Chapter 5: Types of Crime

Learning Objectives

• Classify different types of crime
• Distinguish between violent and property crimes
• Explain emerging forms such as cybercrime
• Analyze crime trends and patterns

Key Terms

• Felony
• Misdemeanor
• Infraction
• Violent Crime
• Property Crime
• Homicide
• Organized Crime
• White-Collar Crime
• Cybercrime
• Public Order Crime
• Victimless Crime
• Uniform Crime Report (UCR)
• NIBRS
• NCVS
• Crime Trends

Summary

This chapter categorizes crime by severity and type, including violent, property, and white-collar offenses. It also examines emerging crimes such as cybercrime. Using crime data and demographic patterns, the chapter illustrates how crime varies across populations and over time.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Photo courtesy of Colawteam

Every year, millions of crimes occur across the U.S., spanning a wide spectrum from the gravest offenses such as murder, rape, or assault to relatively minor transgressions like shoplifting, littering, or video piracy (Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI], 2020b). Statistics and crime research play pivotal roles in elucidating crime patterns, addressing crime-related issues, and even unraveling the underlying dynamics of criminal behavior and social dynamics. However, before delving into crime measurements and statistics, it is imperative to establish a clear understanding of precisely what we are measuring and the parameters guiding our analyses.

Categorizing crime types into distinct classifications serves as a foundational tool for understanding the multifaceted nature of criminal behavior and its implications for society. Through this structured framework, stakeholders can develop more informed strategies to prevent crime, promote public safety, and foster social justice. Due to the broad range of crime types, each reflecting unique aspects of human behavior and societal dynamics, categorization becomes essential for effective analysis and understanding. From crimes of violence that threaten physical safety and wellbeing to offenses against public order that disrupt social harmony, and white-collar crimes that often involve sophisticated schemes targeting financial systems, the spectrum of criminal behavior is vast and multifaceted.

Categorization allows researchers, policymakers, and law enforcement agencies to organize this complexity into manageable frameworks, facilitating deeper insights into the underlying motivations, patterns, and consequences of criminal activity. By delineating distinct categories, we can identify common trends, disparities, and emerging threats within the realm of crime, enabling more targeted interventions and resource allocation.

Crime can be conceptualized in several ways. The most common way people view crime is as harmful acts that are “against the law.” However, many criminologists take a more complex view of the matter and caution that it is unwise to simply see crime as a violation of the law (Beirne & Messerschmidt, 2011; Agnew, 2011). The law is technically a social construction, and many acts that cause significant harm are legal while other acts that cause minimal harm are criminalized. If criminologists only focus on acts that are violations of criminal law, they miss harms that falls outside of the law, and risk viewing relatively harmless behavior as a problem simply because it is illegal.

To address these gaps, some criminologists suggest that we view crime as a violation of conduct norms (Sellin, 1938) – seeing crime from a sociological lens. In other words, it is important to consider what a culture or group deems to be normal or deviant behavior as this may vary based on geographic location, history, and a variety of other factors. For purposes of this section, a criminological approach will be taken when providing definitions for the types of crime.

Crimes can be classified in many ways. Crimes also can be grouped by subject matter. For example, a crime like assault, battery, or rape tends to injure another person’s body, so it can be classified as a “crime against the person.” If a crime tends to injure a person by depriving them of property or by damaging property, it can be classified as a “crime against property.” These classifications are basically for convenience and are not imperative to the study of criminal law.

More important and substantive is the classification of crimes according to the severity of punishment. This is called grading. Crimes are generally graded into four categories: felonies, misdemeanors, felony-misdemeanors, and infractions. Often the criminal intent element affects a crime’s grading. Malum in se crimes, murder, for example, are evil in their nature and are generally graded higher than malum prohibitum crimes, which are regulatory, like a failure to pay income taxes.