Positivist Methods

• Positivists favour official statistics: they believe quantitative data is reliable and generalisable to the wider population. They look to internal or external influences on individuals as the primary cause of crime.
• Unreported Crime

  Crime may go unreported because;

  • its trivial
  • victims believe the police won't / can't do anything or that we can deal with it ourselves
  • fear of police
  • too embarrassed
  • there's no victim
• Unrecorded Crime

  Crime isn’t recorded by the police because;

  • there’s a lack of evidence to pursue the report
  • no witnesses
  • victim withdraws complaint
  • crime isn't covered by current government targets so police see it as trivial (cost and time ineffective )
  • police corruption
• Not Prosecuted Crime

  Crime isn’t prosecuted because;

  • lack of evidence to secure a conviction
  • unreliable witness
  • witness intimidation (won't give evidence)
  • victim withdraws complaint before trial
  • Corruption within CJS
  • dealt with outside of court (plea-bargaining (financial settlement)
• Official statistics

  These are published by the Home Office and the figures represent crime based on arrests, cautions and convictions. They show who commits crime, where its most common, which crimes are most common and the patterns over time.
• Prison records

  This data can be used to compare a group's representation within prison against their representation in society. The data can be used to produce policies to combat crime and to monitor the prevalence of law and order in society. It can tell us the characteristics of the prison population by age, gender, social class, ethnicity, as well as crimes committed. It only includes crimes that have resulted in a conviction with a custodial sentence.
• Functionalists believe the statistics and therefore they have a ‘typical’ criminal to explain. Functionalists believe that society operates on value consensus and that the police and justice system have a positive role to play, therefore they would see that the statistics are accurate and trustworthy. The criminal behaviour is seen as breaking the social norms and statistics can provide an outline of the type of person who has been poorly socialised into a life of crime and anti-social behaviour.
• New Right sociologists believe that laws are made by those with the legitimate authority to govern the country and therefore they benefit society. The agents reporting crime through official statistics are equally legitimate and therefore can be trusted.
• Marxists believe that the police and justice system are agents of social control and therefore cannot be trusted. The statistics reflect the class struggle in society in that most recorded and reported crime in the statistics are committed by the working class and the crimes of the wealthy mostly go unreported.
• Interactionists believe that crime is socially constructed, especially through the media so they would see how the data can be skewed to reflect what is ‘newsworthy’; for example, there may be a higher record of drug crime when drugs are being highlighted as a serious social problem.