: 2. Introduction to the National Crime Victimization Survey Michael Rand and Callie Rennison 3. Introduction to the Uniform Crime Reporting Program Cynthia Barnett-Ryan Part II. Defining Divergence and Convergence: 4. What is convergence, and what do we know about it? David McDowall and Colin Loftin Part III. Sources of Divergence in the NCVS: 5. Methodological change in the NCVS and the effect on convergence Shannan M. Catalano 6. Series victimizations and divergence Mike Planty 7. Exploring differences in estimates of visits to emergency rooms for injuries from assaults using the NCVS and NHAMCS Jacqueline Cohen and James P. Lynch Part IV. Sources of Divergence in the UCR: 8. Using NIBRS to study methodological sources of divergence between the UCR and NCVS Lynn A. Addington 9. Explaining the divergence between UCR and NCVS aggravated assault trends Richard Rosenfeld 10. Missing UCR data and divergence of the NCVS and UCR trends Michael D. Maltz Conclusion James P. Lynch and Lynn A. Addington.

Violence Against College Women A Review to Identify Limitations in Defining the Problem and Inform Future Research

Over the past 25 years, our understanding about violence against college women has greatly expanded, but it has been concentrated in particular areas. As a result, despite this increased attention, significant gaps in our knowledge still exist. One is a failure to take stock in how “violence” is defined and assess whether its current use adequately covers the variety of risks to which college women are exposed. We identify limitations in how the current literature operationalizes violence against college women and illustrate how addressing these limitations can inform and advance the field by identifying new patterns and correlates. We also propose a research agenda to explicitly examine the definition and scope of “violence” as considered in the study of college women.

Hot vs. Cold Cases: Examining Time to Clearance for Homicides Using NIBRS Data

Very little attention has been devoted to studying factors associated with how quickly murders are cleared. This dearth of knowledge is mainly due to a lack of available data, especially at the national level. Currently the Uniform Crime Reporting Program is undergoing a large-scale conversion from its traditional summary system form of data collection to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). One benefit of NIBRS is that it enables law enforcement agencies to report incident-level clearance information, including the incident and clearance dates. The present study utilizes NIBRS data to compare characteristics of homicides that are cleared quickly with those cleared over a longer period of time and those that are not cleared. Findings from this exploratory study confirm the conventional belief that murders are cleared quickly if at all, as a large drop in the percentage of cleared cases is observed one week after a murder occurs. The present research also suggests that incident characteristics play a dynamic role in predicting not only whether a murder is cleared, but how quickly. These findings provide new insights for studying clearance and suggest policy implications.

The Effect of NIBRS Reporting on Item Missing Data in Murder Cases

The Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) is undergoing a large-scale conversion from the traditional summary system and its Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). One goal in designing NIBRS was to improve the quality of crime data. Little is known about the actual effect of the substantial changes in data collection instituted by NIBRS. Gaining this understanding is important for homicide researchers, as more states and law enforcement agencies replace the SHR with NIBRS data collection. This article measures data quality in terms of itemmissing data and compares the amount of missing murder characteristics in NIBRS with the SHR. The findings obtained are inconsistent. Depending on the characteristic, missing data in NIBRS decreased, increased, or remained relatively unchanged. These results reveal that despite the changes in NIBRS, the UCR continues to struggle with capturing information known to police and collecting particular incident details such as victim-offender relationship and circumstance.

Studying the Crime Problem with NIBRS Data: Current Uses and Future Trends

Since 1930, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) through its national Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) has collected mainly aggregate counts of crime from state and local law enforcement agencies. This focus limits the official crime data available for analysis and policy making because, with the exception of homicides,1 characteristics of specific incidents are unknown. Information such as crime location, use of weapons, type of property stolen as well as victim and offender demographics provides a more complete picture of crime and crime patterns. Such details enable assessment of both current policies aimed to reduce crime and posited theories generated to explain it. Prompted by more sophisticated studies and understandings of crime as well as improved technological capabilities to capture and transmit incident information, the FBI instituted fundamental changes in the late 1980s for how the UCR would collect crime data (FBI, 2004). Currently the UCR is in the midst of undergoing this substantial conversion from its traditional summary-based system (the summary reporting system) to its new incident-based one, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).

Reporting and Clearance of Cyberbullying Incidents: Applying “Offline” Theories to Online Victims

Cyberbullying continues to receive growing research attention, but much of this work focuses on prevalence estimates. Little is known about responses to these incidents. The present study relies on traditional theoretical explanations as a basis for modeling predictors for reporting to authorities and police clearance of cyberbullying using two national data sources. Initial support is obtained for the importance of incident seriousness and solvability characteristics for cyberbullying reporting and clearance. These findings suggest the utility of traditional theory to explain responses to cyberbullying, and also highlight a need for measures tailored to the cyber context to comprehensively test such models.

How Safe Do Students Feel at School and While Traveling to School? A Comparative Look at Israel and the United States

Despite increased interest in studying school violence, much less attention has been given to examining students’ fear of experiencing this violence. A better understanding is important, because fear of victimization can generate negative academic consequences for the individual student and larger school environment. To explore students’ fear, our study takes a cross-national approach and compares the United States and Israel. Previous victimization experience is universally associated with fear at school. With regard to other correlates, greater similarities are found between U.S. and Israeli-Jewish students than for either group with Israeli-Arab students. Our study also examines students’ fear while traveling to school. Here, similarities are found among all students. Girls and students victimized at school report being fearful more often while traveling to school than boys and students who were not victimized. Explanations for our findings are discussed as well as possible implications for future policy and research.

Keeping the Barbarians Outside the Gate? Comparing Burglary Victimization in Gated and Non-Gated Communities

Despite the widely-held belief that gated communities are safer than their non-gated counterparts, little is known about the veracity of this assumption. Explanations rooted in routine activity theory and situational crime prevention suggest that restricted entry would reduce crime. Alternative explanations hypothesize that the overuse of security may actually increase crime. The present study explores this issue by comparing burglary victimizations in gated and non-gated communities using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. We find support for the hypothesis that housing units in gated communities experience less burglary than their non-gated counterparts. Our findings also emphasize the diversity of gated communities and their residents, which is in stark contrast to commonly held perceptions of these areas as affluent enclaves. Future research is needed to further explore this initial finding and assess the influence, if any, of gated communities on other types of crime such as intimate violence and vandalism.

Identifying and Addressing Response Errors in Self-Report Surveys

Much of the data used by criminologists is generated by self-report surveys of victims and offenders. Although both sources share a common reliance on responses to questions, little overlap exists between the two traditions mainly because of the differences in the original motivating goals and auspices of each. Recent changes in how these data are used–especially self-report offending surveys–necessitate a re-examination of this division. In this chapter, we review the methodological work on response errors conducted in the context of victimization surveys in order to identify ways to improve data accuracy in self-report offending surveys. We find evidence to suggest that several types of response error may affect the results obtained by self-report offending surveys.On the basis of these findings, we conclude that further exploration of sources of response error is needed and that a true understanding of these errors may only be possible with the creation of a “state of the art” survey to serve as a benchmark for less expensive surveys. In the interim, we suggest ways in which researchers can utilize existing surveys to obtain a better understanding of how response errors affect crime estimation, especially for particular uses such as trajectory modeling.