Eliminate Capping And Crime Rates Look A Lot Different, Say Sociologists
Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - 16:40
in Psychology & Sociology
Violent crime is undercounted or overcounted, depending on who you ask. Some statistics count gun violence twice, for example, as a criminal getting shot and a police officer doing the shooting. On the other side, in a paper published in the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Wayne State University Ph.D. student Zavin Nazaretian and David M. Merolla, assistant professor of sociology, say that "capping" — which only allows survey respondents to represent a maximum of three incidents per crime type regardless of how many incidents they report — is undercounting violent crime by 87 percent and household crime by 36 percent. read more