Abstract
Research QuestionHow can Danish Police calculate a single metric, similar to the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (Sherman, Neyroud and Neyroud 2016), that allows the total harm from all victim-reported crimes to be compared over time and across different areas, offenders, gangs, and victims, and what difference can it make in analyzing crime?DataThis analysis examines 2,129,550 reported criminal incidents in the national police crime reports spanning 16 years (2011–2016) and 93% of all of the crime categories in the Danish Criminal Code, excluding those that are primarily detected through proactive policing. It uses the officially recommended days of imprisonment for each crime type to generate the weight of punishment that would be applied if one offender were convicted of each crime, by standards independent of prior criminal history of the offender.MethodsThe analysis coded the recommended number of days in prison for each offense type based on guidelines set out by the Danish Office of Public Prosecutions. The sentencing value from the prosecutor guidelines was reviewed by five prosecutors. The reliability between the prosecutor ratings and the prosecutor guidelines’ sentencing value was calculated by using Cronbach’s alpha (α = 0.93).FindingsWhile the count of all victim-reported criminal events in Denmark in 2016 had dropped by 14% (54,000 fewer crimes) from 393,000 in 2011, the Danish Crime Harm Index value (after excluding adult rapes due to a 2015 change in reporting rules) for all victim-reported crimes rose by 0.5% or 46,640 days of recommended imprisonment, from 9,714,057 recommended days of imprisonment in 2011 to 9,760,697 days in 2016. Including rapes, the Danish CHI rose by 6% from 2011 through 2016.ConclusionsBecause the Danish Crime Harm Index (DCHI) can lend a completely different perspective (and opposite direction) for interpreting crime trends, it can do the same across individuals and areas within Denmark. The value of adding the DCHI totals to the historic reporting of crime counts would seem to be substantial, at all levels of analysis.
Highlights
Research Question How can Danish Police calculate a single metric, similar to the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (Sherman, Neyroud and Neyroud 2016), that allows the total harm from all victim-reported crimes to be compared over time and across different areas, offenders, gangs, and victims, and what difference can it make in analyzing crime? Data This analysis examines 2,129,550 reported criminal incidents in the national police crime reports spanning 16 years (2011–2016) and 93% of all of the crime categories in the Danish Criminal Code, excluding those that are primarily detected through proactive policing
Accepting the argument by Sherman et al (2016) that not all crimes are created equal and that "counting them as if they are fosters distortion of risk assessments, resource allocation, and accountability” (Sherman et al 2016, p. 1), this study introduces Danish Police to the concept of measuring crime harm in addition to, but not instead of, crime counts
The reported crime data was grouped into its aggregate crime type and multiplied by the equivalent days’ imprisonment value derived from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) prosecutor guidelines and validated by prosecutor sentencing ratings
Summary
How should police target priorities for preventing and solving crimes? What is the best way to identify patterns of crime concentrations in a community, a society, individual offenders, or victims—by sheer volume of crimes or by the overall harm of crimes? Should all crimes be counted as equal or should some types of crime be given more weight than others, as in the formula for the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (CCHI) (Sherman 2007, 2011, Sherman 2013; Sherman, Neyroud and Neyroud 2016)? With evidence-based policing on the rise, and the recent development of crime harm metrics in the UK (Sherman et al 2016), Sweden (Rinaldo 2016), the USA (Ratcliffe 2014; Mitchell 2017), Canada (Babyak et al 2009), New Zealand (Curtis-Ham and Walton 2017), and Australia (House 2018), it is timely to consider how best to measure crime. Examining ways to understand whether policing methods succeed in keeping people safe, Sherman et al (2016) argued that reducing the raw number of crimes is not always the best public safety metric. They argue that the combining all of crimes of all types into a simple count is misleading, as not all crimes are created equal. Leaders of those Danish Police districts use these crime counts to decide which crime areas within districts will receive extra resources While this annual report contains a qualitative element that tries to address the harm associated with each type of crime, analysts have challenged the value of that commentary. They suggest that the annual report is too descriptive when it comes to crime harm and too focused on numbers when it comes to crime count
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