Are crime statistics an accurate reflection of the actual crime being committed in society if not why?

Answer 1

No, many crimes go unreported and often undiscovered. Statistics on crime only deal with the information available at the time.

There are many strengths and limitations to official statistics such as the British Crime Survey (BCS) and the Official Crime Survey (OCS).

Official statistics surprisingly do not reveal the full extent of the crime that happens in Britain, the left over crime that is not known to the public as a whole or shown in the OCS, is called the 'dark figure of crime'. However the BCS goes a little further to reveal some of the 'dark figure of crime' in the fact that the victims of crime are interviewed, rather than the police reporting the crime. This in itself has strengths and limitations such as the fact that the no one under the age of sixteen is interviewed for the BCS meaning that the results are not one 100% representative. Also the police may choose not to report because, for example, the crime is seen as too 'trivial/minor' and people sometimes don't actually report a crime to the police as they may be too embarrassed, i.e. when men are abused by women or for fear of reprisals, thus some crimes don't appear in the statistics.

The BCS gives a more accurate picture of the true extent of crime because it compares police data with the BCS. This is highly advantageous as the BCS has a very large stratified sample of 650 interviews in each police area and also boost samples. A boost sample is when not-white minority ethnic groups are interviewed for the BCS as numbers in the main sample may not have been high enough to draw conclusions. The response rate for the BCS is also very good (80 %+).