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Competing claims about crime problems are made by political insiders and outsiders. Those working within the policymaking process, the insiders, are “owners” of established problems and therefore gain support for their claims by demonstrating the credibility and utility of those claims to policymakers. Official statistics are widely used by insider claims-makers for this purpose. This paper presents examples of cases that demonstrate how government-based political insiders use statistics 1) to encourage the diversion of resources to favored programs and 2) to provide support favored policies.
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Henry H. Brownstein (1995) studied this question.
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