Crime Statistics in the European Union

Abstract

Quite recently, there have been calls for “an evidence-based policy” at a national and international level, or, in other words, the application of experience and scientific methods to decision-making at each phase of the preparation of norms. The starting point of evidence-based Criminal policy is, without a doubt, the existence of reliable data. Since the first half of the nineteenth century, a point at which the first crime statistics began to be recorded (Aebi and Linde 2012, p. 4), criminologists have used that instrument to measure crime rates. At present, the use of these types of statistics is more frequent than victimisation surveys and studies of self-confessed crime. However, the shortcomings of official statistics are widely acknowledged. Thus, by definition, the information that they offer only includes crimes that are reported and, subsequently, recorded by the police, and they overlook the so-called “hidden figures” of crime. In addition, there is a series of factors that determine the presentation of police statistics, to the point where a reliable comparison of crime levels between countries that are based on those statistics becomes a truly complicated task. All in all, that situation hardly means that police statistics are devoid of any validity, but merely that they are an inadequate means of measuring crime and they therefore need to be complemented with other instruments. This is the reason why alternative methods have been developed to measure crime, such as victimization surveys and studies on self-confessed crime.