James Vorenberg, professor of law, has been on leave from Harvard for the past year to serve as the executive secretary of the President's Commission on Crime. This is the full text of a speech he delivered at Harvard last June during commencement week.

When President Johnson appointed the Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice last summer he gave it two broad assignments and 18 months to accomplish them: First, to cast light on what we do and do not know about crime and the methods aimed at its prevention and control; and, second, to make recommendations about how to overhaul this country's system of criminal justice, including specifications as to who must do what to bring this about.

For one who expected to grow old gracefully in the practice or teaching of corporation law, the confrontation with crime and what we do (and do not do) about it has been a series of shocks. The sharpest shock has been discovering the extent to which we lack even the most essential knowledge about crime and the degree to which we make do with untested assumptions, myths and oversimplifications. In my own work with the Commission and in an earlier assignment as Director of the Justice Department's new Office of Criminal Justice, I seem to have spent most of my time trying to understand how our system for criminal administration operates in fact -- as distinguished from how courts, statutes, rules, textbooks (and even law school courses) generally describe it.

The public, understandably worried by warnings of the increasing dangers from crime, focuses on the issues and incidents which make good newspaper copy or television footage -- the brutal or daring crime; riots; capital punishment; the Supreme Court vs. the police; the skillful duel between counsel in the trial of the big case; the parole board's release of a notorious sex offender. Public officials who work in the system too often lack the knowledge and perspective to be sufficiently self-analytical or radical in their thinking about what they do in the name of administering justice. And, with some notable exceptions, the bar and the universities have done little to pierce the darkness which surrounds this field.

There are many forces standing in the way of an overhaul of our criminal system -- fear, vested political interests, the lack of a natural lobby group for the success of the system, and a general distaste for most of those who are the customers of our agencies of justice. But the most powerful inhibiting factor -- and the one which reinforces the others -- is ignorance.

In the first place, we know very little -- much less than most people think and newspaper stories would suggest -- about the volume, kinds and effects of crime and who the perpetrators and the victims are. Over many years the FBI has painstakingly developed a reporting system based on arrest and offense figures furnished by local police agencies, which is our only authoritative source of national crime data.

More To Tell

But there is much these figures cannot tell us.

It is increasingly clear that many crimes -- particularly property crimes -- are not reported to the police. Yet it is essential that we know the actual volume of crime in order to make rational decisions about how to allocate our resources in response. For example, if we should find that there are many times more larcenies and housebreakings than are reported, that fact might affect judgments about the number and deployment of policemen, laws relating to locks and alarms, or the deductible clauses in theft insurance policies. It might also encourage us to try to strike harder at the elaborate system by which stolen goods are marketed. Of course, we might decide not to do any of these things, but at least our decisions would be less blind than they are today.

Even more important, if we should discover -- as I suspect to be the case -- that a high proportion of the victims of unreported crime are poor people, we would begin to get a picture of an economic burden not touched by our present criminal enforcement machinery and falling primarily on those already living on the fringes of desperation. And, particularly if we were to look into the reasons these people do not report their victimization, we might also be better able to understand the deep disrespect of many citizens toward our system of law.

It is not only the public's failure to report crime to the police which clouds our knowledge. In many cities the police themselves are, in the vernacular, "killing" crime. Thus, it has become a common pattern for the crime rate to go up in the first year of a new chief's administration, since one of his first reforms is to take steps to improve reporting.

It should not be impossible to get at the so-called "dark figure" of unreported crime, by sampling the general public to determine the rate of victimization. As indicated in recent newspaper stories, the Crime Commission is experimenting with this technique.

Cancer And Colds

Lack of understanding about trends in crime rates may be even more harmful. I think I am right that when we seek to interpret health trends we look separately at the figures on tuberculosis, lung cancer, and measles. We do not lump these together and add ulcers, colds and athlete's foot and then seek to make a gross judgment about how we are doing.

Overcoming Inertia