Thesis (Ph.D.)--Virginia Commonwealth University, 2009. / Prepared for: L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs Title from title-page of electronic thesis. Bibliography: leaves 187-208.

This project will be comprised of two chapters. The first section will include a comprehensive literature review component defining violence, exploring the current theoretical explanations of violence, as well as coming up with a better way to categorize causal factors and the role of institutions. The triad of social violence is proposed as a more effective theoretical discourse towards effectual social policy. The first section is intended to establish a theoretical link between naturally occurring social violence and social indicators such as poverty and population increases. In section two, I seek to illustrate the argument that declining violent crime rates in Canada are unnatural. Attitudes and public perceptions of the justice system will be statistically analyzed using the data from the General Social Survey on victimization. The relationship between deteriorating attitudes and declines in reported violence are then discussed in greater detail.

This project will be comprised of two chapters. The first section will include a comprehensive literature review component defining violence, exploring the current theoretical explanations of violence, as well as coming up with a better way to categorize causal factors and the role of institutions. The triad of social violence is proposed as a more effective theoretical discourse towards effectual social policy. The first section is intended to establish a theoretical link between naturally occurring social violence and social indicators such as poverty and population increases. In section two, I seek to illustrate the argument that declining violent crime rates in Canada are unnatural. Attitudes and public perceptions of the justice system will be statistically analyzed using the data from the General Social Survey on victimization. The relationship between deteriorating attitudes and declines in reported violence are then discussed in greater detail.

The U.S. Congress has recognized that safety is essential on our college and university campuses. Incidents such as the Virginia Tech massacre and the death of Jeanne Clery have emphasized the need for legislation that assists students in selecting a safe college and improves their safety by reducing the incidence of crimes and fires. The Clery Act is a federal law that requires colleges and universities to provide annual information on the number and type of crimes on campus as well as the number and cause of fires occurring in the residence halls. The purpose of this study was to determine the perceived effectiveness of the Clery Act by students at two higher educational institutions in East Tennessee. This study determined that students are not aware of the Clery Act as it relates to the crime and fire statistics to a significant extent. However, students are aware of the Clery Act as it relates to the issuance of safety notices, emergency notifications, or timely warnings by their institution. Students do not tend to use the Clery Act crime and fire statistics in their decisions as to what college to attend, indicating the limited effectiveness of the Clery Act. Lack of use of the Clery Act crime and fire statistics may be related to a lack of awareness of their existence. Students perceive to a significant extent that the reporting of the Clery Act crime and fire statistics as well as the use of safety notices, emergency notifications, or timely warnings, improved their safety and security while on campus. The Clery Act mandated use of safety notices, emergency notifications, or timely warnings issued by the institution results in students changing their behavior to protect themselves and their property. Students perceive that the reporting of crime and fire statistics as well as the use of safety notices, emergency notifications, or timely warnings, has reduced crime and fires on campus.

This thesis is an intellectual genealogy of counting crime in New South Wales. It is a history of a system of thought which is one of the contemporary foundations of the way we interpret the nature and extent of crime today. It argues that the incitement to annually record crime statistics in New South Wales, and internationally, is immediately connected with a will to govern crime. This thesis traces this bonding of the technology of crime statistics with mentalities of government, and maintains that although the connection of these two discourses has been highly effective, it has not been one of universal domination. This is a history of the continuous state practice of compiling and publishing crime statistics. But it is also a history of discontinuities. This thesis regularly investigates shifts in the categories of recording. It locates changes in what is recorded by broadening its discussion to include localised and international debates on crime that are contemporaneous to these changes. This is not a thesis with a project to improve the way in which we record or utilise crime statistics. Its project is to write a history of how we came to record crime statistics and how we have intended to utilise these crime statistics in our practices of government. It traces the rise of counting crime and interrogates it as one of the key technologies deployed in the government of crime / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

In April 2002 a National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) was introduced across police forces in England and Wales. The intention of this standard, resultant of two highly critical reports regarding police recording of crime, was to improve crime data and promote a victim focussed approach. Research in the field of crime recording emphasises police reporting and recording mechanisms, with a significant reliance placed on police data. However, inter-personal and situational factors determining the ways in which notification of an event is, or is not, translated into a crime record are often inadequately explored. Consequently, there is little recent knowledge regarding the views of individuals reporting an event and the way in which they, through the interactions with the police, affect recording rates. This thesis explores these effects and investigates the impact of deviation from the rules governing crime recording upon service user experiences and satisfaction. Incident logs from three forces were analysed, officer focus groups and questionnaire-based surveys were undertaken and interviews were conducted with service users. Perceptions of service users and police officers vis-à-vis the effectiveness of police intervention were examined, together with the efficacy of previous research methodologies employed to gauge recording rates, the rules regarding crime recording and the existent performance frameworks. The findings suggest that previously reported recording rates are inevitably unreliable owing to a lack of detail within incident logs and the complexities involved in the recognition and labelling of events as crimes. Whilst easing of workloads is a common theme highlighted in previous research, there is notably less emphasis and recognition of other factors. The response, by officers at street level, to the realities of the social world, the conflicting priorities brought about by managerial dictum and the bureaucratic rules governing the recording of crime is to ‘define down crime’. The findings fill the considerable knowledge gap regarding diverse service user requirements and conflicting priorities faced by service providers prior to the introduction of the NCRS, suggesting that the imposition of managerial ideals, the accompanying bureaucratic rules and the corollary, the diminution of discretion, has a detrimental effect on service delivery.

This study aims at analyzing the content of high school textbooks in social sciences, more specifically the field of law and order, and comparing this with the current research situation in the field. Another purpose is to investigate whether the new type of serious gang crime, which in particular has grown in various immigrant suburbs, adjacent to our largest cities, as reported in the media in recent years, has also looked into the textbooks. The essay uses a constructivist theory formation. The constructivist theory considers that different actors, based on their ideological positions, create different descriptions of current social phenomena, descriptions aimed at influencing the recipient to incorporate specific perceptions of reality and values. In this context, the teaching materials become a political product that is not so much about describing a social phenomenon as complex and objective as possible a complex, but, above all, it will be understood as the attempt of the various parties to convey their specific interpretations and interests of the phenomenon. The survey shows that all analyzing textbooks directly or indirectly highlight the men and adolescents group, and to some extent also people in an exposed psychosocial position that overrepresented in a criminal context. In cases where textbooks address statements about people committing crimes, socio-economic and psychosocial vulnerabilities are mentioned, as well as explanations of the social plane in terms of control and casualty structures. In this regard, textbooks fail to report a broad and current research on the mechanisms of crime. None of the textbooks deal with the new crime that has emerged in different socially vulnerable areas to our metropolitan areas, believing that this has gained a lot of space in the media and that the syllabuses in social sciences emphasize that the subject will highlight current social phenomena. All books consistently choose to not treat people it with a foreign background's overrepresentation in a criminal context. Nor should it be noted that some people have a biological vulnerability in committing crimes, for example, that individuals with ADHD diagnosis are heavily overrepresented in crime statistics. / <p>Godkännane datum: 2018-05-31</p>

The master thesis "Types of crimes" deals with the main characteristics of crimes. The goal of this thesis is to summarize each crimes in the Codex of criminal law. The thesis is divided into thematic units to be synoptic, the basics definitions of criminal law is shortly described in the first one. The following chapter focus separately on the individual crimes. The last chapter shows the development trend of crime in the Czech Republic in the period from 2005 to 2015.

The problem this study addressed is the relationship between Clery Act crime data and student recruitment at private colleges and universities. For this quantitative study, I used secondary data from the Department of Education and the Delta Cost Project (2013) to conduct ordinary least squares regression analyses to determine the predictive ability of institutional characteristics, specifically the total number of crime incidents reported in compliance with the Clery Act, on the variance in number of applications and applicant yield rate at private four-year institutions in the United States. Findings showed that the total number of reported incidents was a significant positive predictor of the total number of applications. Conversely, findings also showed that the total number of incidents had a significant negative impact on institutional yield rates. An implication of this study is that although crime statistics required by the Clery Act may not serve as variables used in the student application process, they are part of numerous variables used in the student's decision to enroll at a particular school. The findings highlight the importance of prioritizing and investing in safety and security measures designed to reduce rates of crime; especially for private, enrollment-driven institutions of higher education.