False negatives in criminal justice

Having written about false negatives in steroid testing leads me naturally to ask: how serious is the false negative problem in criminal justice?

It's pretty clear that in law, we also try to minimize false positives, which means that there are criminals who evade justice. I wonder if, and how, one would assess the probability of a criminal not getting caught. Anyone have seen or know about such studies?

It would, of course, not be easy to measure such a thing since one may need a lot of confessions. But there may be smart ways around it. For instance, maybe a large business has tracked the total amount of stuff stolen from its stores over a period of time, and also the total value of goods stolen by those caught red-handed.

Comments

[Ken]

Most businesses do get an idea of the amount stolen, but not the number of persons involved. Basically the stocktake tells them the difference between what they think they have and what they actually have, and that difference will result either from theft or error.

What they have an excellent idea of, is the amount of credit card fraud as they almost always find out in the form of either a rejection at the time of sale or later. Obviously most firms try to minimise the later. Try buying a lot of expensive camera equipment over the internet and you will find out. The banks also have their own checks for fraudulent transactions based on their own data mining.

[GL]

There are quite a few victimization studies that can provide an estimate of the overall number of (specific types of) crimes and whether or not they get reported to the police.

[Kaiser]

GL: can you provide some links? Would love to see them.

Ken: Obviously most businesses would not want to publicize this data but I wonder if we have any reports of the extent of such fraud. If they report these numbers, I assume they report the amount of fraudulent transactions divided by total transactions but we need the amount of fraudulent transactions that were caught divided by the amount of fraudulent transactions.

[monkey]

It's pretty clear that in law, we also try to minimize false positives, which means that there are criminals who evade justice. I wonder if, and how, one would assess the probability of a criminal not getting caught. Anyone have seen or know about such studies?

[junkcharts]

monkey: I was hoping to find such studies as well. Maybe start with the number of reported crimes that are not solved. But you have to correct for reported crimes that are faked.