Measures
Measures of crime include simple counts of offences, victimisations or apprehensions, as well as population based crime rates. Counts are normally made over a year long reporting period.
More complex measures involve measuring the numbers of discrete victims and offenders as well as repeat victimisation rates and recidivism. Repeat victimisation involves measuring how often the same victim is subjected to a repeat occurrence of an offence, often by the same offender. Repetition rate measures are often used to assess the effectiveness of interventions.
Because crime is a social issue, comparisons of crime between places or years are normally performed on some sort of population basis.
Read more about this topic: Crime Statistics
Famous quotes containing the word measures:
“The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... moral certainty is certainty which is sufficient to regulate our behaviour, or which measures up to the certainty we have on matters relating to the conduct of life which we never normally doubt, though we know that it is possible, absolutely speaking, that they may be false.”
—René Descartes (1596–1650)
“I was surprised by Joe’s asking me how far it was to the Moosehorn. He was pretty well acquainted with this stream, but he had noticed that I was curious about distances, and had several maps. He and Indians generally, with whom I have talked, are not able to describe dimensions or distances in our measures with any accuracy. He could tell, perhaps, at what time we should arrive, but not how far it was.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)