CJA Week 5 Assignment

Criminology Interviews: Chief of Victimization Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics Transcript

Michael Rand

Introduction

I’m Michael Rand. I’m Chief of Victimization Statistics at the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics and BJS is the statistical arm of the department of justice.

How would you describe the field of criminology?

Well, criminology to me, and I’m not a criminologist I’m a political scientist, criminology is the study of crime and its attributes and it’s ideology and everything surrounding it and it’s such a diverse field that it encompasses an incredible wide range of subjects related to crime and victims and offenders and the criminal justice system.

What are some current trends in criminology?

Victimization surveys have taught us an awful lot about crime and um, the extent in nature of crimes people experience. But there’s still so much more to learn and we, we’re gonna be moving probably into a lot of new directions. I know that we’re moving into some areas that we had not intended or thought we would be in such as looking at identity theft, looking at internet predating, things like that, new subjects. But also we face challenges related to technology and how we conduct surveys and how we can best reach the public and um, get the best answers from them. So there are huge challenges to be faced, um, both for the survey that I work on and for survey methodology in general.

As a political scientist, what does your research indicate?

One of the things that – one of the key parts of my job is to look at trends in crime and our country has experienced in the past decade uh, and a half a very broad and long-standing decline in violent property crime. That seems possibly to be ending in the last couple of years. As a matter of fact, our survey has shown this year that there really was no change between 2004 and 2005 in the level of crime whereas police reported crime has actually increased by about 1% so there’s a huge discussion in the field as to whether we’ve seen the end of the decline and we’re entering a new period of increase in crime rates or whether this is possibly just an interruption in the decline. So we won’t know that for a few years. We’ll have to wait and see where that question takes us.

Is your research more concerned with practice or theory?

As the statistical arm of the department of justice, we collect information about crime and about the criminal justice system, not so much to apply any theory or to validate any theories, but to inform about crime and the criminal justice system. So we’re not really related – specifically associated with either practice per se or theory.

As a statistician, what does your day tend to look like?

I am in charge of the largest victimization survey conducted, um, in the country, and I have a staff that works with me and for me to analyze data and collect the data. The data are collected for us by the census bureau. So I work with them. So my day involves a lot of meetings, a lot of meetings with staff, a lot of meetings with other agencies to maintain and continue developing the survey, to analyze the data, and in my spare moments I get a chance to actually hands on work with the data myself.

Since you study statistics, does this allow you to predict trends?

We avoid projecting because it’s a quagmire. Um, we don’t know enough about why crime rates decline to be able to predict why they may increase in the future. I mean we can look and see what’s going on today, some of the theories that are being discussed related to this possible increase have to do with changes in drug markets, changes – increased youth involvement as offenders, um, changes possibly in police levels, levels of policing, and um, some of those – those are some of the questions that are being looked at to see how they, um, influence changes in crime rates.

Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved.