NCJ Number
201712
Date Published
July 2001
Length
300 pages
Annotation
This report is the first of a three-volume report on crime and criminal justice statistics in South Australia and contains information on police-related activities for the period January 1 to December 31, 2000.
Abstract
The statistics in this report cover five main areas: 1) the number of incident reports filed by police; 2) the number of offenses recorded by police; 3) the number of offenses cleared by police and the method of clearance; 4) the characteristics of victims who reported an offense to police; and 5) the characteristics of alleged perpetrators apprehended by police. The officially recorded crime statistics contained in this volume do no provide a comprehensive picture of the incidence and nature of offending in the community. These statistics are influenced by a number of factors that include the willingness of victims to report incidents to police, the way the incidents and offenses are interpreted by the police and entered into the data collection system, and changes in the efficiency of policing combined with improvements in the technologies available for actually recording data. Similar factors also play a role in the characteristics of victims and apprehended persons. Highlights of the findings for 2000 include: 1) 215,302 incident reports were submitted to the police, an increase of 9.7 percent from 1999; 2) 273,384 offenses were recorded by the police; 3) with the exception of drug offenses, all major offense categories recorded an increase; 4) of the 273,384 offenses recorded by the police, 41.5 percent, or 113,553, were cleared by the end of the year; 5) the clear up level varied depending on the type of offense involved, with property offenses having the lowest rate, 16.6 percent, and driving offenses and drug offenses having the highest rate, 99 percent; 6) there were 22,158 recorded victimizations directed against a person; 7) of the victimizations where the sex of the victim was recorded, 52.1 percent were male; 8) persons age 18-24 and 25-34 accounted for the highest proportion of personal victimizations, 20.5 percent and 25.4 percent, respectively; 9) the age profiles of the victims varied depending on the type of offense involved and the sex of the victim; 10) 102,986 offense charges were laid by police via apprehension reports, a 15.3 percent increase from 1999; 11) 82.7 percent of the charges were laid against males and 59.5 percent were laid against persons in the 18-34 age bracket; 12) the level of charges laid against juveniles varied depending on the type of offense involved; 13) of the 35,756 discrete individuals apprehended in 2000, 74.6 percent were apprehended only once, with younger individuals more likely to experience multiple apprehensions than older persons; and 14) 10.9 percent of persons apprehended in 2000 were responsible for 39.9 percent of all charges laid by police. Tables, figures, appendix, explanatory notes, and a list of publications of the Office of Crime Statistics