NCJ Number
205287
Editor(s)
Sian Nicholas,
Alison Walker
Date Published
January 2004
Length
80 pages
Annotation
This document describes the results of the 2002/03 British Crime Survey (BCS).
Abstract
The BCS is a face-to-face continuous survey of about 40,000 adults living in private households. Three-quarters of the people were very or fairly confident that the criminal justice system respects the rights of people accused of committing a crime and treats them fairly. In other respects, overall confidence in the criminal justice system was not generally high. On the majority of measures, confidence in the criminal justice system was lower than it had been in the previous year. Three-quarters of the people felt that the police in their local area did a good job. This was unchanged from 2001/02. Forty-four percent of adults had some kind of contact with the police in the previous year. About 72 percent of adults thought the crime rate had increased in the country as a whole over the previous 2 years and 54 percent thought the crime rate had increased in their local area over the previous 2 years. Almost half of the people surveyed thought both national and local crime levels had increased. The results indicated that 15 percent of the people had high levels of worry about burglary, 17 percent about car crime, and 21 percent about violent crime. People from an Asian background (closely followed by Black respondents) were more likely than White people to have high levels of worry about all three types of crime. A third of the people perceived vandalism, litter, teenagers hanging around, and drug use or dealing to be a very or fairly big problem in their area. People living in council estates and low-income areas were the most likely to perceive high levels of antisocial behavior (39 percent compared with the national average of 22 percent). 41 tables, 19 figures, glossary