Overview of the availability, comparability and consistency of administrative statistical data on recorded crime and on the stages of the criminal justice process in the EU : final analytical report

The general objective of the project is to obtain an overview of the availability, comparability and consistency of administrative data on recorded crime and through all stages of the criminal justice process (police, prosecution and courts) in all European Union (EU) jurisdictions. The project was divided into two phases, the first round of data collection (2018) aimed at assessing the data availability of administrative crime data at all criminal process stages in all jurisdictions. The second data collection round (2019) aimed to refine the methodology and questionnaire from the first phase to update and further elaborate the assessment of data availability, comparability and consistency within the EU. This final report summarises and compares relevant findings of both data collection rounds and their accompanying metadata of 28 EU jurisdictions focusing on crime categories, counting units, offence categories and disaggregating variables of criminal justice related data. Data was collected for the reference years 2013-17. The United Kingdom provided separate data for three jurisdictions in the first round: England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The questionnaires used to collect data and metadata for this project focused on the 'person' counting unit in line with the Eurostat/UNODC methodology to create an internally consistent set of indicators that allows for measurements across the different stages of the criminal justice system. Thus, the data collection focuses on socio-demographic breakdowns for the persons brought into contact, prosecuted, brought before a court, and convicted for the offences included in this study. As these socio-demographic breakdowns could not be provided for cases or sentences, the questionnaire focuses solely on persons at the different stages of the criminal justice process. Data on the offences listed by DG HOME to be covered in this project have not been collected by Eurostat or the UN-CTS in the past, or at least not on a regular basis. The offence categories and disaggregating variables used in the questionnaires concur with the offence categories and variables provided by the International Classification of Crimes for Statistical Purposes (ICCS). The ICCS is a common framework to group all kinds of criminal offences into categories that are useful for producing global crime statistics. As legal concepts, criminal justice systems, data methods and sources vary amongst jurisdictions, a common classification system enhances harmonisation and comparability of data. Achieving coherence in definitions is a first condition to ensure comparability of results, prevent misunderstandings and facilitate interpretation and analysis of data.