The importance of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program [UCR] and the National Crime Victimization Survey [NCVS] cannot be emphasized enough as they are the only two ongoing national measures of crime in the United States that provide annual level and change estimates. While discussions of the UCR and NCVS often focus on the differences between the two, the two systems share many similarities in their development over time as well as their influence on how crime has been defined and studied. This entry examines the origins and development of these two data collection systems individually and describes the similarities between them. This entry concludes by examining how the UCR and NCVS have contributed to criminology by shaping views on what crimes “count,” especially the focus on serious, violent street crimes. Alternative ways crime could be measured in the UCR and NCVS’s existing frameworks are discussed.
Introduction
The Uniform Crime Reporting Program [UCR] and the National...
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Department of Justice, Law, and Society, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC, 20016, USA
Lynn A. Addington
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Correspondence to Lynn A. Addington .
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Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement [NSCR], Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Gerben Bruinsma
VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Gerben Bruinsma
Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
David Weisburd
Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel
David Weisburd
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Addington, L.A. [2014]. Development of the UCR and the NCVS. In: Bruinsma, G., Weisburd, D. [eds] Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Springer, New York, NY. //doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_251