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Reporting Property
Crimes
Property crimes against juveniles are
rarely reported to the police (figure 4), and
this is especially true for larceny/thefts,
only 11 percent of which are so reported
(less than one-third the reporting level for
adult larceny/thefts). Police reporting for
burglary and robbery against juveniles is
more common, but less than 50 percent of
these crimes are reported to police, well
below the levels for adult victimization.
However, a considerable number of juvenile
property crimes are reported to other
authorities, presumably mostly school officials.
Thus, for larceny/theft, total reporting
rates to all sources, including school
officials, is not that much lower for juveniles
than for adults.
Police reporting does vary somewhat by
age (figure 5), with younger adolescents
even less likely than older adolescents to
report property victimization to the police.
By contrast, younger adolescents are
more likely than older adolescents to report
these incidents to school authorities.
 Boys are somewhat more likely to make
police reports about property crimes than
girls (15 percent vs. 10 percent). This difference
is explained by two factors: boys
are more likely than girls to report thefts
(difference significant at p=0.05), and boys
are more likely than girls to experience
robberies and burglaries, crimes that are
reported to a greater extent than thefts.
There are some regional differences in the
reporting of juvenile property crime, with
Midwesterners being most likely to report
and Westerners least likely (table 7). The
relation between the value of items and the
likelihood of reporting is strong and obvious.
 Bicycles and motor vehicle parts are the
items juveniles are most likely to report to
police, by a wide margin (table 8). Clothing
and luggage are items for which the
underreporting to police is greatest. Wallets,
purses, toys and recreational equipment,
electronic and photo gear, and jewelry,
watches, and keys are reported to
police about as frequently as anything else,
which is not that frequently. Making police
reports primarily for bicycles and motor
vehicle parts seems only in part a function
of their value or insurance concerns
(electronic equipment is valuable and no
less insured than bicycles). It may also result
from the perception that the domain of
police is the streets and highways, places
where vehicles and vehicle parts are likely
to be encountered. That is, police are perceived
as being better able to aid in the
recovery of these as opposed to other
items. A multivariate analysis of the NCVS
data shows that a bicycle was 457 percent
more likely to be reported to police than
another item of similar value, but only
among juveniles. Among adults, bicycle
theft was just 31 percent more likely to be
reported than other items.
The underreporting of juvenile victimizations
to police means that police records
show a substantially lower percentage of
juvenile victims than is reflected in the
self-report data from NCVS (figure 6).
Thus, 12- to 17-year-old juveniles account
for 14 percent of the property crimes reported
to NCVS but 6 percent of the victimizations
known to police in the NIBRS
tabulations. Another 1 percent of property
crime victimizations (excluding vandalism)
in the NIBRS data is associated
with juveniles under age 12. Interestingly,
80 percent of the NIBRS reports for property
crimes against juveniles under 12 are
for bicycle thefts, additionally illustrating
that juveniles perceive bicycle theft, unlike
many other property crimes, as
uniquely worth reporting to police.
| Victim Identity in Juvenile Property Crime
One of the problems in discussing property crimes, as opposed
to violent crimes, is in defining the victim. Property crime, with
the exception of robbery and personal larceny, is treated as a
household crime in the National Crime Victimization Survey
(NCVS), an approach that considers the entire household to be
victimized, obscuring individual characteristics. The analysis in
this Bulletin takes a different approach and treats all property
crimes as personal crimes, distinguishing juvenile victims from
adult victims even within the same household. At least two features
of juvenile property crimes support doing this. First, most
larcenies—the most common property crime reported to NCVS,
a major data source for this analysis—actually occur away from
home. Second, most larcenies reported to NCVS involve only
the respondent’s property.
The approach used in this Bulletin is to treat all property
crimes as personal crimes, using property ownership information
to identify specific individual victims. In the case of NCVS
data, incidents that involve a respondent’s own property are
treated as personal crimes against the respondent. Ownership
attributions made to NCVS by respondents do not necessarily
conform to a strict legal definition of ownership but reflect
their personal views. However, such opinions about ownership
probably represent the best picture of the links between
persons and property that prevail within a household.
In collecting information about property crimes, NCVS also
asks individuals about thefts occurring to other people within
the household. In order to clearly distinguish among individual
victims, only cases where respondents said their own
property was involved (including cases where their own and
other people’s property were involved in the same episode)
are counted and compared in this analysis. For tallies of the
characteristics of individual stolen items (rather than crime
incidents)—as provided, for example, in tables 3, 4, and 8—the analysis needed even greater specificity and relied strictly
on incidents involving the respondent’s property alone. Also,
use of ownership attributions limits the comparison of burglaries
to only those incidents that included theft in addition
to illegal entry.
Of course, for some items, like a television or car, the identified
owner may not be the only person affected or the person
most seriously affected by the loss or destruction of the
property—for example, when the stolen property was used
primarily by a juvenile. Because much property that is used
extensively or even exclusively by juveniles (including homes,
vehicles, and electronic and play equipment) is legally owned
by adults, victimization data based on ownership attributions
as opposed to usage patterns probably understate the impact
of property victimization on juveniles.
Data on property crimes included in the National Incident-Based
Reporting System (NIBRS), the other major data
source used in this analysis, are organized differently. Incidents
are those reported to police, and their descriptions reflect
both the nature of police reports and NIBRS protocols.
For example, property crimes are classified by type of victim,
which can be an individual, a business, a financial institution,
the Government, a religious organization, or society. For this
study, only crimes against individuals are included because
in these incidents the police have identified and described
specific persons as victims. Once again, to avoid attributions
to multiple owners, tallies of the characteristics of stolen or
vandalized items are based only on incidents that involve a
single victim. This is because property items in NIBRS are
reported collectively by incident, not by each individual victim
involved.
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| Estimated Juvenile Property Victimizations Known to Police
Both NCVS and NIBRS suggest that the total number of
juvenile (ages 12–17) property victimizations known to police
is between 400,000 and 500,000. To allow a comparison of the
data sets, juvenile victimizations are limited to the major
property crimes of larceny, robbery, and burglary, which are
defined and recorded similarly by both systems (vandalism,
which is not, is excluded). Furthermore, to confine the comparison
to incidents clearly affecting specific individuals,
property victimizations tallied from NCVS include only those
that exclusively involved a juvenile respondent’s own property.
Given these limiting conditions, the combined 1996 and 1997
NCVS sample provides a 1-year average weighted estimate
of 491,249 juvenile property victimizations known to police.
The 1997 NIBRS data set, representing police reports from
jurisdictions in 12 States, identifies 26,900 equivalent juvenile
property victimizations. SEARCH, the National Consortium for
Justice Information and Statistics, which assists the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in its planning and implementation
of NIBRS, estimates that its 1997 records represented
about 6 percent of the Nation’s crime. If offenses reported to
NIBRS are somewhat representative of crimes occurring in
nonreporting jurisdictions, then the NIBRS count just noted
suggests that nationally a total of about 448,300 juvenile
property victimizations were reported to police in 1997.
Estimates for more detailed offense categories show overall
similarities, with the greatest difference appearing for robberies:
| NCVS | NIBRS |
| Larceny estimates | 370,685 | 379,000 |
| Burglary estimates | 41,004 | 38,700 |
| Robbery estimates | 79,560 | 30,600 |
The underrepresentation of robbery in the NIBRS data may
reflect the lack of large urban centers among the reporting
jurisdictions. Although NIBRS data do not reflect a national
sample of police reports, NIBRS tallies of juvenile property
victimizations are generally congruent with those of NCVS,
which is a national statistical sample.
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| Juvenile Victims of
Property Crimes |
Juvenile
Justice Bulletin • December 2000 |
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