ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the history of US crime statistics and looks at some possible ways of improving them. It deals with the story of a groundbreaking statistical investigation of crime in Chicago, which set out principles for collecting and using data to study crime. At the Beginning of the twentieth century, there were few reliable statistics about crime. Most Americans got their impressions about crime from newspaper stories, and sensationalist stories of crime waves sold papers. Edith Abbott’s call for better statistics was echoed by social scientists, police and legal professionals, and statisticians throughout the 1920s, when Prohibition and other societal changes led to increased, or at least to a perception of increased, crime. The National Academies of Sciences Panel on Modernizing Crime Statistics recommended removing the category of aggravated assault from crime classifications. Crime statistics are products of the systems used to collect and process the data.
