Canadian Race Relations Foundation

The journal article investigates criminal statistics and literature on criminology, and places race and gender under the microscope to explain the lack of research on the 'relationship between race and crime'. The author pools together various ideologies and arguments on the issue from Canada and the United States, racial discrimination within the court system and police forces; along with the impact crime has on visible minority communities. Further, the author outlines several options to improve the quality of race-criminal statistics along with proper collection of those statistics; which can improve social programs for inmates and correctional facilities.

Problems with official crime statistics have prompted researchers to search for other means of estimating the true extent of crime. Self-report and victimization surveys, the most popular alternatives, have often produced findings that contradict official statistics. For example, American self-report surveys often reveal little difference between black and white adolescents in terms of their involvement in delinquent activities. Furthermore, although victimization surveys show that black are overrepresented among both the offenders and victims of violent crimes, they also reveal that the level of over-representation produced by official statistics is exaggerated (Mann 1993). Therefore, if official race-crime statistics are to be collected in Canada, they must be supplemented by sophisticated self-report and victimization surveys. (p. 264).