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Can never be an objective mirror

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…This idea still very much persists, as official crime statistics are politically used to identify particularly worrying developments, to demonstrate to the general public that crime fighting or prevention strategies are successful, or to allocate resources to particular programs in an evidence based fashion (Maguire 2012: 208).

At the same time, criminologists have been mindful of the fact that crime data can never be an objective mirror of an external reality, but that they are always contingent on the social processes that bring them into being (Colemon and Moynihan 1996; Haggerty 2001; Hope 2013; McCabe and Sutcliffe 1978). To be turned into data and become treatable in bureaucratic ways (Harper 1991), crime needs to be (1) uncovered, (2) classified, and (3) recorded – with each step involving numerous choices and rationales (Skogan 1974: 26).

Matthias Leese (2023) Enacting criminal futures: data practices and crime prevention, Policing and Society, 33:3, 333-347, DOI: 10.1080/10439463.2022.2112192