Perceptions About Crime Rates

Misconceptions about crime rates can seriously affect the decisions of legislative bodies when enacting crime control policies. Without accurate figures and comparisons, they cannot make an informed judgement about which crimes occur most frequently, and where government dollars should be spent on specific crime prevention measures. The misconceptions of the public are also important because they affect how the legislators will spend those monies so that they can best satisfy their constituents' beliefs about crime.

It was reported in 1998 that crime has not changed much over the last 30 years, but the ways crime is detected, the information processed, and how it is dealt with have changed significantly, and often leads to public misconceptions (Part, 1998). There is a greater recognition of violence against women today, and there is gang violence, but the gang violence is not as widespread as most people believe. It is confined mostly to Los Angeles and Chicago. There has been a rise in lethal violence, and especially in assaults with weapons and homicides in which guns were involved.

Because of gang activity in some places, the juvenile crime rate is up in those areas, and violence against women and children is increasing, but this can also be explained in some areas by gang violence, e.g. accidental shootings (Part, 1998). There has been an increasing racial concentration of crimes, and the number of drug-related crimes has definitely increased. However the

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a spontaneous act: over 75 percent of rapes are planned. Group rapes are 90 percent planned. There is a widespread misconception about White women being raped by colored men, but in fact a study showed that 90 percent of rapes occur between people of the same ethnic or racial group, and in the 10 percent of interracial rapes, they are most often committed by White men against Black women. The persistence of these misconceptions determines public policy in the criminal proceedings concerning rape, and the establishment of policies regarding the punishment for rapists. Legislators often ignore the differences in distribution of crime rates, spending money all over the country when most of the crime occurs in major metropolitan areas (Part, 1998). Little crime is actually taking place in the suburbs and in rural areas, yet dollars are diverted there which could better be spent in the inner cities, because the misconception is that "crime is increasing everywhere!" During the 1990s, violent crime increased in some cities and even in some rural areas, but it also decreased in others. The distribution of crime needs to be known before allotting money for its prevention otherwise crime prevention dollars are wasted. Rather

Category: Government - P