Deck 12: Repaying Victims

Question 1

Victimization surveys were originally intended by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to be a more authoritative accounting of crime than the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI's) UCR.

Answer 1

False

Question 2

Statistics can reveal patterns of criminal activity.

Answer 2

True

Question 3

It is possible to "lie" with statistics by using impressive-sounding numbers to deliberately mislead.

Answer 3

True

Question 4

Statistics can influence decision makers or shape public opinion.

Question 5

The declining homicide rate in the first half of the 1940s can be correlated to the impact of many men serving overseas in World War II.

Question 6

The hierarchy rule is one of the problems affecting the accuracy of the UCR.

Question 7

Official statistics are often compiled and published by governmental agencies.

Question 8

The Uniform Crime Report (UCR) is comprised of information gathered from every law enforcement agency in the United States.

Question 9

Premeditation is one of the ways in which first degree murder differs from second degree murder.

Question 10

Data on victimization may be gathered through self-report.

Question 11

The principle failing of the UCR is that only a minority of law enforcement agencies across the country take part in it annually.

Question 12

Data for the National Crime Victimization Surveys (NCVS) are collected by the U.S.Census Bureau.

Question 13

The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is intended as a supplement rather than an overhaul of the UCR.

Question 14

Crime Clocks lack an important measurement of risk-the recognition that there are millions of possible victims throughout the United States.

Question 15

Unlike comparative risks, differential risks can be useful in exploring and understanding risks across gender and race lines.

Question 16

The first national survey about victimization in the United States was conducted by the U.S.Census Bureau.

Question 17

Memory decay is evident when an individual willingly falsifies a crime report to investigators.

Question 18

Until the 1970s, few efforts were made to systematically monitor and measure indicators of crime victimization.

Question 19

Violent crime in the United States has consistently trended downward since 2000.

Question 20

Public officials did not start keeping records about crime until the 1900s.

Question 21

Which of the following information can statistics provide to criminologists and victimologists?

A) Estimates of costs and losses imposed by crime
B) Planning assistance for projects
C) Evaluation of the effectiveness of a criminal justice agency
D) These are all information that statistics can provide to them

Question 22

Which of the following would a crime researcher include in a crime statistics report as a differential risk?

A) Ratio of law enforcement officers to the civilian population
B) Correlation of various diseases on mortality rates
C) Comparisons between crime statistics from different years
D) Victimization rates among ethnic groups for each type of crime

Question 23

Which of the following type of statistical portraits can yield an impression of what is usual or typical about the average victim to a researcher?

A) Profiles
B) Rates
C) Trends
D) Patterns

Question 24

Which of the following can reflect predictable relationships or indicate regular occurrences during an analysis of the data?

A) Profiles
B) Statistics
C) Variances
D) Patterns

Question 25

How can the "big picture" of crime be manipulated or distorted?

A) By having limited personal experience
B) By self-serving data reported by organizations with vested interests
C) By cultural values and myths
D) By any and/or all of these

Question 26

Which of the following can statistics be used to do?

A) To measure victimization rates
B) To expose patterns of crime
C) To demonstrate crime variations over time
D) To accomplish any or all of these things

Question 27

How can a municipal police force in a city where crime has been decreasing annually, misuse crime statistics to try and secure more funding for the following year before a meeting of city legislators?

A) Argue that local crime statistics are not truly representative of the crime situation overall in the city
B) Have representatives from the FBI and DOJ discuss how local crime compares to the national average
C) Utilize as examples, national crime statistic figures from similarly sized municipalities over the years
D) Cherry pick crime statistics to find examples that have not had a measured decrease over the years

Question 28

What was the goal behind the establishment of the UCR?

A) To create a standard set of definitions and reporting formats for gathering crime statistics
B) To supplement the reporting gathered in the NCVS with more information on criminals
C) The creation of a "white paper" that could be used to determine future police budgets
D) The establishment of a guide that lawmakers could use in deciding which activities could be legalized

Question 29

Which of the following do victimologists view as the most valid method for collecting information on crime victimization?

A) Medical record review
B) News accounts
C) Self-report surveys
D) Jail intake statistics

Question 30

The development of the NCVS can be traced back to the first national survey about victimization carried out in which of the following decades?

A) The 1920s
B) The 1940s
C) The 1960s
D) The 1980s

Question 31

Realistic assessments of threat levels that criminal activities pose to particular individuals and groups can be studied by looking at what type of rates?

A) Victimization
B) Risk
C) Crime
D) Trend

Question 32

In what way can a truthful set of statistics regarding a rise in vehicle theft over the course of a year in a city not reflect the actual situation?

A) The statistics are from a single source driven by an agenda.
B) The statistics are not compared to those of other cities.
C) The statistics are contrasted with those from previous years.
D) The statistics are compiled by the police force of the city.

Question 33

The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is an overhaul of which of the following?

A) The NCVS
B) Various state reporting systems
C) The UCR
D) All of these

Question 34

Which of the following can best demonstrate how crime has changed over time?

A) Trends
B) Patterns
C) Variances
D) Profiles

Question 35

Which of the following can provide an idea of what is usual or typical about a victim in terms of their characteristics?

A) Profiles
B) Incidence rates
C) Trends
D) Patterns

Question 36

Which of the following crime resource dramatizes the fact that as time passes, more and more people join the ranks of crime victims?

A) UCR
B) NCVS
C) Crime Clock
D) Doomsday Clock

Question 37

Which of the following items are collected by the NIBRS but not by the UCR?

A) Direct observations by an arresting officer
B) Demographics of the victim
C) Characteristics of the suspect arrested
D) Date and time information of an arrest

Question 38

When victims believe a crime occurred within the desired reporting period when in fact it occurred long before, which of the following is said to have occurred?

A) Recognition error
B) Forward telescoping
C) Memory decay
D) Backward telescoping

Question 39

As of 2016, which of the following percentage of law enforcement agencies that participated in the UCR provided information comprised in the NIBRS data?

A) 37%
B) 52%
C) 47%
D) 71%

Question 40

Which of the following is included in Part II of the UCR?

A) Murder
B) Robbery
C) Forcible rape
D) Prostitution

Question 41

The NIBRS collects victimization data on which of the following?

A) Homicides
B) Simple assaults
C) Blackmail
D) All of these are correct.

Question 42

Outline and discuss the NIBRS system.Who compiles the NIBRS? How does this system compare to the UCR and the NCVS? What are the purposes of NIBRS, and how does it contribute to the understanding of victimization?

Question 43

In addition to the eight closely watched UCR index offenses, how many Group A offenses does the NIBRS keep track of?

A) 12
B) 46
C) 57
D) 92

Question 44

When looking at homicide rates over the course of the twentieth century in the United States, what observation can be made regarding rises and falls in said rates?

Question 45

Regarding homicide rates throughout the twentieth century in the United States, which of the following observations can be made?

A) During times of conflict overseas, homicide rates rise dramatically.
B) High homicide rates can be most correlated to periods of economic fortune.
C) In times of national political corruption, homicide rates tend to drop to their lowest.
D) Homicide rates are dependent on a significant number of variables in the United States.

Question 46

Discuss the ways statistics are used in estimating the amount of crime in the United States.

Question 47

Based on what you know about the NCVS and the UCR, evaluate the information presented by the Crime Clock.

Question 48

A man hits another with a baseball bat once intending to hurt him though the victim unfortunately dies as a result of internal bleeding.This would be classified as which of the following types of homicide?

A) First-degree murder
B) First-degree manslaughter
C) Second-degree manslaughter
D) Second-degree murder

Question 49

Compare and contrast the FBI's Uniform Crime Report and the National Crime Victimization Survey.Be sure to discuss its sources of information and how results from each are interpreted.

Question 50

In what year did the homicide rate in the United States hit the highest level of the twentieth century?

A) 1945
B) 1965
C) 1980
D) 1994