The Social Production of Crime Statistics

Abstract

The problems associated with trying to conceptualize and measure crime with crime statistics are widely recognized and well documented. Most often studies have focused on the technical issues of reliability and validity. Recent analyses have also considered how crime statistics are socially constructed or produced. These studies, however, focused on how such statistics are influenced by the decisions and actions of people who participate in the system of criminal justice and have vested interests in how crime is defined or measured. This paper, in contrast, will demonstrate that actions and decisions of individuals engaged in the production of crime statistics but working without any vested interest in the meaning or measure of crime also have an impact on how crime is conceptualized and measured.