ABSTRACT
In the United States, official crime data began being compiled in 1930, after the federal government established the Uniform Crime Records (UCR) Committee. At that time 400 cities with 20 million residents in 43 states participated in this new voluntary reporting system. It has become an annual report on the numbers of crimes reported to the police. Compiled by the FBI, the UCR gathers data from more than 16,000 jurisdictions within the USA with more than 254 million residents. This covers the vast majority of jurisdictions within the US. There are no systematically compiled statistics on the multitude of corporate crimes committed annually. However, if the analyst is curious about corporate crime, he or she must investigate through the different federal agencies that are responsible for overseeing corporations in the US. The students should realize that data are social constructs that reflect the interest and biases of the researchers.
