ABSTRACT
Crime statistics are ubiquitous in contemporary society. In both Canada and the United States there are special government statistical bodies that solely measure criminological phenomena: the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, respectively. Whether it is through the nightly newscast, national or local papers, or discussions around the coffee machine, we are inundated with statistics regarding crime: crime is going up, crime is going down, or crime is higher/lower relative to other places in the country. Indeed, we torture our students in many introductory criminological courses by placing provinces or states in national contexts, and by placing our nations in international contexts. But how reliable is this information that we pass on to our students and colleagues? Many departments within the arts and social sciences are split between those who accept or reject the quantification of social phenomena. The rejection of this quantification, in many cases, is simply a mistrust of the data or the methods of data representation. Consequently, if we are going to use quantification we must do so critically.
