Recording Rate
Definition
The proportion of crimes known to police that are formally entered into official statistics. Recording rates below 100% produce a secondary dark figure even among crimes that have been reported. Police discretion, resource constraints, and counting rules all affect recording rates.
- Field
- Crime statistics
- Measures
- Reported crimes formally logged
- Distinct from
- Reporting rate
- Influenced by
- Police discretion, counting rules, resources
Common questions
How is recording rate different from the reporting rate that produces the primary dark figure of crime?+
Reporting rate concerns whether a victim tells police about a crime at all, while recording rate concerns what happens after that report: whether police formally log it as a crime in official statistics, so a low recording rate creates a further gap even among crimes victims did report.
Why would police discretion cause a reported crime not to be recorded?+
Officers may judge an incident as too minor, resolve it informally, apply local counting rules that classify it differently, or face resource pressures that affect logging practices, all of which can result in a reported incident never appearing in official crime statistics.
Related terms
- CompStat
- A police management and accountability system first implemented by the New York City Police Department in 1994. CompStat uses regularly updated crime...
- Crime Hotspot
- A small geographic area where crime incidents cluster at a rate significantly higher than surrounding areas over a defined time period. Hotspot...
- Dark Figure of Crime
- The gap between the actual volume of crime and the amount recorded in official statistics. Crimes go unrecorded when victims do not...
- Geographic Information System (GIS)
- Software that stores, analyses, and visualises data tied to geographic coordinates. In crime analysis, GIS platforms such as ArcGIS or the open-source...
- Victimisation Survey
- A survey that asks a random population sample about crimes experienced in a reference period, regardless of whether those incidents were reported...