The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. Add to that more than 3,000 tipsheets from our national conferences on how to cover specific beats or do specific stories and you have a resource that no reporter or editor should be without. These stories and tipsheets are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Logged-in members can view the tipsheets free online:
Search results for "uniform crime reports" ...
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Check your sources: Figuring out what criminal justice data and documents really say
Gabrielson's tipsheet addresses identifying the shortcomings in data - specifically criminal justice data. Gabrielson points out common mistakes made when using the data, and how to avoid them.
Tags: Uniform Crime Reports; police records; Federal Bureau of Investigations; FBI; clearance rates; clearance rates; conviction rates
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How to investigate police crime reporting and statistics: a cookbook
This tipsheet is a great primer for anyone covering cops and crime and utilizing the FBI's Uniform Crime Report(UCR). Thompson and Eiserer identify the preliminary legwork to do so your ready to cover stories as they arise.
Tags: Uniform Crime Reports (UCR); police; crime; assault; burglary; robbery; police reports; federal funding
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Cracking the Justice System
McCoy and Purcell discuss the computer-assisted work they did in reporting their series "Justice: Delayed, Dismissed, Denied." They explain the data you should gather when reporting on the courts, and the stories you can find within those numbers.
Tags: courts; crime data; Uniform Crime Report; FBI; Federal Bureau of Investigation;
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Hidden crimes: UCR data, and what’s not there
This tipsheet addresses use of the Uniform Crime Reports, pointing out it "is only as good as the agencies that report data. Police in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlanta and St. Louis have been caught hiding crimes to make the cities look safer than they really were." Fazlollah addresses how to spot problems with the data.
Tags: Federal Bureau of investigations; FBI; Uniform Crime Reports; UCR; statistcs; crime reporting; advanced techniques
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Criminal Justice: Understanding Crime Statistics
Kalfrin discusses how to get the most accurate story from crime statistics. She discusses the importance of knowing how crimes are classified, how to use the hierarchy of crimes and how to make the information accessible to readers. The tipsheet explains how different crimes are defined, as well as how rates of reporting crimes vary and can affect the story.
Tags: crime; statistics; criminal justice; police reports; uniform crime reports
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CAR and COPS
Olsen lists some documents and databases to look into issues relating to law enforcement. These include such documents as police shootings indices, racial profiling data, staffing and jail data and so on.
Tags: CAR; police; internal affairs; medical examiner; uniform crime reporting; UCR; sex offenders.
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The crime beat: The data & stats of injustice
Milliron's tipsheet highlights what type of data is kept by the criminal justice system, how it is used by law enforcement, and how to get it. It also notes tips on creating your own database and summarizes the crime databases kept by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. Additional material, saved as a separate pdf, includes copies of uniform crime reports and a specific listing of the various law enforcement forms and records that are available.
Tags: crime; criminal justice; courts; criminals; records; data; police; law enforcement
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Using Crime Statistics: Successes and caveats
This tipsheet includes uniform crime reports from the Michigan state police, a listing of cities with the highest level of reported crime per 100,000, an incident report from the Philadelphia police department and an article detailing a Philadelphia crime web site.
Tags: None
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Tips for Getting Crime Records off a Government Computer and Into Your Story
This tipsheet provides tips for obtaining, importing, examining and analyzing data. This tipsheet also includes samples of raw data and uniform crime reports.
Tags: CAR
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Tipsheet No: 805
This technical appendix to the Miami Herald's investigative series on Dade County's criminal justice system combines data from a variety of sources to gauge the effectiveness of the county's criminal courts and compare them to courts in other large urban areas.