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21 Crime & Delinquency 1 (1975)

handle is hein.journals/cadq21 and id is 1 raw text is: Crime and Delinquency * National Council on Crime and Delinquency 0 Volume 21 January 1975 Number 1 Politics and Measures of Success in the War on Crime* MICHAEL E. MILAKOVICH Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina (Greensboro) KURT WEIS Professor, Institute of Sociology, University of Saarbruecken (West Germany) Evaluation techniques used to measure the success of federal anti- crime programs are controlled exclusively by local police, who submit unaudited crime reports to the FBI. Numerous studies have criticized the FBI Uniform Crime Reports as a biased source of information on the extent of the crime problem, and government surveys have shown that FBI figures mirror only a portion of the total number of crimes committed. Notwithstanding these serious deficiencies, the FBI index is still used by politicians, police offi- cials, and the mass media as the primary indicator of effectiveness of federal, state, and local anticrime programs. In 1972 the Nixon Administration used crime rates to support the claim that it was winning the war on crime. Evidence submitted in support of this claim included the assertion that the rate of increase in crime had decreased, partly as a result of the millions of federal dollars allo- cated to the states by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administra- tion. This article assesses the weight of that evidence and addresses * An earlier draft of this article was pre- and Who's Afraid of Crime?-Or: How to sented at the Inter-American Congress of Finance a Decreasing Rate of Increase, in Criminology, Nov. 19-26, 1972, in Caracas. Sawyer F. Sylvester, Jr., and Edward Sagarin, Portions have appeared in Political Misuses eds., Politics and Crime (New York: Praeger, of Crime Rates, Society, July-August, 1974; 1974). 1

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